Published by Romano Sensibile January 31st, 2011
in Project Blog and Team Blog.
Last week we had the pleasure to have at our new offices – newly located just right inside the campus of the swiss italian university - Johan Janssens and Tom Janssens from the nooku team, for the annual beyounic camp, a strategic workshop we host once a year.
For the occasion we were happy to organize, in collaboration with the faculty of informatics, the first Swiss Nooku Jam.
The response from the attendees was very good, and despite the exams period we got a full room of interested informatics students, teachers and many others great people coming also from abroad (thanks @luscarpa & @andreatorre for coming visiting us from Venice and Rome, Italy). Continue reading ‘Nooku Jam Lugano & beyounic camp 2011′
Published by Luca Zerboni January 17th, 2011
in Project Blog.
Today we are very excited to announce Ohanah Alpha 4, codename Pineapple. During the last month and a half, since we published Ohanah Alpha 3 (codename Ground Zero) we have worked to bring the project to a point that could allow us to start the testing phase.
This milestone is probably the most important achievement we have reached so far. This is because with the conclusion of the Core of the project we are now able to open ohanah to a group of users.
The group will have the opportunity to access the platform, in order to test it and share ideas and thoughts about what we have done so far and what we will build and improve next.
On December 3rd, we have created a skype group dedicated to the ohanah project, with the purpose of discussing and sharing knowledge and ideas with the group about what we are doing.
Since the beginning there have been lots of discussions happening in the chat about all different aspect of the event field, a funny chat episode was the one that took us to “The Pineapple Crew”.
The Pineapple Crew is the name that was chosen by the group to define their self.
“It’s nice to tell people that you participate, but sometimes things get lost in translation and someone thinks you’re taking more credit than you should” (Ben Lee)
For this reason the crew proposed the idea of choosing a name for the group, a name that should take into account the ohanah name and brand as well as the culture from which the name comes from, the Hawaiian Culture.
The promoters of this discussion were Ben Lee and Ruud Janssen, thank you so much guys for your precious input and for such a cool name that came out. After the definition of the name we worked on a badge that could represent and identify all the people involved into the project. As ohanah comes from ohana that means “family” in an extended view, where nobody get abandoned or left behind, this is how we like to think of our pineapple crew, thanks again to all of you guys!
If you would like to join the pineapple crew and test ohanah at this early stage you can request an invitation here: http://www.ohanah.com/request-an-invitation
Published by Romano Sensibile November 29th, 2010
in Team Blog.
I’m recently working a lot with MindMeister, a great online mind mapping software.
For few bucks pro year you can grab the premium version of it, which allows you to work together with your friends or colleagues, sharing and collaborating live on an online map, in a real simple but yet productive way.
Simultaneously working on maps grants you really efficient real-time brainstorming sessions, very useful when you are starting to work on a project and you first need to put down all the points in no matter which way. Once putted down all of them you can then easily start commenting and rearranging them on the map in your preferred way.
Here @beyounic we usually use MindMeister side by side with Skype Voice, so it is more easier to discuss live and in a collaborative way on the written points. Everyone can speak, listen to the others and take actions on the maps. The others see live what everyone is doing on the map and can interact, so that the work process is always very productive. For a distributed team as we are, this is the perfect way to go.
Having ohanah as the main focus of our work, i’m therefore thinking of how such a collaborative software could implement the work of event organizers. When you start organizing an event you often have to put down some points that you have in mind and then you may need to share and discuss them with your collaborators. It could happen that they doesn’t live directly in the same region as you, so such an online tool could be of great help making you to spare a lot of time and efforts.
The implementation of such a feature on ohanah is not yet fixed on the roadmap, but we are seriously taking the concept in consideration for further studies. Any kind of shared feedbacks or opinions about it will be of course well appreciated.
Published by Nick Balestra November 21st, 2010
in Project Blog.
Who follow us on twitter and alikes, sometime may have noticed us referring to ohanah GZ, so here a quick post about what’s going on.
What is ohanah GZ?
Well ohanah GZ is just the codename of the full refactoring and rewritng process of the ohanah project, in fact GZ stays for “Ground Zero”. As the code name suggest we have rewritten everything completely from scretch (> 10’000 lines of code). This month we are about to finish the core of the web app, the architecture and the UI. We went through a completely workflow redisgn, pushing our agile developement further and we are pretty happy on how this is impacting our developement and the quality of the project overall. We now run 3 simultaneous iterations of one week each, with each iteration one week behind the other. So we have Flavio working on the core, me working on the UI and frontend developement upon the usable and more stable code that flavio release after each of his iteration, and later Romano doing usability test and bugs over my released code, therefore he can directly use and test parts and features at an end-user level. Every input that come out during those iterations is then addressed accordingly in the following ones, while allowing us to keep core developeemnt, front-end developement, and usability work going on no-stop.
What we do have in place sofar:
Published by Nick Balestra November 16th, 2010
in Project Blog.
In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services.
The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs (an interface implemented by a software program that enables it to interact with other software) and data sources to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data.
Continue reading ‘Mashup? No… Mashapp!’
Published by Nick Balestra September 12th, 2010
in Team Blog.
There are events you can attend live, there are events you can attend remotely through the net, there are hybrid events you can attend both live or remotely and there are event PODs! Event PODs, are sub events dislocated around the globe and attached to the main event. Event PODs are a new experimental way to enable to live attend events through a remote location. If you still not clear about what an event POD actually is, read “What the heck is an Event POD” by Samuel J. Smith. I’ve recently took part on the eventcamp POD in Switzerland, Basel. This article is about my POD experience, the outcome, the potential and it’s possible applications.
Continue reading ‘Experience Events through a remote Event POD’
Published by Nick Balestra September 8th, 2010
in Team Blog.
We all are nodes in a graph, connected through edges wich carry stories from node to node. Meeting bring those edges alive transforming stories into experiences. Experiences enrich us, enpower us, teach us, grow us, they are the vital nourishment for the nodes. The answer to “Why do we meet” rely in us as social being as the answer “why do we breath” rely in us as biological being.
- Thought posted in reply of #eventcamp poll
Published by Nick Balestra September 1st, 2010
in Team Blog.
Published by Nick Balestra August 30th, 2010
in Team Blog.
“Events are entering a new era and social media is becoming an increasingly important and visible element in the transformation of events. However, the full extent of social media’s use in events is still not very well known. Social media has greater power in events than many realize”. From Social Media in the New Event World”
As for today, event organizers are faced with numerous social networks that can be used to spread out and engage conversation about their events, thanks to their huge social graphs, like for example Facebook. Although all this social networks provide really limited tools in their event pages.
I strongly believe that events are no different then social networks, in fact many organizers easily associate events to social networks because of the many social interactions and networking that occur among attendees before, during and after an event. That’s what many good companies and projects try to address, like Pathable Crowdvine, The Social Collective, and many others. Treating events as social networks is indeed a logical path nowadays, but threatening them as little isolated walled gardens doesn’t always fit a bigger picture: not allowing the social graph they create to grow avoiding to embrace the changes that the social media is bringing in the events world. Events are not isolated islands anymore, they are all linked together, because events are made by people, and people are central interconnected nodes. Wanna see why? Continue reading ‘Social Graphing Events’
Published by Nick Balestra August 29th, 2010
in Team Blog.
I often find myself thinking about innovation, ideas, and entrepreneurship, where everybody seems on the quest of whatever they can claim being the first in it. Being the first doesn’t mean to be remarkable. Let’s think about it: Google wasn’t the first search engine outhere when they laucnhed, and when they started there were allready big players out there with much more money in their pockets, like for example Altavista. So being the first may be of value until someone else enter the same market, but at this point is execution that matters, and it matters much more then the idea itself.
So Ideas are worth nothing, execution does! Continue reading ‘Don’t Be The First!’
