New England Regional Developers - Code for Change

Hack for Western Mass and NERD Summit Team up for 2016

kelly — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 03:58:27 +0000

Due to a large overlap in our communities and in our funding sources, H4WM and NERD are joining forces for the new year. We are looking for 4-8 people to join the central organizing team which coordinates the event held in May or June each year. This is a fantastic way to develop your leadership skills with an experienced team, to learn more about tech needs and resources in the Valley, and to give back to your community. Your commitment level can be as large or as small as you want it to be. Come to find out more!

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 13 2015 - 1:00pm-Sep 13 2015 - 3:50pm

Room:

168

Allowed Types:

Session

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Strategy

Code for Change

Reflections and Follow-Ups 2015 Hack for Western Mass

kelly — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 03:54:47 +0000

Learn more about this annual, local event that connects civic-minded tech professionals with nonprofits in need of elegant web and mobile solutions. How does Hack for Western Mass work? Who is involved? Who did we help? And what is the plan for next year. Learn the answers to all this, and how you can get involved.

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 13 2015 - 10:00am-Sep 13 2015 - 11:50am

Room:

168

Allowed Types:

Session

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Strategy

Code for Change

BOF - Why Drupal can save the Environmental Movement

Elyssa Marie — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 03:14:44 +0000

Can it? Humanity is certainly at a crossroads. There is something universal about Open Source communities that unleashes human creativity, that drives people to late nights tearing down the barriers to their dreams and creating powerful change. What are the visions that Open Source people want for the world, and how does the Drupal framework bring that vision to reality?

20-min Presentation - Power + Parallels among Open Source Communities

The Pioneer Valley is teeming with groups that value free exchange of information, versatility + adaptability, and coming together for the common good. It is no coincidence that you find overlap among the people in Open Source communities. This presentation outlines the parallels in the norms, values and practices of the Drupal community and two other local regenerative culture movements: Permaculture and Non-violent Communication.

25-min Discussion + Think Tank

What would happen if a web platform for collaboration, free discussion and collective enterprise were created with Open Source values at its core? It is amazing that Drupal Core has over 30,000 contributors. How is collaboration possible among this many people? The northeast permaculture community has over 10,000 people. Imagine if they could collaborate to an equal degree, and if they could network and collaborate among movements with similar core values. The sky would be the limit, and the movement would be firmly rooted in the ground.
Thank We.

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2015 - 4:00pm-Sep 12 2015 - 4:50pm

Room:

Concourse

Allowed Types:

Session

Sessions Topics:

Speaker Bio(s):

Elyssa Serrilli is a community organizer in the environmental, education and non-profit sectors. As a budding web developer, she is keenly aware of how impactful web technology upgrades are for local and regional movements. Elyssa is also a kick ass wilderness guide - hit her up if you'd like to know more hidden gems to explore in the Pioneer Valley.

How to Turn Your Software Ideas Into a Side Business

Jim Verzino — Sun, 26 Jul 2015 21:32:49 +0000

Every developer has at least one or two ideas in their head about something they want to offer to the world.

Good software development has a codified process with specific steps. Skip a step at your own peril.

Software Business Creation is exactly the same. It has a codified process with specific steps. Skip a step at your own peril.

There are tens of thousands of blogs and websites with generic information on how to start a business. The problem is not a lack of information. The problem is too much information geared at a generic crowd without context.

The secret is having just the right steps done in just the right order to go from having an idea to starting and growing a small software business.

There are very specific steps to:
Determine if your idea will really have traction
Get your first customer that is not a family member or friend
Get your first 5 customers
Get to $1,500 per month

Then, if you want to go beyond that, there are different steps for getting to $10,000 per month and having it be your full time small business or $100,000 per month with a full fledged staff.

Each phase has a different and specific set of steps.

In this session we are going to cover the steps you can take to bring your project from an idea in your head to a $1,500 - 10,000 per month business.

Just like software development, if you follow the right steps, in the right order, you will come out with a great program.

Bring your questions and ideas about your specific situation. This will be interactive and you will walk away with worksheets and specific steps on the road to your side business.

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2015 - 10:00am-Sep 12 2015 - 10:50am

Room:

177

Allowed Types:

Session

Sessions Topics:

Strategy

Project Management

Code for Change

Speaker Bio(s):

Jim Verzino is the founder of Eco Business School. He teaches green and socially conscious entrepreneurs how to start and grow their businesses. He has been a founder or co-founder of 4 businesses including the now closed Tools4PHP, which was a PHP script generator for processing web forms. Since closing Tools4PHP he has started 3 socially conscious organizations and advises many more.

Shaping Your Free Software Project... and the World?

mlncn — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 04:00:49 +0000

We'll talk about the fundamentals of participating in Free Software projects and communities, which is why this is in the Fundamentals track, but we'll also talk about how we as individuals and as groups can shape what our powerful software is built to do— and how we build power through coördination in the context of extreme power inequalities that we, mere web developers and other information technology workers, are well-positioned to change, which is why this could be in the Revolution track, if there was one.

How Do You Make a Difference?

Challenges you might want to take on and possible courses of action which we'll discuss include:

There's some feature you want or want to make better:: Learn, publicize, code, document, coordinate, fund.
Not a proportionate number of contributors to beneficiaries:: Make involvement more accessible, varied, encouraged.
Contributors to the community good not always secure financially:: Form coalitions, better passing of work & employment, crowdfunding.
Common needs are going unmet:: Create a better way to coordinate and contribute.

Participation in the session (or comments to this post right now) from people seeking an outcome and people who know what your particular software community most wants, and how to engage, very welcome.

Who Owns Free Software?

WordPress isn't owned by Matt Mulenwegg or Automattic and Drupal does not belong to Dries Buytaert or the Drupal Association. As Free Software released under the GPL, it belongs to you (and every other person who steps up to claim it) equally.

Free Software is a form of wealth that everyone shares.

What does it mean to accept this ownership?

Black Star Co-Op Pub & Brewery [in Austin, Texas] opened doors in the summer of 2010, with a large banner outside reading "Community-Owned Beer." A consumer cooperative (owned by the community it serves) and also a worker-coop (run by its employees), Black Star is attracting a full house of business seven days a week.

From A Cooperative Economy by Carmen Llanes

Our banner should be Community-Owned Software. And we can learn from the co-operative movement, and its acceptance of buyer and worker cooperatives, including hybrids like Black Star. Both builders of the software and users of the software can step up and claim ownership in different ways.

Why Us?

It's time to get involved— and to reap the benefits of participation. Second-order benefits are "you participate and good things will/may happen as a consequence."

First-order benefits are immediate from the act of participating itself. Nothing big, except by the accumulation of many little things. Participating makes you better. These direct benefits are specific to forms of participation so will be discussed along with the ways and means of participating.

But most of all, shaping a part of the future of our Free Software projects means shaping our own future, and potentially our community and our world's future.

If we — workers with direct access to software powering much of the Web and enough time to come to this awesome summit — don't coordinate to take relatively small and simple collective actions that make our immediate professional environment better, how will we — the broader community of humans on this planet — build the networks and tools needed to stop exploitation, prevent violence, avert or deal with global warming, and otherwise move toward justice, liberty, prosperity, and simple survival for all?

We can do our part simply by figuring out still better and more sustainable ways to make our software and community better— like coming together to add or improve features, support contributors, and meet common needs.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 14 2014 - 1:30pm-Sep 14 2014 - 2:30pm

Room:

163C

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Strategy

Code for Change

Speaker Bio(s):

Benjamin Melançon (mlncn) lives and works to connect ideas, resources, and people to help us all gain as much power possible over our own lives.

He re-found Drupal in 2006 and co-founded Agaric, a web development and consulting collective which helps people create and use powerful Internet technology, in the same year. He remains a principal of Agaric and an advocate of worker co-operatives. Recently, as CTO of Activore (building communities supportive of better health and fitness) he had the opportunity to play with many non-Drupal technologies. This led to the formation of a Spry Group and Agaric joint venture, ImageScale, to bring the goodness of Drupal's imagecache approach to everyone.

Probably best known in the Drupal community for posting problems he runs into (and occasionally solutions he stumbles over) to data.agaric.com, this somehow to have led to writing, joined by three dozen authors, The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

Currently in his non-existent spare time Ben pushes the Snowball initiative to create a user-need-led collaborative funding platform for Drupal projects.