At last week’s OSCON conference event, Evan Prodroumou won an award from Google and O’Reilly Media for his work on identi.ca and the laconi.ca platform.

OSCON is by far the conference with the biggest profile in the year; and it’s a statement well-deserved to Evan’s magnificent work on the laconi.ca platform, which has now reached 7.000.000+ “dents” and 60.000 users.

Google and O’Reilly Media, the co-organizers of the conference awarded Evan, as well as other open source/Free Software leaders, such as the people behind Drizzle, PostgreSQL, etc. The award is given to individuals who innovated in open source and lead by excellence

Evan can be proud of himself; he’s in many ways a model for entrepreneurs and hackers alike, proving that all you need is a laptop and a spot in a co-working space somewhere in the world (ok that was maybe stretching it a little bit, but not so far from the truth…)

php Québec organized Codefest 3.0, a 3 day event where programmers are invited to work on their open source project, share their work.

This time, it was sponsored by Microsoft Canada (their office in Toronto), and was held at a Helm Café, on Bernard Street.

There’s something striking seeing 20 or so php programmers each in front of a laptop, all in corner of a trendy bar.

The event was “organized” in a very free-form way, similar to FreeHackers, but maybe with even less focus on having “results”. A few of the ingredients:

• it’s cool to have free food and beer (!)
• great idea to gather everyone in the same space, lots of energy. I met a few students, from a computer engineering school I didn’t know about (!!), and it seems there are lots to be done with them in the future. Also new ideas discussed about future direction of TechEntreprise 
• a conference/presentation was held to present tests suites for php, etc.
• I noticed lots of openess: there was a guy who will be doing Google’s Summer of Code, on Asterisk. A couple of people were also doing standard Java work, and also ruby (that’s me and Gregory)

Pics from the demo, test suites in php



MTW Pictures

Codefest is a weekend-long event targeted at php programmers, but also any other developers programming in other languages, planned from May 1st to May3rd. Come over if you want to meet other developers, and co-work on current & open source projects

Event website

Here is a report of a previous Codefest

Another report

Proposed Projects in 3.0:

• MediaWiki
• Drupal
• WordPress
• TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
• BeWelcome
• Habari
• Anne G. wikigraphe
• PHP Unit Tests
• PHP Quebec Employment section
• Laconica sera présent (ideas)
• sux0r.org
• Validation Testing Framework
• Your project! (Contact us contact@codefest.ws)

As a sidenote, Evan Prodromou worked on the first lines of identi.ca at Codefest 2.0. Organizers are also looking for additional sponsors.

I dropped by (quickly) at the Tikifest 5 à 8 today.

The meetup gathered TikiWiki users, developers and the TikiWiki community, who gathered in Montreal for the Tikifest 2009 event.

The 5 à 8 was quite impressive, with a jolly crowd, a very good presentation by Marc Laporte, and the announcement of the beta version of Tikiwiki 3.0, which was produced during Tikifest.

So far, Tikiwiki has been downloaded 700.000 times, has 1000 options/features, and sees user contributions very frequently. Lots of good numbers; Marc Laporte wondered at one point at a php Québec codefest how come Drupal or Wordpress were ahead, but I think there’s nothing to be “jealous” about.

One thing which surprised me a lot, as an outsider, was how open the TikiWiki community was. There is a sense of welcome, openess, inclusive participation. It’s the sort of community any software project (or for that matter, a web startup who’d want to offer a “platform” and foster a development community) would want to take lessons from. Kudos to Marc, congrats to every member of Tikiwii.

We’ve missed the event for last month for FreeHackers, but we’re back with the event, with an exciting schedule.

From the event page @ techentreprise:

FreeHackers is a free, open event targeted at programmers, hackers and everyone interested in experimenting in new technologies.

Schedule:

• 12h30pm Sébastien Pierre, from datalicious, is going to present Sugar, a new programming language meant to replace Javascript for front-end user interfaces
• A workshop by Sébastien Pierre, covering Sugar, will follow for one hour or so

The event will follow the unconference format, which means attendees will be asked to participate, lend a hand at co-organizing, present, or organize a workshop. We should have a couple more workshops alongside Sébastien’s workshop.

For the remaining 3 or 4 hours, there will be free hacking. Anyone is free to code/hack/work on his/her project of choice.

Any technology, programming language, platform, software or hardware is welcomed. The focus is on community, experimentation, hacking etc. You can view it as an intense R&D session, an opportunity to network or exchange, visit the bolidea offices, or just be curious and see what’s hot in Montréal currently.

Organizers: Heri (MontrealTechWatch), Alok Mohindra (Arkalumen), Bolidea

• MontrealTechWatch covers Technology and Innovation in Montréal
• Arkalumen markets a new revolutionary LED light, much more efficient, programmable, and more powerful than any LED light available currently.
• Bolidea generously provides the space, with the goal to connect with local hackers, brilliant programmers and software Engineers

What’s been added in FreeHackers this time is a featured presentation (Sébastien’s) to begin the event with.

We’ve also added workshops to the event. This will be “organized” following the unconference format (wikipedia link), which means you should lend a hand, present, interact, organize a workshop, discuss. The event will be participant-driven, and will be as great as you want it to be. 

Free Hacking will follow. 

I believe this makes it an exciting schedule, and should be a great platform for experimentation and enabling new projects. 

As the previous edition, the event is done in close association with Bolidea, a startup incubator started by sucessful entrepreneurs. The event is hosted by Bolidea, on 4115 bd St-Laurent, suite 200.

Go over to TechEntreprise to register. Do leave a comment, here or at TechEntreprise, get in touch on twitter,

Lots of WIN and awesomeness today at identi.ca

Congrats to Evan, csarven and millette!

Last week, MontrealStartup announced a seed investment in ControlYourself.ca, which does laconi.ca & identi.ca

Identi.ca is an open source version of twitter, building on standards and openess, such as the fact that any user can download the software and open up their own laconi.ca instance, which lead me to dub the service as the “wordpress for microblogging”.

Another key advantage is that it’s federated and distributed, meaning that separate instances can still communicate with each other, thanks to the open microblogging standard. While Twitter has been getting a lot of press, identi.ca has also received a lot of press, both from free software/open source/creative commons publications, and also from technology blogs as a solid alternative to Twitter.

Identi.ca is the brainchild of Evan Prodromou, who has under his sleeve wikitravel and vinismo.

The upcoming months will be indeed very exciting to watch. Twitter’s Evan Williams announced they’ve got their business model under way, to be introduced early this year, and Jaiku is also going to enter the open/federated micro-blogging scene, sponsored by Google itself.

Congrats to MSU & the team at ControlYourself!

One of the first posts at TechEntreprise, back in August, was about an idea by Zed Shaw, which was to get developers and hackers together and work on projects. 

The post was meant to test the publishing system there, but it generated quite some attention, up to the point that doing an event like this in Montréal made sense. 

Now, I don’t know Zed Shaw nor do I completely understand his “fight club” rules; all I know is that there is a substantial group of developers in Montréal willing to get together, share projects and code, and experiment new technologies.

All without necessarily thinking about underlying business models, but just to hack things together and see what comes of this.  

That’s the vision, and all we needed was a place to host this. I’m happy to announce that we found it!

Bolidea, a new technology incubator founded by successful web entrepreneurs, graciously offered to host the event in their awesome offices on St-Laurent boulevard, right near Laika. Bolidea develops technology companies that strive to provide solutions to real market problems. They share our vision of gathering developers, entrepreneurs and everyone else interested in experimenting with new technologies.

So here it is:

A first FreeHackers event is scheduled Saturday 13th of December, beginning from 12.30pm, for an entire afternoon of freehacking, up until 6 or 7pm. 

Every python, ruby, C, java, php, erlang, sql, javascript, css developer is invited to come over. It’s your chance to work on a new library, or on a new algorithm you’ve never had the time to work on, or just meet other developers. Of course designers, and people wanting to work on hardware are also welcomed.

I’m expecting between 10 to 20 people. Registration will close after the first 20 people so sign up here (the event is open but places are going to be limited)

Note: I am aware that there are talks about doing a programming event at montrealonrails, but as far as I am concerned, it’s only about rails (or ruby) stuff, which I find very limited. Getting everyone onboard would be much more interesting than restricting an event to a language or one implementation

Internet permet une plus grande participation de tous à plusieurs égards. Samedi prochain, une vingtaine de personnes se réuniront en après-midi à la Station C à Montréal pour des démonstrations, discussions et enfin une session de codage pour un projet de l’association canadienne Visible Goverment.

Les démontrations se feront sous la forme d’un “Speed geeking [en]“. Quatre ou cinq personnes feront la démonstration de leur projet pendant cinq minutes à un groupe de trois ou quatre personnes. Les démonstrations se déroulent simultanément et après cinq minutes, chaque groupe passe à la prochaine démonstration, juste à côté.

Pour en savoir plus sur le project de Visible Government, consultez la présentation en ligne de Jennifer Bell expliquant ce projet de web scraping.

Michael Lenczner nous parlera aussi des différents projets de web scraping au Canada et au Royaume-Uni.

Comme l’espace est limité, svp confirmez votre présence par email à robin@millette.info ou bien via Facebook ou Upcoming.

Si vous avez un projet à présenter, svp m’envoyer un email ou bien faites le savoir sur Facebook ou Upcoming. Notez que vous n’avez pas besoin d’un compte Facebook ou Upcoming pour participer.

Date :
Samedi 29 novembre 2008
de 13h à 17h

Lieu :
Station C
5369 Saint-Laurent #430
(faites le 703 en bas pour entrer)
http://station-c.com/

Inspiré par :

• http://civicaccess.ca/
• http://ibelieveinopen.ca/
• http://datalibre.ca/
• http://notreparlement.ca/
• http://quivotequoi.ca/
• http://www.makethechange.ca/
• http://cancan.waglo.com/dataface/

One of Akoha’s inherent charm is how it manages to tie an offline game with an online component. It gives much more meaning to the service, and certainly a better experience for members of the website.

One of my current ideas right now is to be able to print business cards-like from this section of TechEntreprise. So you sign up there, fill in a few information, and afterwards you could get a “member card” that can be used for local events, with details about what’s your profile (a web programmer, a designer, an investor etc.), and what you’re looking for. Other ideas:

• show the username so people can hook up with you just after the event,
• have color codes on the avatar depending on your profile,
• list projects you’re working now currently etc.
• being able to print on different kind of papers (such as a special color for a special category of the website’s members)
• being able to completely automate it (and not spend hours printing one business card)

Now, I’m vaguely aware that one can get sheets of blank business cards-like at a store like at Staples, and then print them from your laptop with a normal printer; but from my perspective, you need special software plus they do have a fixed size for the business cards.

Does someone here have experience in these sort of thing? what kind of setup is needed (such as what kind of printer)? Is it possible to print it with the HTML or TechEntreprise will have to render it in PDF?

Thanks for any feedback :-)