There are some cool things going on around here that I wanted to share:

• Lafayette CampFiber - Saturday, October 4 - As I’ve mentioned previously, excitement is in the air in Lafayette with the fiber network that is being installed as we speak.  With this as a theme, Geoff Daily has been spearheading the BarCamp-style event planned for the October 4th.  This is the second BarCamp in Louisiana and already has a lot of people registering.  I was hoping to do a VC 101 talk, but have a wedding that weekend.  Will Donaldson is going to lead the discussion.  Get over to Lafayette for this great unconference.  Register on the wiki or through Eventbright.

• NetSquared NO Meetup - Tuesday, September 2 @ 7pm - Jessica Rohloff is rocking out the social media + nonprofit focus of NetSquared by getting this event kicked off right here in New Orleans.  The location is TBD, but should be a great group.  I’ll be leading a discussion on what New Orleans Non-Profits can learn from Web 2.0 - blogging, community building, brand authenticity & transparency. This is going to be a lot of fun.  Sign up on the Meetup site.

• Jelly Co-Working - Friday, August 29 - Benjamin Reese is getting Jelly, a national collective of co-working initiatives off the ground here in NOLA.  If you haven’t heard of co-working, its a way for those of us who work alone “virtually” either from an office or at home, to get together with other human’s every once in a while and have a conversation in person, not just over twitter.  We’re going to try to do one right here at Voodoo next Friday!  Register on the wiki if you think you can make it.  Free wifi and coffee, and maybe we’ll get some beer for the afternoon.

Hope you can make it to all of these, its exciting to see the Louisiana Tech community gelling this way.

Take note: these are all “open source” community initiatives.  We’re getting it together down here, and its by the contribution that we all make.  We get out of it what we put in. Let’s build it together.

BarCamp NOLA is this weekend!  We hope everyone can make it, thanks to all the support we’ve been receiving.  We got some great sponsors on board who will be supporting BarCamp NOLA by providing FREE for all attendees:

• Coffee & danishes to get our creative juices flowing
• Soul Food Lunch on Sat catered by Ms Linda with jambalaya, shrimp pasta, greens, and bread pudding for desert (we’ll need a nap after lunch)
• Lunch on Sun will be po-boys for everyone who shows up for hack day
• A keg of Abita Amber and plenty of soft drinks to keep us fueled through the afternoon and into the evening.

We’ve got several great organizations who we’ll be doing work for over the weekend:

• Offbeat.com - New Orleans music bible wants us to work our magic on their website
• The Bayou Boogaloo - is a non-profit music festival benefiting Mid City, they want some web help too
• And more… depending on how many people come, we’ll take on another non-profit project

Check out the awesome t-shirts that are being printed for us by New Orleans’ own Dirty Coast.  Show up and you’ll get one!

Come one come all.  Sign up to attend BarCamp NOLA today for a great weekend!

I’m very excited to announce BarCamp NOLA to be held in New Orleans January 5-6, 2008. Brian Oberkirch and I were rapping this morning, and we decided to nail down the date for January. Blake Haney is excited about it too, and we’re even hoping to get Tara Hunt and Chris Messina there.

We’re going to be hosting the BarCamp right here in the Voodoo Ventures offices. For anybody interested here’s some pics of the layout. ( I’m also going to try to recruit the guys at Blutique next door to throw in their space).

Brian has the great idea of making the first day a traditional BarCamp day, and the second day a hack day, where we put together some piece of web goodness for deserving local charitable organization. Anybody interested, sign up on the wiki.

I’d like to find a struggling small business we could help immediately with a new site or enhanced Web services. Spend a weekend cranking as a team and launch the thing at the end of the weekend. We can get help from our friends everywhere with regard to code, design, ideas. Brains, we have them at the ready.

The New Orleans Brainjams event a year and a half ago was a fantastic experience, and I’m really excited to be rallying the troops for a bigger, better, badder BarCamp experience.

So put January 5th and 6th on your calendar, and go put your name on the wiki. For you out-of-towners, why not make a weekend of it. Come the BarCamp so you can write off your trip, stay for the Sugar Bowl, which will be the BCS National Championship game in New Orleans on January 8th.

Update: Join the Facebook group for BarCampNOLA here.

We made it happen - First BarCamp in Russia!

The day of the conference was 4th of August, while Christopher Schultz was in Kazan, Russia at Flatsourcing-development department (that is located outside US for better cost/effective rate although it’s secure US-based entity with top quality standards).

Well, it was actually first BarCamp conference in Russia - we made it! Made people feel very comfortable, informal, we’ve broken all the walls and stereotypes of that Russians are very modest and shy to talk openly. It was even a surprise to me, how it looked similar to regular BarCamp that are happening in US, Europe and all over the world!

I definitely think we should do that one more time and meanwhile, please take a look at those materials that are available from the conference (copy-pasting from TatSoft web-site, blog that was covering the story in Russian):

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oleg_kurnosov/tags/barcampkazan/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/barcampkazan
Original conference official web-page: http://barcamp.org/BarCampKazan

Dobraye ootro from Kazan, Russia, home of Tatsoft.ru and Flatsourcing.com. It been a long trip over here, but I arrived Tuesday night after several flight delays and about 60 hrs of travel.

Its great to be over here with our entire development team and to be spending time with Oleg, Alex, & Timur, my partners in Flatsourcing.com. We all are getting a tremendous amount out of working together face-to-face. Even though we talk can daily via Skype, email, and phone, nothing supplants seeing each other in person.

We’ve laid out aggressive plans for ourselves for the next few days, and started today with hashing through the details of the siteMighty Advanced Analytics module. This is an incredibly sophisticated tool that will enable us to fully optimize PPC campaigns by pulling in cost & conversion data. It’s quite a task, but 6 hrs today enabled us to finalize the specs and really move forward on it.

We are all really looking forward to Russia’s inaugural BarCamp this weekend. We’ve got a lot of excited attendees, and many software development firms in the region will be in attendance. I’ll be blogging about the event and the rest of our adventures together, so stay tuned.

We are very pleased to announce the very first BarCamp to be held in Russia. BarCamp Kazan (Russian here) will be held on August 4th, 2007, in Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan.

This BarCamp conference will coincide with my trip to Russia to visit my colleagues at Flatsourcing, Inc. we are all very excited to bring the “unconference“-style conference to Russia.

Kazan is a city with multiple excellent technical University programs. There are many highly qualified computer scientists and web programmers, and we look forward to this opportunity to bring them together, and share some of our experiences through our last six years of developing our global partnership.

I’m personally excited to host a conference session with my colleague Oleg Kurnosov in which we will share concepts from Thomas Friedman’s excellent book The World is Flat. This book has had a tremendous impact on us both personally, and provided a blueprint (and name inspiration) for our current joint venture, Flatsourcing Inc.

We want to extend the invitation to anyone and everyone to join us in Kazan August 4 for this BarCamp. The airfare might be a little steep, but we will make sure the conference is free. Thanks to everyone who is helping to put this on. Be sure to read the announcement on the Tatsoft Blog too, (English version here.)