BarCampNOLA Hack Day: Clever Hacks for the Neighborhoods New Orleans
Catered by Linda Green (504 891 4478) the crab meat and shrimp dressing was the main event at BarCampNOLA. Photo by Brian Oberkirch.
I spent today at BarCampNOLA held at the offices of Voodoo Ventures at 757 St Charles Ave in the Central Business District of New Orleans, Louisiana. There were some familiar faces, like Christopher Johnston, Brian Oberkirch, Evelyn Rodriquez and Chris Schultz.
The Unconference Agenda
At BarCampNOLA I listened to people speak on stuff like..
- Brian Oberkirch spoke about social networks and social network portability.
- Chris Schultz led a discussion on how to market a web application that went all over the place, including talking about unconferences and invitation.
- We then had a sumptuous New Orleans lunch, with an awe inspiring crab meat and shrimp dressing catered by Linda Green, on the second floor rooftop patio, on breezy and sunny day.
- Thereafter David Herrold of Chron.com talked about designing content mobile devices. (The geekery begins.) His spiel drew on his experience designing the mobile content for the Houston Chronicle.
- Then Steven Evatt of Chron.com spoke about search engine optimization. This was the crash course in SEO that I’d been avoiding. It was painless, because Steven was speaking from practical experience.
- Matt, who’s last name escapes me, did a presentation on Grails.
Tomorrow is hack day. My projects are candidates for hacker help and marketing help. I’m the belle of the ball. I’ve got some ideas for projects, which you can find after the jump. There are two projects, one that’s a great for marketing types the other that’s great for software types.
The Bayou Boogaloo / Together Through Music
Hack day can be fun for marketing folks, too. How would you like to help with a netroots marketing plan for a huge festival full of New Orleans art, food, music and culture? Namely, the 3rd Annual Bayou Boogaloo on the banks of the beautiful historic Bayou St John in Mid-City, New Orleans, Louisiana.
On the Banks of Bayou St John by Jared Zeller.
The Bayou Boogaloo was started in 2006 in the summer after the flood. The powers that be spoke of “shrinking the footprint.” Flooded neighborhoods like Mid-City came back slowly with uncertainty. The Mid-City Neighborhood Organization did what New Orleans people do. They threw a party.
This festival was a celebration and a statement. Mid-City was coming back. The Boogaloo featured live music from New Orleans artists, some traveling from Houston for a hometown gig. Local restaurants served food and let people know they back in business. Louisiana artists displayed their work in the Mid-City Art Market. Nonprofit and neighborhood organizations had kiosks at a Festival of Neighborhoods, to let people know what resources were available to rebuild.
The Bayou Boogaloo was a weekend getaway for people couldn’t get away. We took a break from rebuilding to remember why we love this city to much.
Walter “Wolfman” Washington at the 2nd Annual Bayou Boogaloo by Jared Zeller.
It was such a success that the next year, it expanded to two stages. That was such a success that this year, it will expand to two stages and two nights.
The proceeds form the nonprofit Bayou Boogaloo have been rolled back into civic projects. Proceeds went to reopening the Mid-City branch of the New Orleans Public Library and to printing a StayLocal! guide of reopned Mid-City businesses.
Here are some thoughts:
From our closing circle today, it occurs to me that the Bayou Boogaloo would be a great event to mix in with a BarCamp. There will be rooms available, but there will also be a great music festival to attend.
Sketch out some marketing ideas. Give the Bayou Boogaloo some netroots marketing love. Give the website some help.
How can we raise money for stage sponsorships online? Or help fund the festival with T-Shirt sales online? How can we draw people in from out of town to strengthen those regional relationships and share an incredible neighborhood festival?
Squandered Heritage / Computer Geeks Feeding Civic Geeks
What sort of mad man reads through Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force reports? What sort of a man mad can recite the finer points of procedure at a Housing Conservation District Review Committee meeting? Why kind of a crazy woman runs around with a camera to take pictures of houses said to pose an “Imminent Health Treat”?
“Imminent Health Threat” demolitions along historic, oak lined Bienville Avenue by Karen Gadbios. (I think I see a pattern.)
Sadly, we know the answer to this question. These people are not mad. They are not crazy.
They are geeks like us.
Civic geeks.
And they love data.
Squandered Heritage has some raw data that would be easy to mash. Matt McBride intrepid investigative citizen journalist, has put together one killer spreadsheet.
He’s taken the FEMA demolition list, cross referenced it against the permits and assessor databases, to create the only comprehensive list of properties eligible for a federally funded demolition. The GPS readings are there. Maybe we could go one step further and do an address geocoding.
Karen Gadbois and Sarah Elise Lewis use Flickr extensively, but not the the fullest. Is there a way to create a Flickr plug-in or such like to mash their photographs?
Hack!
For my neighborhood readers, who’ve watched too much evening news, you don’t know what hack, hacker or hacking means. Unless, of course, you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “I know what it means,” then you probably do know what it means. If you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “what does Alan mean?” then you don’t know what it means.
I’ll tell you what it means.
Hacking among software types means to create, usually quickly with minimal effort for maximum return. A hack is clever and elegant. A hacker is someone who is on the one hand relentlessly determined and certain to solve a problem. The Jargon File definition of hack and the Jargon File definition of hacker both make note that laymen have taken the term to mean something else, and they are for the most part quite wrong. Yes, when your computer doesn’t do something, a clever hack will make it do your bidding, but it’s your computer, not someone else’s.
Most of the people that I know are hackers of a different sort. (This means you dear reader of Think.) We are applying clever hacks to the bureaucracy, we are hacking the city, state and federal government to make it do our bidding. It is our city government, after all.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_hacking#Reality_hacking_as_political_activism
“Reality hacking is a form of activism which relies on tweaking the every-day communications most easily available to individuals with the purpose of awakening the political and community conscience of the larger population. The term first came into use among New York and San Francisco artists, but has since been adopted by a school of political activists centered around Social Redemption.”
Heh.
We are “awakening the political and community conscience of the larger population.” But, I don’t know that we “advantage of the insight of linguists and sociologists.”
We are taking advantage of this wide area network and it’s primary messaging application, email, to route information about policy and events to the people who will be most effected.
There is more order to this network two and a half years out. There are new authorities on civic topics. Many of us are finding our area of interesting, and taking it up. We’re taking a beat and earning respect by being both predictive and empathetic.
Alan, seeing the plate of food at the top of this post makes me want to drive to NOLA for a second helping of gumbo and geekery.
I hope everyone had as good a time as I did at BarCampNOLA.
I was shocked at how many people attended. Hopefully it will help build some geeky momentum for the nerdarati in the area.
-Dave
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