Who You Calling A Jesse?

The Canada 3.0 conference wrapped up the second day with speeches from the CEO of RIM, the Chair of the CRTC, and others all with a strong patriotic message as well as a surprising amount of useful vision and position stuff specifically from the the Chair of the CRTC. Day 2 did, sadly enough, start off with some rather dry and boring stuff that made for a fun game of buzz word bingo.

Between the speeches I attended the talk that included Waterloo’s own Jacqui Murphy from TechCapital. She took full advantage of having a mic and an audience to make it clear that startups shouldn’t be about seeking funding or exits with big companies buying you. You should dream big and focus on revenue generation. Some great messages to bring back to VeloCity I think.

The round table discussions in the afternoon felt like they lacked energy and urgency. The big rooms and groups just didn’t work well for that but I did meet some really interesting folks around my table. If nothing else, that was a huge bonus.

Overall, the strength of the Canada 3.0 conference was in the diversity of the folks that attended. There were some very obvious complaints about the lack of students attending but we really need to stop idealizing students, if they are interested they will come—if they aren’t there they really don’t care…. yet. There were enough student volunteers to suggest to me that the ones that are interested knew about it and made the effort to attend.

What I think was really missing was the younger entrepreneurs and leaders on the panels. Not the under-25s that the over 50’s marvel at, but the 25-40 yr old professional crowd that have the skills, experience, and know how to really push Canada’s ‘digital economy.’ I would have also liked to see more of an unconference stream. Being a Barcamp/Startup organizer I am already a fan of the format but we needed more conversation over round table sticky notes. I will even volunteer to organize that for next time ;)

I should also point out the technology situation. Stratford doesn’t have 3G, the wireless was overwhelmed by all the mobile devices and laptops begging for data (but we got the tweets out!), innovative things weren’t set up like streaming panels to the media room at the very least. Sure Igloo put together a good site but that was impressive a couple years ago, if this is ‘3.0’ then it should push the boundaries.

Honestly, it was an amazing conference. This should be the start of something… keep the buzz going, follow up with the business cards you collected, and start thinking big!

The Canada 3.0 started today in Stratford Ontario (45km west into farm fields from Waterloo) and surpassed a lot of people’s expectations I think. The morning had the typical political talk you would expect when government folks are given a microphone along with the University of Waterloo making it clear it is committed to the Stratford campus and all the potential developing such a campus may hold. What followed was a day of great conversation about communities, what to do to foster entrepreneurial talent, mobile technology, and more.

It was high level discussion mostly but it was honest discussion focused not on how great Canada is but where Canada needs work. Have a look at the twitter stream under the #can30 hash tag for some great bits of information. Day 2 promises to be more interactive with work groups tackling some of the issues presented today.

I spent a lot of they at the VeloCity booth talking to people that are interested in the idea and colleagues at other schools that are a bit envious that Waterloo has such a residence. I will be around for day 2, stop by the booth and say hi!

Almost ready to have the sixth StartupCampWaterloo in just under two years. For this one it was decided to not get an opening speaker and just leave it to the community to drive the event. Our sponsors are still doing the same thing and making sure everyone has snacks and liquids. I am really looking forward to the event and meet some new folks as well as catch up with others. If you haven’t signed up and are coming, please head over to eventbrite!

After number six there will be some changes coming to StartupCampWaterloo. We didn’t get a chance to put them in place this time due to vacations (I didn’t post a thing in May) and overall being busy. If anyone has suggestions please post them here to drop me an email (jrrodgers on gmail).

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the regional Higher Ed Web Conference that was held at Cornell University over the past two days. What a great conference put together by Jason Woodward and his team at Cornell. The speakers started off yesterday with a heavy focus on how to get the user involved in your web project from user testing to engaging folks through social media story telling.

Today we moved into an actual project aimed at a particular set of users at Cornell, into project management (my presentation), and off into the high level thinking about the future of higher ed with Mark Greenfield. My head is swimming with ideas and issues but even more focused on the purpose of the web in higher ed.

My presentation slides are here, thanks everyone for the great feedback and I look forward to continuing many of the conversations online and maybe even at the big Higher Ed Web conference in Milwaukee in the Fall:

After a few weeks of going back and forth with all the internal workings it is now official, I am one of two new Associate Directors at U of Waterloo’s incubator 2.0 residence, VeloCity. I join Virginia McLellan (the other Associate Director) and Sean (Director) as the new team to really push things into something really great (and fun).

The residence has come a long way in last 8 months since it started taking on students. With more investment in people to help push the direction we plan on building more of a community around VeloCity, trying out new things, and seeing where we can go. It is very exciting to be involved in such an innovative and fast moving project.

Can’t wait to get started.

A bit of a personal post… It is already March and the todo list starts to get pretty crazy. I thought going a masters and working was hard, came kid #1 while I still had to finish up the grad work. Then along comes kid #2 and I don’t understand how people do it. How do you balance the demands required to stay on top of the work game and still spend as much time as possible with these cute squishy things that seem determined to never allow me to sleep again?

My approach is to have fun. If you aren’t having fun doing what you are doing you should figure out how to make it fun.

Higher education institutions need to make far more clear separations between the core business that occur on a higher education campus. Research and education isn’t the same thing and neither is training. The public seems to blur education and training as do the institutions themselves. Institutions have made changes, smudging the definitions/roles, for funding reasons and higher education has failed the public in not even trying to explain it’s role (or doing such a bad job at it they might as well not have been trying).

Research is about the pursuit of something for the sake of it

Research can be seen as the endless pursuit of something for the sake of the research (generalization yes, but for the love all things we need to talk on more simpler terms in higher education). Research in Higher Education terms is gaining knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Spin off discoveries usually appear and the research projects may iterate many times before it becomes something tangible or it may just stop. Generally it generates revenue over a much longer term. It may develop expertise as well. It can be value-added to education but it is separate, it is expensive, and creating an environment for a wild range of research to occur is the whole reason a higher education institution exists.

Education is about learning how to learn

To an undergrad student in higher education is about learning how to learn. That includes skills like assessing the quality of a source, finding quality sources quickly, and packaging up your argument/research in a way that the target audience can understand it. The truth that no one seems to admit is that, except in special cases, it really doesn’t matter where you get your first four years done. Undergrad is generic, grad school is a different story.

As you move to graduate work you are applying that skill and developing expertise. That is where research plays a huge role in my mind. You can only develop certain type of expertise in a field if you are allowed to dedicated your time researching it. Higher Education has students so that there will be people to utilize the infrastructure and continue to pursue knowledge in a protected environment (what protected means to me – safe from dramatic government, corporate, or economic oversight).

That isn’t for everyone and far fewer students go on to graduate studies then enter the process out of high school. That is good. The skills are transferable to many jobs in the real world and civilization as a whole benefits from having critical, efficient thinkers that can communicate outside of the academic environment. The truly dedicated move on up the rungs of academia and hopefully have the passion that be shared with students in the future. Sadly I think many loose a certain passion and hide in higher education but they are exceptions.

Skills training is for corporations or is it?

Skills training for a specific job is something that I don’t think works well within Higher Education as it is currently designed. In Ontario we had clear division between College and University where one was skills training and the other was essentially academic training. The government and the public fails (or chooses not) to see the difference in practical terms. Pressure mounts on Universities to train students for real jobs and Colleges have lifted their educational profile by teaching academic courses.

I think Colleges have made the transition towards ‘academia light’ better than Universities have towards skills training and largely because the underlying culture conflict. Universities are run by academics that were trained as academics with the belief Higher Education just exists to pursue knowledge and the value to community is assumed, while College is run as a business. I think Higher Education shouldn’t be exclusively about the academics and it should stop trying to mix the two and be honest about what is being offered.

Globally we see specialty schools doing specific skills training for safety, nursing assistants, etc. There is a market for more specific training everyone and generally Higher Education (besides Colleges in Ontario) have not taken a lot of interest in exploited the market. Instead they try to train skills as well as have students explore their education. I think that is not being true to what the experience is supposed to be about and has created some bizarre dependency between Higher Ed and many companies.

Next: How can staff in higher ed help these three areas?

Part of the Higher Education revolution.

Note: This is all based on observations, experiences, thoughts, etc from working in Higher education for 8 years and being a student for another 5 in undergrad at two different schools. I did my Msc and my wife did her grad work through distance education for the last 3 years. My stint as President of the Staff Association at U of Waterloo is over and I find myself all fired up about how Higher Education needs to change. I am also really tired of seeing academics research problems and hiding that research in journals were only other academics will find it.

With the economy slowing (or grinding to a halt) mixed with credit being hard to find, higher education institutions might be facing a perfect storm that could shake poorly run institutions to the ground. Students with parents that have the money to pay for their education might be hard pressed to do so, jobs to pay for tuition might be harder to find, loans outside of state assistance might dry up, money for research might be cut, and public along with private donations will likely be even harder to get. This all spells trouble for organizations that wish to maintain a status quo. For those looking to fix some big issues the climate could be ideal.

What are the biggest issues facing higher ed both with regards to the organizational structure and the adoption of technology? My list is short (it is hard to keep short):

1. higher education has an identity crisis – a religious battle is going on internally between the ‘leave me alone, things are fine’ crowd and the ‘wow this is messed up, why are we here?’ crowd
2. the culture has created processes that make change slow and ineffective make sure that any change is painful
3. young talent is defeated by a management class that doesn’t know what management is (and I blame academics for that)

I have already posted my thoughts on how to deal with inefficient committees and the fun that surrounds item 2 and some of 3 above. The first is the illness with the following points the symptoms… I think. I want to explore my thoughts as to why we (higher education) are here and what we can do about it (besides better meetings, time on task tracking, etc). This is a series of blog posts as I don’t want to post some rant in big essay form.

Next post: What are research, educational, and training activities in Higher ed?

Karlyn Morissette has set her ’biggest problem in Higher Education’ on the total inefficacy of higher education institution and how that is enshrined in the culture. I agree. From my viewpoint, Staff and Faculty in Higher Education spend far too much time in committees that have no mandate or authority (or even an agenda or a chair). The "building of consensus" for every little thing paralyzes progress and forces what I see as a continuous pursuit towards mediocrity.

Examples given in Karlyn’s post we see every day in higher ed (committees, endless pursuit of a pet project). The problem gets a lot worse when you look at some of the typical decision making processes that have layers of committees that stretch over months with 12 or so people on each of them. In the case of grad admissions or research funding, committees don’t make decisions but instead push an application up to another committee to consider. Finally someone might make a decision but usually that some one is in no position to make a proper decision as they have no idea what they are deciding on. They just sign the paper and move on.

Time is money except in Academia where time builds authority

To me this boils down to a lack of appreciation for people’s time (at least in Canada, specifically Ontario). It is understandable from the academic viewpoint, you have been in school all your life. Getting a phd is a long process and that process works. An academic’s time has little value over simply having their presence on campus as their entire purpose is to think and do research. Their work hours are open, this is their life. Unless the committees get in the way of their research or teaching there is no real cost.

However, staff time is different. At a guess, historically higher ed (being run by academics) hired clerical staff for clerical tasks. They weren’t required to make decisions as the academics were in charge. With 1000 or so students that might have made sense. As institutions grew they hired more professional staff. Professional staff hired more professional staff to help manage the business of the institution. These professionals are often more skilled and necessary to ensure a level of service. However, academics ensured the committee processes remained in place and that they had final say. This does nothing to empower staff and the skilled professionals that couldn’t accept that left higher ed in the 80’s (at Waterloo anyway). Larger, older institutions seemed to simply professionalize phd/academic roles which laid down the academic committee process that leaves decisions with academic chairs and Deans.

Note: The evolution of academia in North America and beyond is a thesis topic methinks… so my abridged assumptions shall end here ;)

The culture was enshrined over the 1990’s and the insane cut backs that higher education had to deal with. New staff didn’t come in, culture took over. I would assume that the reality of ‘it is easier to beg forgiveness’ always has been present but I found when I started working in Higher Ed that it was the only way to get anything new done. Sadly that approach is wrong (most of the time). It is wrong because sure you change things but you don’t have lasting change. You simply embarrass other people and get shut out of any future process. On the rare occasion you succeed in sparking lasting change but you have still marginalized yourself and others to get there. That isn’t a good way to do things.

Identify value, document process, and stop doing things that don’t need to get done

In order to have lasting change you need to participate in the process, ask questions, understand why people fear change, and give them a big nudge in the right direction. Lead by example, act professional, and be kind to those that will attack you for what you doing. It isn’t easy but in the medium term you will see change. After 8 years working in Higher Education I am convinced that no amount of positive change is worth treating people poorly. If someone makes it impossible to do anything then bulldoze them but I doubt you will have to fight the bully if you build support by other means.

There are a few simple things you can do that borrow from the world of Project Management, Drucker, Roberts Rules, and others:

• Ensure a committee meeting always has an agenda
• Identify the Chair, support the Chair in keeping the meeting on track
• Identify who makes decisions and what is required in order to have a decision made
• Identify who will carry out the decisions
• Do not take things personally even in the face of obvious personal attacks
• Track your time on task, report it to your manager on a weekly basis
• If you are working on a project, get agreement on what ‘finished’ means (open ended projects are probably the worst specific waste in higher ed)
• Identify what you expect to get out of the project
• Figure out what doesn’t need to get done and stop doing it

All these things help identify value in what you are others that are working with you are doing. That value will help make people feel better. If they feel better about what they are doing they are more likely to take risks on the current project or one in the future.

Organizational waste, inefficiencies, etc will not be fixed over night in higher education. But making an effort now (especially in the face of cuts) will help in the future.

Following what was an interesting 2007, 2008 proved to be one of personal and professional growth. Here is my reflection/projection post for the year.

Personally:

Probably the oddest thing about the last year was that it felt like I got very little done. I just didn’t feel productive in my work life nor did I feel like I was using my own time very well. Sure I got to spend a lot of time with my son and accomplished a lot at work but I think a lack of sleep just left me feeling a bit drowned in tasks for 2008. An overall goal for 2009 is manage my time better and enjoy myself more.

I also need to use more time for a hobby or two that isn’t web tech related. It may be time to re-invest into hockey equipment and/or my bike. At the very least I am going to bring my son fishing and try to get up north more often.

That said, things I feel good about personally:

• I finished my Msc (and my wife finished hers)
• Led the UW Staff Association as it doubled its operating budget, hired an Executive Manager, changed some key policies, and after 40 years the organization signed a formal Memorandum of Agreement with the University of Waterloo.
• Drove to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
• Besides Myrtle Beach I visited Las Vegas, Orlando, Wilmington, Clarksberg, Georgetown. All except Orlando were family trips!
  
• Spent a lot of time with Addison
• Welcomed an amazing baby girl into our family

Professionally

Working at the University of Waterloo has advantages and drawbacks. The drawbacks are largely the politics of the environment – a culture that suppresses creative problem solving has been set in for some time. I can honestly say that in 2008 I finally figured out how to get things done properly in such a place without becoming part of the existing culture. The organizational culture must (and will) change over time. Not sure if I will be around UW long enough to see it but who knows.

The past year was about being front and centre in campus wide politics. This coming year is going to be about building some pretty cool front ends, learning to really love (and hate) AJAX, AIR, MS servers, and design. I will be more behind the scenes on campus politics hopefully and I just focus on some good geekery for 2009.

I would also like to make a few more conferences this year. The creative spark that I get from conferences went missing last year. I need that back.

Community

This past year saw what I think was a huge success in the growth of a local tech/entreprenuer community outside of traditional channels. StartupCampWaterloo and BarCampWaterloo really started to take off. DemoCampGuelph contributed as well to what is a pretty interesting unconference community. It isn’t a huge community by any stretch but it is a very intelligent group of creative entrepreneurs. I am excited to see what 2009 will bring.

There is of course the other groups locally that add depth to the community. DevHouseWaterloo (hosted at AideRSS), local Twitter groups, Flickr groups, etc are all enriching and broadening community.

This year I want to get a local Adobe User Group off the ground. The region has a lot of Adobe users and I think they could all benefit from having a group that shares their experiences using software from Adobe. Being an Adobe Community Expert I should really get on that ;)

Bring on 2009!

A twitter conversation got me rethinking about the concept of content vs design yet again. I am constantly in a battle with having to design an interface for content, actions, and requirements that are either contradicting or simply not known yet. That is hugely frustrating however there are ways to design some general things without knowing the specific content and through a few iterations you get there. That is usually what you are forced to do if you are trying to be truly agile.

In Higher ed, what rules is content or design? My feeling is that it is still content. Aside from Alumni and High School students, the gross majority of consumers of information in the higher ed web space are a captive audience. They are staff, students, and faculty that are simply doing their daily activities in a web space they have to use. Sweating over design and what that design should be may not be a fair trade off over just simple content organization. If content is so important I think the use of Microformats is as well because it allows the higher ed space to open up that useful content to a larger audience and potentially enables their internal audiences to use that content better.

Design (impressive, high end, etc) should be more important for micro-sites that are targeting external audiences. An impressive design can be that ‘wow’ factor that will attract those high school students or make your internal audience more comfortable to find information within your web space. However, content may still be more important in the form of a social media foot print in youtube, twitter, facebook, and other places where you don’t have control over design… only the content.

That is not to say good design isn’t needed but I think if you have only 1 day to spend fixing something in your higher ed web space, fix up the content.

Tonight had to be the most unexpected StartupCampWaterloo yet and it was a load of fun! We had a fairly full room of new faces (60-70) that hadn’t been to a camp event before and really didn’t know what to expect. This left us in a bit of an odd situation as we had no one signed up on the board. So what happened? David Crow made his community pitch to the folks and then everyone introduced themselves as Mic got the names of startups in the room up on the white board.

The number of startups on the white board? 19. There was 19 new startups in the room that were all in fairly early stages. Once all the intros were done and we had a break, a mix of new and some evolved ideas were presented. It was totally not what he had expected for the fourth event but it is exactly what these events should be about. Everything from the project that is being worked on in the basement to a student from Velocity just throwing ideas out there.

The startup community in this town is inspiring.

Email is something higher ed institutions have been providing to students since the beginning of email. Many long-term staff and/or faculty believe it to be a perk while others now simply see it as essential communication. With phones and paper no longer practical ways of official communication, higher ed has been approaching email like corporations when the client (students) see it in a completely different way.

The problem (and my assumption for this post) is that students have an email address before they get to higher ed and they will have it after. For the four years they aren’t going to use some feature crippled email and they aren’t going to switch their primary contact address.

There was an argument a number of years ago for higher ed to provide top notch email to students and encourage them to switch. They will then retain that service as Alumni and retain a great connection with campus. I am not sure that would work anymore.

What students (and Alumni) currently use is their @hotmail or @gmail or @yahoo and that creates a problem. Computers on campus can get compromised, when they do they usually result in the campus domain being blacklisted which means no email is received for a while. IT thinks you fix this by forcing students to use campus email. But that doesn’t change the fact that the higher ed institution can’t contact the rest of the world.

My thought: move your email to a different ‘email’ only domain or move machines on campus to a special domain and stop forcing students to use a bad service. Also stop spending money on a service that no one uses. Email services should be for staff, faculty, and grad students (optional) with forwarding to undergrads email address of choice.

Just a thought.

We are just a week away from the third StartupCampWaterloo at the Accelerator Centre on North Campus in Waterloo. If you work for, own, or are thinking about having anything to do with a startup in the Waterloo region you should come out and meet other like minded folks. All are welcome.

StartupCampWaterloo is a community run event that gives startups a chance to test their ideas on their peers. Everyone who wants to present is given 60 seconds to get the audience interested in hearing more. The audience then votes and we try to give at least the top five a chance to present and get some feedback from everyone.

If you just want to see what this all about and get some free pizza and chocolate bars, you are welcome to that too ;) Please sign up on either the wiki or the facebook event.

Illya posted some thoughts on Agile Release & Testing Procedures and instead of writing a big long comment I figured it was worth a blog post. At the University of Waterloo I have had experience deploying a number of different applications for a variety of audiences… it is next to impossible to get all the details in a post but here is the general truth: there are no enforced institutional wide procedures for web applications. You might think the lack of procedures is bad but it is a result of the relatively low risk environment (even though the campus community has a low tolerance for bugs and changes). There are rarely formal teams of developers, it is mostly the loan coder building a specialty application – enforced procedures would frustrate them.

When you are dealing with a simple web page, say the uni home page, I have essentially covered the typical user acceptance, performance, and stress tests when the page goes live. I go through the gamut of web browser testing, try some OS variations out, and then get it out there. There is a relatively low risk here as the users don’t interact with a database or a whole heck of a lot client side. Once rendering issues are dealt with, it is pretty much unlikely to have other issues. This is with 30 000 or more people seeing it within a short period of time too. I had relative success but I think it was more luck and the fact we kept web pages simple.

Stepping up the development a bit, throw in a Ruby on Rails or PHP application. My testing procedures involved pretty much the same as the web page testing: poke away at it, fix bugs as they appear, and get it ready to go off of the development server to production. We (co-op student and I) never really sat on changes very long. The thinking was that if it went bad on the production end we just roll back the version, fast. When I made the jump to Ruby on Rails development with Capistrano and SVN that became so easy it was scary. On many occasions we had new versions going up two or three times a day. Minor changes, but they add up. This meant a lot of bugs made it out to the community version but as a whole the community appreciated seeing the progress. Our harshest critics were few and usually the type of people that would sit on things until they are perfect, the web is never perfect.

Now I find myself in the .NET/C# development world. I am happily hacking away at the JavaScript on the front end but I still live in the development environment. Here we have a solid team, a lot of developers, some serious tools, and totally different requirements from the client relationship/expectations end. At the moment we are doing limited testing that makes sure it works and then pushing it to an environment that a group has a ‘sanity check’ and gives us feedback. Releases are going out on a weekly build routine with a daily routine for an internal release. The whole process is evolving as we go but in a very general sense we are aiming to maintain a weekly build schedule for one set of users, daily internally. Our goal is to not leave the application in a non-working state and at any time the build could go live. This habit takes time to develop though… I don’t expect us to be in the groove until over the summer.

That is the nutshell version of what I have had experience with, I suppose it is Agile without the buzz terms. Personally I don’t see a reason why any web application couldn’t work on a daily build process. If you break the big change down to a lot of little changes you reduce the risk of breaking it and you ensure stability (so the theory goes). The problem is that in order to break a big thing down to a bunch of little things you need to take the time to talk it out, plan it out, and scope out what goes into a big thing. It is a way of thinking and it doesn’t happen overnight, most people need experience thinking that way.

I am interested to know what other higher education folks are doing with release and testing procedures.

This Saturday is BarCampWaterloo (number 6!) from 1pm to around 7pm (we may retire to the pub before that) at the Accelerator Centre. A much more toned down event compared to StartupCampWaterloo, BarCampWaterloo is where people come to explore ideas and maybe get themselves ready for a DemoCampGuelph (which happens to be April 9th at the Albion in Guelph). I might show some of the stuff I have been working on this weekend ;)

DesignCampWaterloo is March 26th (Wednesday)27th (Thursday) starting at 4:30pm in the Tathum Centre on the University of Waterloo campus. The first one was a bit difficult to follow being in the SLC and all so I am really looking forward to it in the TC. Plus I just have to go up two floors from my office to attend!

There is also a RailsNite next week on Monday at Ceaser Martini’s. Not sure of the start time but I think 7ish might work.

Update: RailsNite does start at 7pm and there is a Facebook event created for it.

Another update: Rick Segal is not coming to Waterloo for his VC roundtable, but he is coming to Guelph on April 28th… Perhaps Ali is influencing people now.

Yet another update: DesignCampWaterloo is Thursday not Wednesday.

With our second StartupCampWaterloo behind us here in Waterloo we hit a milestone. Over 100 people were in the main area of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre to talk with Startups and help each other with ideas (quick estimate based on 88 chairs in the room plus Ali’s colourful chairs). I am pretty sure all those that demo’d got some useful information and experience out of the evening.

A big thanks to Stefanus De Toit for opening up the evening and breaking-in the crowed by sharing insights like: Turning academic research into a product is hard if you don’t keep your paperwork in order; hire your friends; wow people with lots of 3D chickens to get investment (actually prove your concept with a solid demo). Another big thanks to Austin Hill for closing off the evening with a great presentation which included: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas because someone already tried it – it is your execution that is important; Canada needs more of its successful entrepreneurs re-investing in the startup scene; beware the vulture investors; do a startup while you are a student; it helps to work for a startup if you are thinking about a startup as startup culture is infectious.

What was learned from this one is that 60 second intros with voting works out really well. Keeping things short and keeping the slides out of it kept the conversation interesting and focused. The big buzzer also helped. Only took one person being caught by it—no one else dared challenge their time limits. Plus it kept us on time, mostly.

I had a lot of good feedback and now can relax—until the next one. What are we going to do next? BarCampWaterloo is on March 29th, a DemoCampGuelph will be in April, and StartupCampWaterloo3 will be sometime in May. If you can’t figure out if you want to go, I have a post coming up tomorrow that will cover that ;)

Other folks to thank for making the trip from places afar and/or helping out last night… The Toronto folks venturing outside of the GTA in their large 4×4: David Crow – thanks for the books and disruption, Jevon McDonald,  Jonas Brandon.   Ali Asaria brought some chairs and name tags and Simon Law for came down from Montreal. The other organizers Simon Woodside and Mic Berman ensured that we appeared as unconference as possible ;)

Most importantly, the night was good because of the folks that were there. Waterloo has a great community.

It is interview time here at Waterloo. It happens once every four months, thousands of students and employers enter a dating game for talent and experience. Waterloo is a bit unique having a building dedicated to the process (just happens to be where my office is) and a frequency of three times a year for the process to run. Large companies like Google, RIM and Microsoft are hear hiring large numbers of students but so are local startups like AideRSS and Semacode along with all sorts of companies from different fields and different sizes. Posters on the walls with all the different information sessions show all the opportunities for students.

Why do the companies come here? Waterloo has the talent and I would argue there is far more and better talent than Stanford (update: Larry disagrees or does he?). Our students go to the Valley or Seattle or Boston or Ottawa and all points in-between to work for big names and get started on their carriers while they are working on their undergrad (or grad) degrees. A lot them stay local (Google and RIM are in Waterloo, along with a lot of other interesting employers) and even more would like to stay local for a term or two if a great job can be found.

For local web/tech startups this is a great opportunity. If you developing an idea and you need someone that can code and wants to contribute, for around 10K you can get a junior student for four months to do that. Senior students are more but you get higher quality and more experience. Just to prove a startup concept though, a junior co-op student is inexpensive and hugely beneficial.

The project I am working on depends on the quality of Waterloo Co-ops. We are building a new system to run the job/dating game and have a great bunch of students to do that. They code, they ask questions, they learn, they are excited, and they build really cool things from your ideas. Over the years I have worked with a number of different students and all of them made me look good—which is what you want when you hire someone, right? ;)

There is a side benefit to local startups hiring students I think as well. If you keep the students here, keep them engaged, and get them excited about trying out their ideas you help the local community build resources. I think it’s one part of the puzzle that may help Waterloo’s stealthy startup scene become even more open and exciting.

If you are wondering how to hire a co-op, contact CECS and they will have you set up in no time.

If you are in the Greater Waterloo Area (roughly Milton to Woodstock in highway 401 terms) and have a thing for startups you should come out to the second StartupCampWaterloo on February 26th. Our first one attracted a great group of participants and inspired similar events in Toronto and Montreal. The event is free, the refreshments are provided thanks to sponsors, and there is working wifi. All you need to bring is your expertise, ideas, and an open mind. We have undergrads, grads, alumni, startup inclined people, technologists, and other various characters in-between that make up a large group of people all eager to share and develop ideas.

This event is informal and fun. We aren’t expecting polished presentations. The audience would prefer that you use little to no slides if you present. What you should have is a passion for your idea/technology/etc and the ability to receive open and honest feedback. The schedule is set at the event by those at the event by the participants so be sure to get there on time (starts at 6pm, wiki has details).

Please sign up on the wiki, look forward to seeing you there!

The recent buzz online between WaSP members over IE 8 is approaching lunacy. With the respected Zeldman suggesting WaSP co-lead Drew was not doing his co-lead job of signing an NDA with Microsoft. Lets step back and think about the lay of the land for the moment.

WaSP has a Microsoft Task Force and an Adobe focused Task Force both with NDA requirements, both companies are now seriously competing for the web developer market. The lead of WaSP shouldn’t be NDA’d by either but they should be informed when an announcement is coming and that is the Task Force leads job.

WaSP needs to refocus and those in all the task forces need to shake their heads at recent events and figure out their next steps. Rachel asks what happens now? Well I am inclined to say re-state the goals of the organization, re-evaluate what each task force is doing and how that fits in the goals, and ensure process are developed to maintain a professional presence.

I also commented on Rachel’s blog that I believe SXSW is partly to blame for some of the recent mess. Why? People feel cut out of contributing if they don’t go to Austin. I know I do and what is worse I know that isn’t totally true. WaSP needs to distance itself from all events unless it runs them, at least for now. Let the participation focus around online venues and crank up the advocacy once things are figured out.

The next big challenge is in front of us. IT departments now have massive, poorly developed, monsters of web applications to maintain… or Sharepoint. They don’t want the browser to change, not now, not ever. WaSP, there is your new enemy.

For the record I don’t much care for the meta targeting but I won’t hate it… just think it is a quick fix, not well thought out, but isn’t that what ‘beta’ is for?

In my relative short career I have not had the pleasure of surviving a unionised environment except as a summer student doing landscaping work for the City of Sault Ste Marie. IT related work environments just don’t seem all that interested in a union, I would argue most knowledge workers have little interest in such a club. However here we are in 2008 at the University of Waterloo facing a vote in an attempt to certify OSSTF as a bargaining unit on campus. The vote is today however the outcome won’t be decide for approximately a month due to some dissagreement in who is in the bargaining unit.

The one thing that does get me about this entire process is how the law in this province favours unions over the individual. Maybe in industrial work environments the method used to unionize makes sense as workers generally may be easily replaced and can be easily bullied. However in a professional work environment, where it can take a few months to a few years before a worker performs at top form with higher education credentials, it feels like the whole process tramples on your rights no matter which side of the fence you sit. The behaviour out of the union itself just feels like they are after members, they don’t actually care about the workers otherwise they wouldn’t pursue unionization where the support is 50-50 at best (here it is 60% against, but they need to vote).

This whole experience has taught me a lot and I’d like to think I managed to get through it, up to this point, as President of the Staff Association (the opposing force) with only being called a few names: Meat puppet, lap dog, etc. Oh and apparently I have been paying people to vote… that would mean I had personal wealth large enough to do that. Cool, someone tell my bank manager ;)

Over the past year or so the MMNP effort has been working on ways to utilize mobile and media based technology on campus. A year ago a pilot project looked at the possibility of students replacing their land lines in residence is relatively smart phones. Lots was learned (primarily that students are shell shocked by the telco cost and don’t really use them even when a large chunk of costs are covered) and the project moved on to different ideas. One of those ideas was a living environment that doubles as an incubator for entrepreneurial students.

Enter 2008 and the announcement of VeloCity. The Daily Bulletin article covers all the details. From the VeloCity site:

“It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.”

I was involved with the project early on and it is great to see that Sean has taken his idea and made it a reality. I expect to see some exciting things come from this housing experiment. What a great opportunity for some students!

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

Last night I attended StartupCampToronto which was put on by the guys behind StartupNorth. It was a really good event with some intelligent entrepreneurs and a great audience that weren’t afraid to speak up. The format was simple, five minute presentation with roughly 15 minutes for questions. They did let it go over a bit if the conversation was a good one.

It wasn’t until the last presentation that I really go excited though. A couple of students from U of Toronto came with their idea and prototype for a really easy portfolio manager. They had a grand plan for how this can work which had its issues. The crowd jumped on it and offered some great advice which I hope helps them create a successful product. That, I believe, was Simon Woodside’s motivation behind StartupCampWaterloo. When he had an idea for his company/technology it was hard to get that advice to move it along. For students and researchers or anyone else really, it can be hard for them to understand the market their technology might work in. Yes there are organizations designed to help but the community nature of a StartupCamp I believe works better for a lot of people.

A lot of the talk about entrepreneurial learning curve is that you have to fail to succeed. StartupCamp was designed to encourage people to at least try with the support of the community to offer some guidance. Could some failures be avoided by the community helping them figure out the obvious mistakes?

A secondary benefit is the community is enhanced from the fresh ideas and energy out there. With that in mind, next StartupCampWaterloo is February 26th. Looking forward to it.

It has been about two years since the unconferences started in Toronto. Shortly after it started, David Crow coined the community is the framework discussion and helped inspire folks to help build communities. It took me a while but September 29th, 2007 saw the first BarCampWaterloo. We are now six events (plus DemoCampGuelph) into it and I think with StartupCampWaterloo I feel confident saying there is a solid community in Waterloo that finds community driven events useful and are willing to participate.

Why organize these events? Personally I am not an entrepreneur with a few attempts or successes at starting my own business under my belt. I have not experienced the joys and fears of starting a business but I have experienced years of feeling isolated within both the University community and the larger regional community. I have had more web technology contacts in the US than I do in Canada, more of a sense of community when I attend the big Adobe MAX conference.

Starting and continuing a ‘BarCamp’ movement in Waterloo is about the entire tech community: the web developers in big companies, the entrepreneurs, the inventors creating things for fun, the people that are researching the application of technology and/or how people interact with it, the business minded folks that would love to help something grow. However, the desire for topic specific events is there and that is why we (Mic, Simon, Brydon and Ali in Guelph, and myself), with the help of the community, have broken the events into three main forms:

• BarCampWaterloo – something for everyone who attends. We have talked about how to age a good ham, use two keyboards at once, cool coding, and how to build the technology in your business. Its a day long event that strives to include everyone who attends.
• DemoCampGuelph – this event aims to showcase working projects. You demo something that works, no slides, no time to babble.
  
• StartupCampWaterloo – the most recent experiment that borrowed from the spirit of DemoCamp. This event focuses on the start-up experience and aims to give folks a place to get the feedback they need to keep going and succeed.

The events are staggered monthly and all three events offer a place for folks to connect. Through these connections comes a sense of community. Someone other than your dog or the voices in your head that share the same passion as you are out there and they want to help. You may leave an event inspired to try something new at work or in your own business or find something to work with on your next big idea. That is the potential power of the community that I currently see in Waterloo. With the success of the Accelerator Centre and the construction of another Accelerator Centre along with a Research Accelerator Centre it really feels like Waterloo is on the verge of something. Infrastructure (we do need a free community wifi) and the brains are here… a vibrant BarCamping community will certainly help I think.

It is not that I don’t acknowledge the groups that have been organizing events for a while. The first one that comes to mind is WatStart which is an effort led by Gary Will. The launch of the new WatStart site I think offers a great place to organize community resources, I hope people start using it. Then there are some of our now regular BarCampWaterloo sponsors: Communitech and TechCapital, they have done a lot positive things for the entrepreneurs in the community.

No matter where you are I would encourage you to seek out the local community and participate. Every person that contributes enriches the experience for everyone. There are other events in town and groups that meet mingle. DesignCampWaterloo, UX group, a new RailsNite Waterloo, a .NET users group, and others. Get out there and meet people, you never know what could come of it.

Tags: community, BarCampWaterloo, StartupCampWaterloo

The BarCampWaterloo group brings a BarCamp/DemoCamp event to Waterloo that is aimed for those that are interested in or already have a start up. It is called StartupCampWaterloo and will run from 6pm to 9pm on the 23rd of October at the Accelerator Centre on North campus (295 Hagey Blvd). Sign up on the wiki if you are going to attend, all are welcome!