March Refresh Philly
Last night was the March installment of Refresh Philly. It was a good time which started out with pitches from some projects born out of BarCamp Philly such as HealthCampPhiladelphia, BarCamp NewsInnovation, and HigherEdCamp. Its great to see more niche programs and projects grow out of social media using the available technology and its potential for good rather than just monetization.
Luke Crawford, CTO of muxtape, gave an overview of muxtape past, present, future. What i got most out of his presentation is picking the right tech for the project. It is such a simple idea that gets overlooked for ease and what is the norm. Sometimes PHP isn’t the right language to use to implement a certain idea. And its always cool to get a behind the scenes look at a project you admire and use.
Todd Zaki Warfel from message first was up next speaking on Rapid Design. The idea of getting a diverse group in a room and forcing quick, dirty design and implementation ideas intrigues me. Coming from a place with little to no cross departmental interaction and a long track record of not sharing information I can see a huge potential to break down barriers and get things done. It is so easy to butt heads and keep a stalemate in educational/institutional settings that this cuts through the vested interests and gets to the heart of an issue. I can see myself implementing this in the near future.
Most notable of the evening initially occured in the backchannel and that was throw out by @saturdave: “is waiting for when RefreshPhilly starts talking about how to make Philly better.” I agree wholeheartedly, the talent and energy in that room could totally take on something that we see as a problem and make a huge dent in something perceived as a problem. I have a few ideas brewing that im going to start hashing out a bit on these pages.
