Hawaiʻi's Technology Community
WWW Beat #2: Money, Widgets, and Code in Chinatown
July’s WWW core meeting took place in a dimly lit corner in Chinatown…inside theVenue @ BambuTwo lounge. Members of the core group present this meeting were Yuka Nagashima, Galen Sasaki, Russell Cheng, Dean Crouch, Len Higashi, and Henk Rogers. The meeting began by revisiting the Coded with Aloha discussion from last month’s meeting. More specifically, the widget that was spoken about previously, that counts the lines of code being generated on all of the Hawaii sites participating in the Coded with Aloha campaign. Russell brings up the idea that we could have a competition, featuring coders across the spectrum, to come up with the app for the site. However, Henk brings up the point that this widget is strictly vanity, yet requires a lot of thought and work to implement. Russell agrees, and says that the focus of coding is not to have as many lines of code as possible; we want them to write the least amount of code to execute the job, hence the widget’s premise could be wrong altogether. However, Coded with Aloha will function just as well without the widget, so the core group agrees to form a subcommittee to develop a criteria sheet for CwA to be discussed at the next meeting. Westward ho!
The conversation then turned back to sponsorship of WWW events. All core members agree that the sponsorship money is important as much for the message as it is the logistics. Ultimately, if you made money in software, you should sponsor at least one of these events. Henk envisions half of the sponsors being from academia (not just UH, but other IHE’s as well). Galen adds that from the UH perspective, 3 would probably be the maximum. High school involvement came up as well, and most agree that they would work better as a program partner rather than an event sponsor.
Yuka and Henk add that there is another way to look at it, where we could have year-long sponsors (Steve Case, Pierre Omidyar, Shidler, etc) and work with them to determine the programs for that year. If you’re reading this, what do you think?
Shameless plug: If your organization would like to sponsor a WWW, contact us at events@htdc.org
That’s pretty much the extent of the July core meeting. If you have any questions related to this post, hit me back at michael@htdc.org
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Philip Johnson on
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Quick comment on the widget: As a software metrics researcher, I am quite opposed to creating a game widget that rewards organizations for "most lines of code" for all the obvious reasons. However, my idea of creating a widget that enables organizations to submit software development *activity* (in terms of LOC, commits, whatever) was intended to address two issues:
- What kind of organization "qualifies" to participate in "Coded With Aloha". This was a subject of discussion last time. My response: if you're committing code, then you're coding with aloha.
- How do we address the perception that "Coded with Aloha" is just another silly marketing slogan to make it appear that a Hawaii tech industry exists? My response: A public "ticker" that shows aggregate, anonymous commits provides an objective demonstration that people in Hawaii are really, truly cutting code. There's no reason (and it would be counterproductive) to reveal the numbers for individual organizations.
I agree that such widget will take some thought and there is considerable design thought required to make it something that participating Coded with Aloha organizations can use efficiently and effectively.
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Permalink Reply by Anže Žnidaršič on
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I don't know if it might be the issue for some organizations, but there are no estimates on how much do sponsors have to invest into one WWH event. Also what are direct benefits to them (e.g., saying they're one of the awesome local tech companies, advertising company's current head hunting activities, VIP room of the venue used to do interviews on the spot, ad on Facebook page, etc.).
This might be my engineering brain thinking, and next comparison might seem like comparing apples and oranges, but I know I would probably not contact GitHub about how much does the private repository hosting cost if they would simply put "FREE for public repositories, email/call us for private ones" on their website :)
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Permalink Reply by Russel Cheng ラッセル チェン on
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Regarding Coded with Aloha, let's just get this started. A simple page of listed companies with their URLs highlighted and a map showing their respective locations might be a good start. Then we can get some metrics on participation and where the teams want to go from there.
Is this being routed to the kindness of Dan Leuck's team?
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Here's one in Denver.
Denver Startups – Get on the Map
In another example of entrepreneurs just doing it and not waiting for anyone to give them permission, a couple of Denver entrepreneurs created the Denver Startup Map. My friends at FullContact blogged about it this morning and explained how it works. It’s simple – if you are a startup – just go to the map and put your information on the shared Google map. 60 seconds – done.
While you are at it, I encourage you to go enter your startups information into CrunchBase. I’ve been working on a mapping project with Ross Carlson (our IT guy) and Ian Kuliasha (Silicon Flatirons) that we plan to roll out shortly. It’s based on CrunchBase data and the open source Represent-map project that was the basis forRepresent.LA map of the LA startup ecosystem that Alex Benzer of SocialEngine created.
We’ve got a nice twist on this that leverages CrunchBase data, will be applicable to any geography, and will be open sourced so get ahead of us and get your data in. We’ll be rolling it out as part of Startup Revolution.
And – while you are at it, if you are a Denver startup, get on the map.
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