The formation of Downtown Cartel can be directly attributed to our work environment, The Creative Space. We all started as individual residents in a coworking space in downtown Bryan. We would come in after our day jobs and visit a bit. Kick some ideas around. Go out to eat, then come back and work on different projects. The office grew from five people to thirteen in just under 8 months.
I was one of the founding members of the Creative Space along with four others and somehow I knew that if we got this thing started, something very good would eventually come from it.
In December of 2007 - sometime between Christmas and New Years the four of us were sitting around one night and we all came to the realization that we had all the parts to start a software development and consulting company specializing in Ruby and Python.
The amazing talent of the other residents are a great value to our company. We can outsource work that we may not be the best at - like photography or video - thanks to guys like Michael Cummings.
The first ‘real’ company that existed in the Creative Space was Always Creative - a company we work very closely with when it comes to design and branding.
We also have access to PHP and ASP guys in the space that we can go to if we need expertise in that area.
And last, but not least there’s a Solaris admin in the group that is most useful not for his old-school unix admin abilities, but his home brewing of beer. We have found a need for beer far more than a need for Unix admin skills.
The folks outside of our company are the ones who provide us the ability to adapt to the different types of work that come in. We have the leanness of four and the experience of thirteen. This is a defining aspect of our company and we are fortunate to have the folks around us when we need them.
Over the past 8 years I’ve managed around a half dozen enterprise level CMS’s for various companies and universities. I’ve come to a couple of conclusions - none of them are perfect and cost is not a measure of quality.
I worked for the better part of a year and a half with a system that managed upwards of 75,000 documents and the process for choosing the CMS took over a year just to evaluate and push through. We had around 6 or so “admin” users who took care of the editors, managers, etc. and upwards of 200 or so that made edits on a semi-regular basis. This was serious enterprise content management.
I don’t want to mention products specifically; I’d rather keep this generic. The process of choosing a CMS can be extremely difficult and time consuming. The marketplace is extremely crowded and it’s very hard to find unbiased information about them. CMSMatrix is a great way to learn about some, but it doesn’t really tell you where the cream of the crop is.
You must decide what features are most important to you, such as workflow, migration, platform, language or scalability. Cost can also be an important piece of the puzzle, but let’s save that for the latter half of this write-up. Once you have prioritized your features, it’s time to go out and hunt down a list of 20 or so products that you think could be a candidate.
Now, our CMS that runs downtowncartel.com is Wordpress. It can sometimes be referred to as a “blogging platform”, but in reality it is a system that manages our content in blog-form. Wordpress is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum as the system I mentioned previously.
The larger system cost nearly the salary of two employees while Wordpress was absolutely free. They are both quality products and cost should not be looked at when deciding which CMS is right for your organization.
If you would like for me to talk about some of the things that I’ve learned over the past few years leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to cover it in the next part of this series.
Note: Hashtags is back up and running thanks to Twitter re-enabling XMPP messages.
It feels as though watching the twitter uptime graph is like watching GOOG’s stock graph. In short, we rely on twitter for tracking hashtags. We use their XMPP service to get real time updates from the 7000+ users that have opted in.
As you can tell, on May 29th, we received our last hashtag updates. It was at that precise time that twitter shut off their IM functionality and essentially killed hashtags.org. Bummer. At this point, we’re at their mercy. Once they restore IM services, we’ll be good to go… our bots are eagerly waiting for that XMPP stream.
Every year, like clockwork, you’ll find me glued to a TV set at a sports bar, friends house, or restaurant. I’ll sit there 4 quarters, watching a certain NBA team show 3 western conference teams how it’s done, then an eastern conference team in the finals. It is a wonderful experience being a Spurs fan.
Since I only watch 25-35 hours of live TV a year, it is awfully hard for me justify the $80 or $90 a month for cable. There’s a few sitcoms I watch, but they are available on great services like Hulu. So where does that leave me? Listening to the game on the radio, errr, internet radio.
I would have no problem paying $5 per game to watch them in my browser - just like Hulu. I’d even be fine with watching the two and three minute commercial breaks because it’s not like they can cut them out if I’m watching it live.
So, they would be able to get $5 from me per game, and the ability to show me 40-50 commercials. You can’t tell me that this is not a money making opportunity. I’m sure the cable companies have some pressure on the NBA and TNT/ESPN/ABC to keep them exclusive to the old RG6, but how long can that last?
I feel like the NBA, as well as myself, is missing out on a golden opportunity to, in their case, make a bunch of money and, in my case, watch Tony Parker drive the lane for an easy 2.
We all try to keep the signal to noise ration down quite a bit when communicating. Unfortunately, I think most of us are usually on the receiving end of it. I have tried to keep tabs on my communicating by asking myself the questions: Is this the right outlet? Is this the right context?
Normally I will send out a tweet with just a little bit of information rather than whip out Wordpress and goto town writing a blog post because what I have to say doesn’t need to be elaborated on.
I do not have a blog of my own. I have a tumble log, but that’s nothing more than an aggregate of what I publish. So I publish in different blogs that have to do with the topic I’m writing about - be it politics, culture, or technology (here).
So after being unsatisfied with our current Twitter/Blog/RSS scheme, I came up with an interesting idea to weave our tweets into the flow for Downtown Cartel as asides. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, introduced asides to the blogging community a couple of years ago. I found that asides were exactly the thing that microblogging platforms like Twitter and Pownce tried to be but were handled differently - mainly by method of distribution.
I’m still trying to figure out how to pull off asides so that they work with Twitter, Wordpress and Twitter-Tool. I’m not certain that this can be done, but we’ll see.
Somehow I missed the fact that an interview I did while at the BIL Conference in March was posted to YouTube. For those of you who don’t know what BIL is, it’s an unconference that was held outside of the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Several members from the Creative Space helped plan the event and made the trek out to California.
Downtown Bryan, TX recently stepped it up a notch when our good friends over at Square One Bistro began announcing the lunch special and soup of the day over twitter. Yes, every day around 11:15, I get a little update with what’s being served for lunch.
I think this is a great way for non-tech businesses to have somewhat persistent contact with their users, err, patrons. I’m sure plenty of restaurants have an RSS feed of different things like events and specials - it’s time they move them to Twitter.
The Creative Space, the coworking space we operate out of, held BarCampTexas a few months ago. Travis Ward wore the shirt today and I sorta got to thinking about the process that unfolded as we planned our first BarCamp. I thought I’d post a few tips to sorta help those out there that might be planning a BarCamp for the first time.
Distribute the workload - Plain and simple, don’t do everything yourself. Let folks take on tasks and let them have ultimate responsibility. I think the understanding of “this is a group thing” will make people realize that they will be letting everyone down if they don’t get it done.
Promote, promote, promote - Living in Bryan/College Station, we knew we had to get out and really get the word out around the state. This meant taking a few trips to Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and talking with community leaders in those cities to ensure they energized the locals.
Get sponsors early - Before you choose a date, make sure you have a plan of attack ready for gathering sponsorship money. BarCamps can be done on a shoe-string budget, but if you have certain things in mind and a level of quality that may take some donated funds. Make sure you know the fiscal realities before you commit to a date.
Nice quality shirts - Spend the extra $250 for American Apparel. There’s nothing like a good shirt you’ll wear over and over again rather than a low-quality shirt you’ll just throw in a drawer and forget about. AA usually costs about $1-2 more than your average Hanes, but you’ll get so many more wears.
Access to alcohol - While not everyone drinks, make sure that there is at least access to alcohol towards the end of the night. Visitors will become more social and things will end on a good note. Besides, who doesn’t like a party?
If you have any other tips, just tweet them out using the hashtag #barcamptips. Or leave them in the comments section below. Thanks.
I’ve been playing around with Fluid, the free site specific browser for Mac OS X Leopard, for a while now and recently came up with a really interesting way to browse hashtags.org. I’ll briefly cover the steps involved to browse hashtags.org using coverflow and fluid.
I was one of the founding members of the Creative Space along with four others and somehow I knew that if we got this thing started, something very good would eventually come from it.
