Little Geeks News: GTA Children To Receive 100 Free Computers June 12th
At the mesh social on May 21, we, our guests and the event sponsors, Social Media Group, helped to raise money for Little Geeks, one of our favourite organizations. Ben Lucier, one of our favourite geeks, is very active within Little Geeks, and writes in with news, which we’ve copied below. We admire and support Little Geeks, and hope you’ll think about doing the same.
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GTA Children To Receive 100 Free Computers June 12th
Over the past several months, the Little Geeks Foundation staff and Board of Directors have worked hard to lay the groundwork to deliver on our mandate: To enhance the lives of children by providing computers to the underprivileged families within our community.
Thanks to the generous donations of the Foundation’s individual and corporate sponsors, I am very excited to announce that on June 12th at 3PM, The Little Geeks Foundation will hold an event and give refurbished computers, complete with Windows XP and Microsoft Office to 100 families of underprivileged children, free of charge.
This very special event will be held on June 12th from 3PM until 7PM at:
St Andrew’s United Church
117 Bloor Street East
Toronto, Ontario
(Google Map)
If you have a child in need of a computer, you can visit the Little Geeks Website to register. Once qualified, recipients will be contacted by a member of the Little Geeks staff to attend this event and pickup their free computer. NOTE: Don’t forget to register, you must register to be qualified to receive a computer.
Recipients of our computers are screened and selected in advance for the event, but media and supporters of Little Geeks are also invited to attend this event to learn more about our Foundation’s mission and the environmental and social roles The Little Geeks Foundation serves within our community.
Tags: Ben Lucier, Little Geeks, mesh08
Posted in mesh08 news | 2 Comments
mesh Portraits
Rannie Turingan’s amazing series of black and white portraits shot at meshU and mesh08 are now up.
Tags: mesh08, meshU, photojunkie, Photos, Rannie Turingan
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Looking back at mesh 2008
Much like its two predecessors, the mesh conference this year was just a huge amount of fun — I can only hope that the people who attended and meshed along with us had as good a time as I did. From the keynote I did with Ethan Kaplan from blackrimglasses.com, the VP of technology at Warner Brothers, and the one that my colleague Stuart MacDonald did with Lane Merrifield of ClubPenguin.com (who seemed like just a terrifically down-to-earth guy — very Canadian) to the panels and workshops, and of course the great social events, it was as good a time as I can remember having at any conference. For me, the mark of a good conference is always the people you meet and the ideas you share, and hopefully we enabled a lot of that.
Some highlights for me personally included the design presentation at meshU by Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce, who is just a super-nice guy (also very Canadian), and the ones by Ryan Carson — complete with his trademark hat — and Kevin Hale of Wufoo.com. As for mesh proper, the music panel was one of my favourites, in part because I programmed it; but also because David Gratton was such an excellent moderator, and because the mix of people of the panel was so good, with David Usher, CRIA head Graham Henderson and Kieran Roy of the indie label Arts & Crafts.
The presentation by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com on “the economics of abundance” was also a personal favourite, and a whole bunch of people came up to tell me the same thing. Mike is extremely good at explaining difficult economic concepts as they apply to digital media and business models, and I could tell people in the panel room were getting a lot out of it — and I think 322 slides in 30 minutes is a new record. And of course, all the social meshing in the concourse was a big part of the conference for me, and hopefully for others, as well as the great parties put on by Maggie Fox and the Social Media Group and by Edelman, our PR partners for mesh 2008.
If you want to try and track some of what went on at mesh, here are some places to look:
– mDialog has video highlights of many of the keynotes and panels, and the videos are also available on iTunes as well (thanks to Greg Philpott and his team, and to the excellent Mark McKay).
– Flickr has some photos from mesh and from the mesh party at the Rockwood, hosted by SMG (thanks to Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan and Arieh Singer)
– David Janes’ Onaswarm has a roundup of Twitter posts, Flickr photos and more.
– Nora Young of CBC’s Spark has posted video of her chat with Bill Buxton, which will be broadcast as part of next week’s show
– Michael Geist has uploaded his excellent slide presentation on digital advocacy
– Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce has uploaded his meshU presentation to Slideshare.
– Sam Ladner, who did the Reputation Management workshop, has uploaded her slide deck.
– Amber MacArthur has put up a YouTube video of her presentation on video
– Jonathan Keebler and Guinevere Ortis (who was also on the video panel, and was an excellent choice) live-blogged most of the conference using ScribbleLive, which was featured in a TechCrunch article written by Erick Schonfeld, who attended mesh08 (and is a really nice guy).
– Mark Blevis live-blogged many of the sessions, as did Dave Fleet and Connie Crosby, and music-panel moderator David Gratton.
– Nav from Scrawled in Wax wrote about a couple of sessions, as did Colin Carmichael and mesh regular (or irregular), the excellent Michael O’Connor Clarke.
– Marketing magazine has a story about mesh 2008, as does The Industry Standard
and for bonus points:
– Mike Masnick writes about how Warner Brothers should move Ethan Kaplan out of the technology side of the label and into the business side.
– My Globe colleague Matt Hartley worked his tail off at mesh and wrote several excellent stories (and I say that as a completely unbiased observer 
: one about StumbleUpon, one about Michael Geist and online advocacy, one about online brand-building and one about online video.
– Alec Saunders of Iotum gets into a back-and-forth with moderator Rachel Sklar from Huffington Post about the privacy panel at mesh 08.
– Ross McKegney has some thoughts about meshU.
– Jon Lax of Teehan Lax posted his presentation from meshU.
– Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard have posted their Government 2.0 presentation from meshU on Slideshare.
– Wayne Macphail from Rabble.ca has posted video of six sessions at mesh, including the keynote by Michael Geist, the keynote by Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin, the “Video is Everywhere” panel, the “New Front Page” panel, the “Cultivating Community” panel and Mike Masnick’s presentation on “the Economics of Abundance.” Just click the “On Demand” button on the Rabbletv player.
– Reg Braithwaite has posted slides from his Building and Managing Great Software Teams presentation from meshU on Flickr.
– Alistair Croll has posted his slides from his Watching the Web presentation at meshU at the Bitcurrent site.
– more at the Tucows blog, as well as from Glen Farrelly and from Doug Walker, and some thoughts on meshU at StartupNorth
– Rahaf Harfoush also live-blogged a couple of the marketing panels.
– Stan Sutter of Infopresse has a post up about several of the panels and keynotes.
– Kevin Restivo has posted some thoughts about mesh08.
– Rob Hyndman did an interview with CFRA and has posted the audio.
– Kathryn Lagden has a post up about the conversation between Nora Young of CBC’s Spark and researcher Bill Buxton.
If you have any other links to mesh-related stuff — or thoughts about it — please post a comment. There are also meshU and mesh feedback forms you can use to give us your take on either of the two events.
Posted in mesh08 news | 6 Comments
Michael Geist’s mesh08 presentation is on blip.tv
Michael’s presentation at mesh08 was a highlight for me – and if you were in the room you’ll recall that I mentioned at the outset that Michael was recording the audio – on his iPhone – and would be posting a synced version of his presentation. It’s now available on blip.tv (and yes, we do think it’s pretty cool that Dina Kaplan of blip was at mesh08) – thanks Michael!
Tags: blip, Dina Kaplan, Michael Geist
Posted in mesh08 news | 1 Comment
the mesh08 Job Board
During meshU and mesh08 we put whiteboards onsite to allow our guests to share info about job opportunities. It was very 1.0, but we thought it could also be very effective. And it was – our guests jammed the boards with information – one of the best signs going of just how much is happening here in technology. If you missed them, you can still see what was posted – @motionblur has a series of photos on Flickr – you can start here.
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Mesh Live Blogged
The guys from CTV are live blogging all the keynotes and panels they’ve attended over at Scribble Live. Its pretty neat they have pictures and links and summaries of whats going on. Here’s the link check it out.
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mesh 2008 first day: rocked
Have to get some sleep soon, since I feel like I’ve been up for about 18 hours straight, but I had to mention how great the first day of mesh 2008 felt. Obviously I’m biased, being one of the organizers, but I really think the keynotes were pretty fantastic — even if we did have to get Michael Geist to sub in for the missing Matt Mason. Ethan Kaplan is one of the most interesting and thoughtful people when it comes to the future of music, and I could have easily continued talking with him about it long after the keynote was over. And David Gratton of Project Opus continued some of the discussion about those issues on his panel in the afternoon with musician David Usher, Kieran Roy from the indie label Arts & Crafts and Graham Henderson from the Canadian Recording Industry Association, who was actually a pretty good sport about being made out as the bad guy all the time.
The music panel really seemed to get people fired up — we had a huge amount of great questions and interaction from the audience, which to me is one of the hallmarks of a great mesh panel. And we had some great feedback on a bunch of the other panels as well, including the Private vs. Public one with my friend Mark Kingwell from U of T, Internet researcher Nancy Baym from the University of Kansas and Ken Anderson from the Ontario Privacy Commission. Add on top of that some great workshops from the always excellent Amber Macarthur and Mark Kuznicki and it was a pretty awesome day — followed by drinks in the MaRS atrium and a great party at The Rockwood. And now, to sleep.
If you want to read up on some of what people have been saying about mesh, check out the aggregator page that David Janes has set up at Onaswarm, or see the live-blog that David Fleet did with CoverItLive (David Gratton live-blogged the Ethan Kaplan keynote as well, and Nav also had some thoughts about Ethan’s keynote), Or you can do a Tweetscan for mesh08 or check out the mesh08 Tweme. If you come across anything else interesting about mesh please send us a link, or twitter it and use the keyword #mesh08.
Tags: conference, mesh2008
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mesh keynote update: Matt Mason
For anyone who was looking forward to the mesh keynote by Pirate’s Dilemma author Matt Mason (and that includes all of us on the mesh organizing team) we got some bad news over the weekend. Unfortunately, Matt has run into some visa problems in the United States, and he won’t be able to make it to mesh. While we are disappointed that we couldn’t work things out in time — as is Matt — we do have a top-notch replacement for him as the society keynote: Dr. Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa law professor and copyright expert.
Dr. Geist was originally scheduled to do a presentation Wednesday afternoon about how Facebook and other social media tools are being used for grassroots lobbying and advocacy purposes, building on his experience in setting up a Facebook group opposed to Ottawa’s anticipated copyright legislation. In Matt Mason’s absence, we have asked Dr. Geist to adapt his presentation as the keynote for the society stream, which will take place at 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday. Taking the place of his original presentation Wednesday afternoon will be a panel discussion on “Managing the Mozilla Way” with Mic Berman, John Resig and Mike Shaver, moderated by Michael McDerment.
For more information, please see the mesh schedule at www.meshconference.com/schedule2008.
Tags: Geist, keynote, Mason, mesh2008
Posted in mesh news, mesh08 news | 1 Comment
A post mesh wrap party after-party
Just a note that Radian6 tells us that they’ll be hosting a get-together at The Pogue Mahone Irish Pub, Thursday, May 22, after the Edelman mesh wrap party – from 7:00pm on.
Rohit Bhargava, marketer, blogger, speaker and author of the much anticipated book Personality Not Included, will be at the Pogue Mahone Irish Pub, giving away signed copies of his book. Radian6 sez make sure you say hi to Tim Tozer from Radian6, on your way in. He’ll direct you to the reserved cocktail section for the event. They’ve booked room for 30 people to attend, so be there early to claim your spot.
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Please join us at the Edelman mesh wrap party!
When we announced the meshU and mesh08 social schedule a few days ago we mentioned that an after-after party was in the works for the 22nd, after the second day of mesh.
Please come and join us after mesh for the mesh wrap party, hosted by our good friends at Edelman. Continue the conversation at L’espresso bar Mercurio at Bloor and St. George, from 5 to 7 p.m. on the last day of mesh – Thursday, May 22. See you there!!
Posted in mesh news, mesh08 news, meshU | 1 Comment
