Life is extraordinary! Every single time I hold William, I marvel that every little part of him is just like us, a bit of us, but in miniature and developing quickly. He is my son.

My life has new meaning!

Based on the BarCamp and Open Spaces concepts, the first DemoCamp was held in Toronto and inspires events of the same name in many Canadian cities and other locations around the world. Victoria organizer Mark Lise was inspired by attending DemoCamp Vancouver.

¹

The following demos are currently proposed:

• Why DemoCampVictoria was created (Mark Lise)
• Fortuno (Jesse and Jason)
• Genetify (Andrew)
• BountyUp - Social Commerce (Joshua McKenty and Todd Khozein)
• DailySplice (Rian)
• Flock - the social web browser (Clayton Stark and other Flockers)
• Songbird (Steven Bengtson and Peter Van Hardenberg)

The format usually has the audience (participants) vote on what demos they want to see. What doesn’t get voted in at one event, often gets voted in at the next.

As BabyCamp could start any day within the next month, I hope to make it for the first hour tomorrow night.

Hat’s off to Mark and crew for putting this together. I’m sure it will be an awesome event.

Update: I did make it to the first half of the event, and took some photos. It was an awesome event! Dave Chard and team were incredible hosts! Dave is founder of the real estate development company Chard Development and behind the Juliet condominiums being developed in downtown Victoria. Urbanist Yule Heibel made the introductions that resulted in this venue, and it seems this relationship will continue to grew and be a great benefit for entrepreneurs and technologists in Victoria– Dave welcomes other opportunities to host similar events!

I had a very interesting conversation with Yule about urbanization of downtown Victoria, got to catch up a little with Boris Mann, and have a little face time with the incredible — and recently relocated to Victoria — Darren Barefoot. I saw some people I haven’t seen in a while and met quite a few wonderful people. The demos were great!

Looking forward to the next one.

1. Photo by Brij Charan

Now, I’m taking another look. Why? Because of the WordPress Prologue Theme.

If you haven’t heard about Prologue, it’s WordPress theme that people are calling a twitter for groups, created by the Automattic team: Matt, Joseph, and MT. It is available on WordPress.com or you can download it for your own WordPress install.

I’ll admit I thought it was a lot of excitement over nothing, but my nay saying didn’t diminish Matt’s enthusiasm. Then he announced Prologue, and everyone was really excited about it! The titles of the articles are quite telling, here are a few:

• Twitter - Public Timeline = Prologue
• WordPress’s Prologue: part Twitter, part Basecamp, all business
• Prologue: Twitter for WordPress for Groups
• Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?
• Prologue/WordPress–Private Twitter II

Still I didn’t get it, until I really started to use it. Now, after using it these last couple of months did, I couldn’t live without our private Prologue for sharing with the Automattic team and even more important keeping up with what they are working on and ideas they are playing with.² As MT describes it:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

Every team or group needs a prologue to share tidbits of what you are working on, without the pressure. Is there a similar tool you use?

This is why I’m now turning to Twitter and family to see what use I can make of them.

1. I just disabled this feature, because the emails are getting annoying.
2. I also get a lot of value out of the WordPress core developers prologue.

When you first try WordPress 2.5, it will feel like it has changed a lot, possibly for the worst (my wife Julia had her concerns). Change is hard. Take a deep breath, and be patient with yourself and WordPress as you explore the new experience. You will surprise yourself how adapt at change you are, and I’m betting you will soon love the new WordPress.

We did hide a few bugs in there — remember there is no such thing as “user error” — so take notes of the problems and challenges you encounter. Write them down when you first encounter them, reflect on which you think are the worst, and blog about them, discuss them on the forums, mailing list, or report them in our bug tracker.

Only together can we make WordPress even better by fixing the worst problems in maintenance releases (the next likely in about a month), and fixing the other challenges and most important us working together to incorporate all your ideas!

The product speaks for itself, but I often find the WordPress participants too modest to blow their own horns, so here is what Matt wrote:

The Community is Growing

More than growing, it’s on fire. We always talk about things like downloads, and the 2.3 branch has already had 1.92 million downloads as I write this post, but this time we have some far more interesting information I’d like to share.

There were over 1,200 commits to our repository since 2.3.0 and over 90 people were credited in them. This means in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today. I had no idea this group of people was so large.

Outside of the core commit team, there was particular help from these people, in rough order of number of credits and tickets: mdawaffe (Michael Adams), azaozz (Andrew Ozz), nbachiyski (Nikolay Bachiyski), andy (Andy Skelton), iammattthomas (Matt Thomas), tellyworth (Alex Shiels), josephscott (Joseph Scott), lloydbudd (Lloyd Budd), DD32 ( Dion Hulse), filosofo (Austin Matzko), hansengel (Hans Engel), pishmishy (James Davis), ffemtcj, Viper007Bond, ionfish (Benedict Eastaugh), jhodgdon (Jennifer Hodgdon), Otto42, thee17 (Charles E. Free-Melvin), and xknown (Alexander Concha). Also want to thank MichaelH and Lorelle on the documentation side, and moshu, Kafkaesqui, whooami, MichaelH, Otto42, and jeremyclark13 for helping with support.

And that is just a very small slice of the people that make WordPress the best blogging software in the world! I always want to write more about the people that make WordPress special for me. I would love to read about the people that make WordPress wonderful for you.

“If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.” — Anonymous

I laugh every time I see it, because of the possible arrogance of it, and the reflection of the competitive spirit at the center of our culture, as opposed to a collaborative spirit.

I joked to him, “I’m sure glad WordPress isn’t written in Perl, or do you have a special sig for PHP as well? He replied explaining, “It’s meant more to poke fun at the syntax, rather than the people who use it I’ve written my share of sites using Perl CGIs and run a few sites using PHP.”

Have you ever laid down a diss in your email sig? Maybe, your favorite lyrics from a nerdcore battle rap?

What would a WordPress one look like? “I click publish and my content is live.”

There is a real art to a good email sig, maybe a lost art, because I haven’t noticed great ones lately.

It’s going to be an amazing time, thanks to Google, and all the mentors that have already committed. It’s not to late, if you are still interested in participating as a mentor.

Students, now is when to start researching and documenting your ideas. Please see the WordPress Summer of Code 2008 page in the codex and our application template. Please join us on our mailing lists to discuss your idea. You will be able to submit your applications from March 24 through 31.

Update: Leslie Hawthorn has posted Meet Your Mentors on Google’s Open Source Blog and it includes:

… After reviewing over 500 applications, we finally narrowed our selection to 175 Free and Open Source projects. …
….

Remember, some of our most successful student projects come from ideas suggested by the students themselves, so take advantage of this time to explore what areas of development most excite you. You can then find people to help you brainstorm about your initial thoughts and further refine them. We’re hoping this additional time for up-front dialogue will help our student applicants craft the most well-informed and targeted program applications possible.

Congratulations to all of our future mentors! We look forward to working with all of you this year, and to working with many of you once again.