Kudos to Mark Lise for organizing a succesful first DemoCampVictoria. Lots of excited post coverage of the evening: Mark, Yule, Tris, TechVibes – I think this was a great spring board for future meetups. My favourite quote from the evening was from Gels Saby, who said at the beginning of her talk “I wasn’t going to present, but I got excited about my project, so I wanted to share it with you”. Great stuff, this is exactly the kind of reaction that DemoCamps are meant to engender.
I haven’t been back over to Victoria in quite some time, so I was amazed by all the activity. Sure, the University of Victoria is my alma mater, and I know that it spreads co-op students everywhere – much like Waterloo – but after leaving, I certainly wasn’t in touch with the technology industry there. It turns out that tech is the #1 / #2 industry in Victoria, along with tourism.
The Juliet Presentation Center, where the event was hosted, definitely also deserves mention. This is for a new “Vancouver style” condo development in downtown Victoria. In general, there seemed to be consensus that holding the event downtown was a critical factor. Hmmm…a link between property developers and technology workers? Definitely something to explore.
I felt like it was a really successful trip for me: I got to meet a bunch of people doing cool things in Victoria, and then ended up in a couple of longer discussions – one with the crew from Flock (thoughts on the social graph for every website on my personal site) and Yule on Placeblogger-like functionality for Victoria.
Photos of the event can be seen in Tris Hussey’s photostream, and I did a live interview using Utterz.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the scene in Victoria, and encouraging cross pollination in both directions with Vancouver. For that matter, Seattle is pretty close as well…
P.S. The next event in Vancouver is this Thursday, April 10th – DemoCampVancouver06: Gaming Edition.
April 7, 2008 at 6:28 am |
[...] Crow really started something: the first DemoCamp Victoria was apparently a success [1, 2], and there’s one coming up in Vancouver on April 10. If only there was a consolidated [...]
April 7, 2008 at 6:31 am |
Boris, awesome as always to see you. Now I guess it’s my turn to come over, eh?
April 7, 2008 at 6:51 am |
Great talking with you, Boris, and you sparked something in Dave Chard’s mind when you asked whether he’ll put live-work technological capabilities into his newest project for 834 Johnson. He has already asked Mark Lise to explain to him the specs (in terms of wiring), so he can pass this information along to his engineers and architects.
Don’t forget he develops in Vancouver, too, so maybe you can look for a software developer live-work development coming to Vancouver soon! I suggest he add a strata-held commons room, and then there’ll always be a space for the *next* democamp!
April 7, 2008 at 8:17 am |
Kudos back at you for DemoCampVancouver05 – That event was my inspiration for doing the same here in Victoria. There’s definitely a lot going on here and it would be great to have our cities to collaborate and engage each other more. Plus give me more reasons to take the float plane