Blog: Web 2.0

DC Tech Events are Heating Up Along with the Weather

It's a very hot week for technology in Washington, DC. There are a ton of great events going on, so many in fact it was very hard to narrow it down to ones we could feasibly attend! Here's a quick look at what we're hoping to do this week. As always, a full listing of tech events is over at DC Tech Events.

Monday, July 14

7:15 to 9:00 pm

DC Drupal Meetup: Tonight we'll be heading over to the monthly Drupal meetup. If you're a Drupal developer or user - or want to be - join us for some cold beers, a game of foosball, and some heated discussions on Drupal.

8:30 pm

Screen on the Green: This summer tradition starts today with a screening of Dr. No. If you haven't seen the flick in awhile or just want a truly DC movie going experience, grab a blanket and a picnic dinner and head down to the Mall.

Tuesday, July 15

11:00 am - 12:30 pm

It's another busy albeit rainy week in Washington, DC with a lot of interesting tech events and happy hours taking place. We had a hard time deciding which events to check out this week, but finally narrowed it down to the ones below. As always, you can check out everything happening this week in tech at DC Tech Events.

Hope to see you out this week! 

Tuesday
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Dorkbot DC: This is one of the dorkier meetups happening in the city, so if that's your bag - or machine to machine (M2M) communication or RepRap is - swing on over to GW University for this month's Dorkbot meeting. 

Wednesday
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Drupal Lab: Have a burning question about how to get a Drupal module properly configured or want to share a glory (or war) story about that last Drupal site you built? Then come on out for the April Drupal Lab and talk shop with other Drupalers.

6:30 pm
DC New Media Technology: We hear this networking/happy hour event is a great place to talk about new media, social networking, and all that is web 2.0 with a bunch of other people in the field. This will be our first time out to this event, and we're pretty psyched about it. 

Saturday
5:00 pm
DC Rollergirls Championship: For a little weekend fun, come out for the DC Rollergirls championship match. Haven't heard of them? The photos should peak your interest : )

International Development, Agriculture, and Smarter Tools

I just landed in Rome for the Web2forDev conference where I was invited to speak on how social software can be used to connect geographically diverse teams. The timing of the conference is fantastic. It’s eAgriculture week here in Rome, so I suspect that many of the 350 participants will have a lot of on the ground experience. 

There are a lot of great presentations in the queue that I want to sit in on. The session Cairo Concept: Village to Village Knowledge Sharing sounds fascinating – it will discuss a project that links small town together in an online network to help them better share knowledge, news, and expertise. I’m also excited to learn more about USAID’s Amazon Basin Conservation Initiative, which not only sounds interesting and necessary but is also of special interest to me as one of our very first clients back in 2003 - Amazon Alliance - worked in this area.  I’m also looking forward to catching my friend Tobias’ session explaining how African civil society organizations are and could be using blogs, wikis, and social networking tools to better use their limited internet connections.

I arrived in Rome straight from Barcelona, Spain and DrupalCon, which was a spectacular conference overall. I came away from it very energized about the future role of Drupal in international development.

After many conversations with Jose (who I was able to work with for most of September out of his Leon office) and Gábor  (who I talked with at both FrOSCon and DrupalCon), I’m extremely confident that Drupal will be a leading multilingual platform.  We are standing behind future investment in making Drupal multilingual by working on the i18n module that makes Drupal multilingual and getting more of this functionality into the core of the system. We’re also really excited to be working more closely with Gábor to make it easier to translate Drupal into more languages.

Our not so hidden agenda is to follow the huge aid investments for improved connectivity in developing countries made over the last decade with a few open source publishing platform that will make it simple for people all over the world to generate local content in their native language.

Managing News and Maggie

For the past few months, we’ve had our heads down working on many technical aspects of Managing News, our fully-loaded team aggregator, and we’ve written about a little of that here and here. And as I mentioned last week, we’re also tackling giving the tool a new look. We’re completely redesigning the user interface of the tool and at the same time designing a public website to promote it.

Sneak Peak at our Newly Designed Team Aggregator

Managing News – our fully loaded team aggregator – has gotten a makeover. This is part of our work to bring Managing News from a proof of concept to a functional beta release. Currently Managing News is in private alpha testing but is being used by World Resources Institute and RH Reality Check, and the system is based on the work we did on BuzzMonitor with the World Bank.

I’ll post more about what’s in store with the beta release later this week, along with some more shots of the new Managing News design and user interface. For now here is the logo.

We just received an email saying that our proposal "Portal 2.0: Using Social Software to Connect Geographically Dispersed Teams" has been accepted to be presented at the Web2forDev conference this September, scheduled during e-Agriculture week. So after DrupalCon, I’m off to Rome to present the Drupal powered intranet package we’ve been developing :) !