If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. beCamp is Charlottesville’s version of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon—organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. Realizing that the most energizing parts of any tech conference are the ad hoc conversations that take place in the hallways between the sessions, beCamp facilitates these types of interactions for an entire event.

This year we are using the bright airy CitySpace facility, on the downtown mall, underneath the parking garage.  CitySpace is directly upstairs of the space we used last year, and the open layout should mesh well with our OpenSpace conference. We’ll have a large room that can hold all 100 of us, as well as 4 or 5 break out rooms for the individual sessions.

We provide the venues, the wireless, the projectors, the food, da beer—you show up to teach, learn, and participate.

Each attendee should talk about something or volunteer (registration, set-up, teardown, etc.). We will suggest and pick the sessions which will be picked by the attendees Friday evening. For example, if lots of people want to hear about Google’s OpenSocial, then that will be on the agenda. If no one wants to hear about HTML5, then it won’t be on the agenda.

Think of it as an open-source geek gathering where you get to decide what goes into and what comes out of the event. It’s 2 days of creating, collaborating, and conversing with people just as juiced excited about technology as you are.

If you think you can help sponsor some of the needs, please let me know.  We’ve listed some of the needs on this page: http://barcamp.org/sponsor-beCamp-2009

Learn More

Homepage: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2009

Sponsorships: http://barcamp.org/sponsor-beCamp-2009

See other beCamp’s: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008

Details

Dates: May 8th 5 PM to 10 PM, May 9th 9 AM to 5 PM.

Location: CitySpace (http://www.cvilledesign.org/cityspace/)

Map: http://tinyurl.com/c6bxzr

Price: $FREE

Signup: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2009#Campers

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Originally posted by Eric Pugh | Principal | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 | http://www.opensourceconnections.com

If you’d like to be a part of the planning but can’t make it to this first meeting, I’ve set up a UVaCollab site and email list at UVaWebConf09 at collab.itc.virginia.edu. All future announcements and online discussion regarding the conference will happen there, so feel free to join if you’d like to keep tabs on the progress. The name of the UVaCollab site is “UVa Web Conf ‘09″, and it’s listed in the public directory.

Hope to see you there!

First planning meeting and discussion with Jared Spool
When: Wednesday, November 12, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Where: In the Byrd Room, Harrison/Small Special Collections building, U.Va.

Mr. Rumsey will show how technology has transformed his work as an historical map scholar and collector. Using imaging software, GIS, and popular applications like Google Earth and Second Life, Rumsey has given new life to old maps, both in their dissemination and in our ability to analyze and understand them in a variety of disciplines. He will demonstrate how he offers rare maps and innovative software tools on his free, public website:

http://www.davidrumsey.com/

Come early to the talk for a guided tour of the Seymour I. Schwartz collection of North American maps: “On the Map,” beginning at 3pm in the main gallery of the Harrison Institute / Small Special Collections Library:

http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/onthemap/

And stay late for a reception to follow Mr. Rumsey’s presentation!

This lecture is co-sponsored by CERSA (the new Center for Emerging Research, Scholarship, and Arts) and the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library.

The Scholars’ Lab is also hosting a luncheon, open house, and other map-related events on November 19th, which is International GIS Day:

http://www.gisday.com/

This is a quick update for you regarding our Flex Discovery Group meeting next Tuesday. A detailed agenda will go out on Monday. This week the annual Adobe MAX conference is happening in San Francisco, so expect big product news to come soon from Adobe. Don’t forget the focus of this group is to build a Flex Application together utilizing: multi-page forms, web services, web cam inputs, validation, video, video cue points, animations, file uploads, wysiwyg editor and more! Place all code here: http://code.google.com/p/flexdiscoverygroup/ .

MEETING DETAILS:

When: Tues, Oct 28th, 12:00pm - 1:00pm

Where: Brown Science and Engineering Library, http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/brown/, [location see map: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/map.html ]

Who: Everyone is Invited and encouraged to share ideas and parcels of finished or unfinished Adobe Flex work for discussion purposes.

A lot of the most illustrious names in open-source databases will be here. This will definitely be a place you can meet people who know how to make databases sing and dance. For example Peter Zaitsev of mysqlperformanceblog.com fame will be here, as will the creator of SQLite and many more.

It would be great if you would

1. spread the word — put badges on your sites, blog about it, tell
   friends to come
2. help organize
3. attend!

See http://opensqlcamp.org/

Grab badges from
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/10/04/opensql-camp-badges-are-ready/

RJ Bruneel is a seasoned Software Developer since 1997 currently working for Opensource Connections. 

For more information about the location, check out http://www.lib.virginia.edu/map.html

When: Wednesday, July 30th: 1:00pm – 2:30pm

Where: Newcomb Hall, Room 168

Meeting Title & More Below:

Title: RDF, and OWL, the Semantic Web, and Linked Data

Description: While some may roll their eyes when they hear about the
Semantic Web, usually because of unfair associations with the
pie-in-the-sky failed promises of Artificial Intelligence, many
developers are already building some very cool applications. In this
presentation, we’ll look at technologies that build on the simplicity of
the RDF data model to enable these applications. We’ll also see how
RDF/OWL enables the coding of useful semantics, and how the Linked Data
movement is building on many Semantic Web principles to make increasing
amounts of valuable data available to your applications.

Bio: Bob DuCharme (www.snee.com/bobdc.blog) is a Solutions Architect at
Innodata Isogen. In a recent XML.com newsletter, editor Kendall Clark
wrote “Does anyone write tech prose as clear as Bob?” Bob is the author
of Manning Publications’ “XSLT Quickly,” Prentice Hall’s “XML: The
Annotated Specification” and “SGML CD,” and McGraw Hill’s “Operating
Systems Handbook.” He’s written over seventy pieces for XML.com and has
contributed to Dr. Dobb’s Journal, IBM developerWorks, perl.com, XML
Magazine, XML Journal, XML Developer, O’Reilly Books’ “XML Hacks,” and
Prentice Hall’s “XML Handbook.” Bob received his BA in Religion from
Columbia University and his Masters in Computer Science from New York
University. He lives in Ivy.

Today Ian Brill demo’d ITC’s VMware infrastructure. A similar system is hosted by BeTech to host any number of web software development efforts. Currently ITC hosts ~150 web servers utilizing four servers clustered and running VMware. Ian described Vmotion (product for moving live virtual running virtual machines), Virtual Center Server (product for managing the details of virtual machines), VMware High Availability (product for managing automatic replication and fault tolerance), and DRS (product for virtual load balancing).

This stable VMware infrastructure appears to be a solid solution for hosting systems with a high available requirement. Contact ITC Microsystem, ITC-Microsystems@virginia.edu, if you are interested in standing up a new system in this popular VMware system.

If you are interested in developing a test system in a VMware environment, you can get started free of charge by emailing betechlabs@virginia.edu.

Great talk Ian! Thanks from BeTech.

We have 68 registered attendees so far. If you’re planning to come but haven’t yet registered, do it soon so you can get a t-shirt! You can register at http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008.

Last year this event was a huge success, with a huge range of topics from ruby, smalltalk, and solr (which you might expect) to 3D modeling, robotics, and reputation management (which you might not expect, which makes them even cooler). beCamp is whatever YOU want it to be, so bring your ideas for a session.

Event Details

When

• Friday, May 2nd, 5:00PM-9:00PM
• Saturday, May 3rd, 9:00AM-5:00PM

Where

• Charlottesville Business Innovation Council
• 501 East Main Street, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902

Bring

• Brain
• Laptop
• Reference books
• Games—cards, board games, Legos, video (bring a monitor as well)
• Snacks, beverages
• Camera (Flickr tags: beCamp, beCamp2008, BarCamp)
• Business cards

Join us this Thursday, April 24th, at 2:30pm for a presentation by Ian Brill from ITC Microsystems on the subject of VMware. Ian will discuss and demonstrate how departments can obtain and manage virtual servers using the VMware system here at UVa.

If you missed this jam packed VMware session at the LSP conference or would like follow up with a more interactive discussion about how you can take advantage of this rapidly growing resource at UVa, join us this Thursday.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, March 26
* 3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
* Byrd Seminar Room in the Harrison/Small Library
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/harrison/facilities.html#byrd)
(http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Blacklight is an OPAC (online public access catalog) developed at the University of Virginia Library; it has been made public under an Apache 2.0 license. Blacklight was the first project made possible by beTech Labs and is the first project to come out of beTech Labs as open source.

Madelyn Wessel is Special Advisor to the University Librarian and Liaison to the General Counsel, focusing on a broad range of library system legal issues including intellectual property, copyright, licensing, and special issues arising in the area of digital scholarship.

Bethany Nowviskie is the Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at U.Va. Library. She is active in digital humanities and is an advocate for academic open source.

Come on out, y’all! We had a great time last month, and I know there have been some new jobs in the community that we all want to hear the juicy details about.

What?: beerTech!
When ?: 6:00PM
Where?: South Street Brewing, 106 W South St, Charlottesville, VA
Who?: You!

Hope to see you there.

Eric Pugh started off the meeting with the following hilarious youtube.com video “Code Monkey”:
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA

Eric explained the wide adoption of OpenID by many of the internet powerhouses like Yahoo, Google, and others. Interesting resource links include:

• http://openid.net (for more explanation about the standard)
• http://openiddirectory.com (to discover who is participating)
• http://spreadopenid.org
• http://www.37signals.com/openid/ (37 signals is using open ID for their systems)
• http://myopenid.net (popular openID provider)
• https://pip.verisignlabs.com/seatbelt.do (verisign offers a firefox plugin and openID service too)
• http://www.opensourceconnections.com (Eric will offer more information about his presentation on his company web site soon)

Eric also show a demo of his “Fish4Brains” application using OpenID put together at the 48hour long Rails Rumble this year. We also discussed the upcoming BeCamp event. Last year this event was tremendous, get involved this year and make it even better. Visit http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008/ for more information and keep up on the developments.

Great information, thank you Eric!

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh is the owner of OpenSource Connections, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a committer on many projects including DBUnit, Maven, and Jakarta Commons.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, February 20th
* 2:00pm-3:30pm
* electronic classroom in the Science and Engineering
Library, Clark Hall. (http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Also, Eric would like to get the beTech community involved with the planning and organization of the next beCamp and bring us up to speed with the progress that has been made on beCamp Squared…, beCamp Redux…, beCamp Part Deux…

Hope to see you there!
–Doug

NOTE: For Post Meeting Notes, Read The Follow-up Meeting Post and Any Comments to This Post

Three years ago Anna Tubbs and I assembled an open group of enthusiastic Web designers and developers and coined the name beTech—Bleeding Edge TECHnology. The name was a little poke at, among other things, many of the University’s inaccessible table-based layouts and dry, brochure-ware sites in an age of CSS, Ajax, and social software. Our goal, then and now, was to subtly coax the UVa Web experience into the 21st Century—to evolve already. We engaged designers, developers, administrators, and anyone that saw the Web as a fascinating realm of possibilities with powers to change the social fabric of this institution and the World. We merely asked that everyone share whatever knowledge, skills, and inspiration they had and to start building the Web they wanted to work in. We’ve come a long way since then.

Today beTech is a strong and vibrant community with almost 200 members on the mailing list and a blog that is followed on every continent that Google tracks. Our inaugural beCamp brought in over 75 campers from across Grounds, across the region, and across the country. The spinoff WeeCamp series is also proving to be quite popular (a WordPress WeeCamp is in the planning stages). beTech Labs, our virtual Web development environment, is really starting to pick up steam with 8 Labs rolling as we speak. It’s truly been an amazing ride and one that I hope will continue to provide opportunities to others for a long, long time. Thank you all!

So let’s get together next Wednesday, dream up the next chapters of the beTech story, and then figure out how to divvy up the organizational duties. Unfortunately, in leaving I won’t have any ceremonial tarball of Mosaic or disc of FrontPage to lay at the base of the beTech Tim Berners-Lee alter but I will pass along any insider knowledge and username/passwords that I can conjure up. I hope to see you all next Wednesday.

In other words, this would not take the place of beTech. BeTech could live on as-is. Instead, could the LSP program be expanded upon to include content that sort of sits in between beTech and the LSP developer content?

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