Czajkowski

Once again there seems to be a packed week of things to do in Dublin. Sunday of the August (2nd) bank holiday weekend there is a picnic for geek = Geeknic taking place in farmleigh park, it’s open to everyone, bring along partners, and kids, it’s a lovely venue and the farmers market is also on. Afterwards we’re heading to O’Donnoghues Bar a tradtional Irish bar in Dublin. All of the details are here.

Wednesday 5th August, we’re having a Girl Geek meet up.  I’ve not been able to make the last two, so I’m really looking forward to catching up and seeing what folks are up to, I’ve added a small post to the Ireland Girl Geeks site for folks to leave a comment.

Finally, the PotD is on as usual on the 1st Thursday of the month, in the Longstone bar top floor. The Ubuntu-ie LoCo has decided to start doing a small short 15 min talk before hand just to see if folks are interested in adding this to the PotD in future, so we’re meeting at 6:30pm Rory and myself will be talking about the Ubuntu-NGO project.

So lots of events lined up, all free and hopefully see some new faces coming along. That’s just the 1st week of August… lordie!

I’ve been rather busy lately and not had much time to myself, finally getting some me time. Between moving house and getting things back in order and been busy at work I’ve neglected a few bits and pieces. So some housekeeping is needed!

I’ve been working with JonathanD on freenode with Fossevents for the past few week and it’s taken some tweaking, yes the orange is staying but has been toned down a bit ( I was vetoed on brown).  I have to say that I’m well impressed with the uptake from so many different communities from around the world submitting events. There are many different events on there at present, from Geeknics, general meet ups to conferences it’s great.  We’ve had a lot of feedback, and RSS feeds and mapping facilities are coming along as soon as we can figure out some bits and pieces and maybe a plugin or two.

I’ve also been working on my own little pet project which went live and has seen some folks already sign up so I’m pleased with that. It does however clash with another event Bizcamp in Dublin on the same day at the same time in a different location so it does mean start up companies will miss out on hearing about how useful Open Source software is. Shame….

I was asked recently on channel about the links I post as I shorten them and I thought I’d explain a bit further.  Firstly I like to support an Irish service or product wherever and whenever.  I use pix.ie for my photos, Blacknight for my hosting and short.ie for my urls.

But shortie has a really nifty feature which is why I use it, well two actually, 1 I can personalise a url like www.short.ie/geeknic and secondly I can keep track of them and view the amounts of clicks it has received.This is called the public timeline and you can share it with folks. I just find it rather neat. And the majority of these services all use open source

Screenshot-short.ie - Laura Czajkowski's public links

I’ve also just had one of the most productive IRC meetings so far for our LoCo.  We changed the day around to mid week as we had been meting on a Sunday for the last few months and it was just harder and harder to get people due to  travels. So this evening a load more new people joined and took on board new tasks, which is awesome! We used to just meet up and have a drink on the 1st Thursday of the month, but we’ve now decided to try and have a short talk before hand and see how that goes.  This will give people a chance to hear about a new project they are working on and also people a chance to practice giving talks.

I like going to events, but sometimes I miss out on hearing about them as I don’t find out about them till it’s too late. One has to troll the net or suscribe to multiple mailing lists.  Christel on freenode asked to join their team so I can work on community areas. One area I wanted to tackle was events and letting folks know about them.

There are so many groups and organisations who use freenode and who run meet ups, conferences, barcamps it would be great to know about them if you were travelling or just relocated.  With that we’ve been working on a new site Foss Events, I’ve added some events that I know of but would love to add more. So if folks have meet ups, geeknics, conferences, unconferences, giving a talk then let us know so we can have all of the events in one place.

A new venture is taking place in Dublin. Dub Hub a flexible working space for start-ups, social entrepreneurs and creative businesses to come together to share ideas, experiences and resources, to participate in and build a new way of thinking about working.

I’ve heard about these kind of places and I think it’s great to see one being set up in Ireland. The Dublin Hub is a flexible, affordable, shared working environment for freelancers, small businesses, the self-employed, and home-workers looking for a desk, or a meeting space in town. Members book time in the Hub in advance – similar to buying mobile phone credit – they have the freedom to choose when to work and are charged solely for the time they spend in the Hub.

“We hope to attract inventive, innovative, socially committed, ethical and environmentally aware people, people who need to take their ideas out of the garden shed or away from the kitchen table. We aim to provide a vibrant, dynamic, collaborative, exciting atmosphere, a place people will want to be in and be part of. We think this is an essential response to the challenges posed by changing work patterns in the new century”

If you’re interested they are having a meet up July 14th at 7pm at the Science Gallery in TCD. Looking forward  to this hopefully it takes off.