I Have My Own Life to Live

Social Media Year in Review - December 2010 Victoria BC

Traditionally December would be a month of planning holiday celebrations! Not for the Victoria social media community. Janine Theobald came to Social Media Camp and Club, and was inspired to create the #twamper drive and tweetup held December 17th at Cabin 12 . Two families were assisted through these efforts.

Earlier in the month Alan Smith organized a Victoria event for Help Portrait, providing free portraits for Victoria families and individuals who might be otherwise unable to have a professional portrait. More than 30 photographers and volunteers provided 148 sessions. Help Portrait 2011 is December 3rd. Become part of the Help Portrait Victoria community here:

On the same day, Herb Lainchbury rallied over 30 geeks for International Open Data Hachathon Day locally. There are now plans to hold montly hackathons with the first scheduled for January 22nd. Contact Herb for more details. Anyone (not just geeks) interested in open data can attend.

Victoria's inaugural Figgy Pudding Carolling Competition was also December 4th. It all started with a tweet, and soon @JanineAnnT @VIHippieChick @jagamer and @lacouvee were forming a group "The Tweets". It was so much fun, there are now plans for a much larger "Twitter choir" next year.

TEDxVictoria hosted simulcasts at the University of Victoria for the first TED Women Congratulations to organizer Sherry Moir for the very first TED event in Victoria.

TEDxJuandeFuca has plans for another TEDx event in April 2011.

The year ended in a flurry of tweetups #victoriatweetup (breakfast, WestShore, High Noon Hump Day, #U30 ladies, ladies, gents) and one final Social Media Club "Holiday Open Mic". See Mike Vardy's "The Twelve Days of Christmas: Social Media Remix".

Photo: Eventualism.com

Words can never convey my huge debt of gratitude to everyone involved in making this a simply amazing year. 2010 will be remembered as the year social media came into its own in Victoria. Each and every one of you played a HUGE part.

I'm sure I've forgotten people and events that need to be remembered - it's not intentional. Please let me know.

Happy New Year! Here's to a fabulous 2011.

There is much to look forward to - #yyjbleeders tweetup January 15th, Word Camp Victoria January 22nd, Frans Jonker and my wedding tweetup/meetup February 17th (stay tuned for details), IdeaWave February 26th & 27th, Twestival Victoria March 24th, TEDxJuandeFuca in April, Social Media Camp June 3rd and 4th, as well as regular Social Media Club Victoria meetings (3rd Monday of the month at the Victoria Event Centre) and many a #victoriatweetup.

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International Open Data Hackathon Day Victoria BC

December 4 2010 was the first International Open Data Hackathon Day. Originially instigated by David Eaves @daeaves and some of his friends, it saw people in over 63 cities, in 25 countries, and on 5 continents participate.

Herb Lainchbury @herblainchbury organized Victoria's event. Here's his recap of the event.

"Yesterday's Victoria hackathon was a great success. Much gratitude to David Eaves! Big huge thank you to Nelson Lah @nlah and CGI Victoria @cgivic for providing us an awesome space here in Victoria, an endless supply of coffee, snacks and pizza. And mostly, thanks to everyone who came out. We had over 30 people, started and/or advanced 8 projects!

We are in the process moving the new projects to public URLs so folks can see them.

The projects we worked on are:

Eatsure Victoria (status: working demo)
RideNow - crowd sourced transit stops/schedules application (status: semi-working prototype)
OpenLegislature.ca - fork of openparliament.ca for provincial legislatures (status: instance running, data being compiled)
Waterly.ca - (status: new watering jurisdictions KML files created to be added)
Victoria instance of VanTrash (status: prototype)
Rezoning Notifier - notifies residents of rezoning appications and displays on a map (status: data collected)
MyRep - app that displays who represents you at every government level given a location (status: data partially collected)
OpenDataBC Catalogue - completed list of BC public bodies for the catalogue (status: complete)

The list of projects advanced or completed worldwide is being posted to the wiki here: http://www.opendataday.org/wiki/Opendata_Day_Projects"

Hackathons aren't just for developers and geeks. The Victoria group is planning another event for early 2011 and would love to see more citizens involved. After all - we are the end users of all the applications being worked on.

So, send a message to Herb and ask to be included on the group email list. If you've got ideas of apps you think might be useful - let them know.