Ideas for Free

TRUEGIFT DONATIONS

NEWS

We are starting to provide free school supplies for schoolchildren for the 2007 school year. Every year I am amazed how much we do with so little.

Shopping

We completed most of our shopping for the year, taking advantage of the annual swings in school supply prices. Many Kudos go to Hugh Merriam for several thousand dollars of shopping and for spotting the special sale of $0.25 for 12 Rosemark colored pencils. We also did well on purchasing crayons ($0.10 for 24 crayons) and scissors (about $0.45 per pair). Construction paper and copy paper are purchased as needed year-round. We have the supplies ready and our garages are full.

Website

As usual, we closed the website in the summer and opened in mid-August with a clean slate of sign-ups. There have been some challenges in updating the news stories and the site looks about the same as last year. Each time we think of updating the site, we decide to give more school supplies instead.

Opportunities for this year

This year promises to be a good year. We hope to foster better contact with schools, especially the needy K-3 schools in the San Francisco bay area. By getting more sign-ups at each school, we can fill more gift lists at each school with fewer trips. This helps keep our overhead even lower.

Also, we are aiming for much better donor feedback this year. We want to be able to give an accurate accounting to each donor about each dollar, and provide a donor’s message in with each box of supplies. Of course, we would love to have more than the dozen stellar donors that currently pay for all the supplies.

There is a gap after the schools have been built, the administration organized, the teachers paid, and the textbooks bought. We hope that our supplies will fill the last gap so that the children have crayons, paper, and pencils with which to learn and become the next great generation.

We look forward to another year of service.

Charles Merriam and the Rest of the TrueGift Volunteers

Hello Everyone,

I am looking for work. I’m looking for a technical or technical sales position in a company with exciting technology, preferably one working near sensors, vision, or robotics.

This is a reentry into the regular workforce for me. I left JavaSoft in 1999 on good terms as a successful strategic systems engineer with many patentable ideas and large sales involvements. JavaSoft had accomplished its original goals of popularizing and standardizing the Java language and its employees were being folded back into the larger entity of Sun Microsystems. I took some time off from the frantic pace of JavaSoft, explored angel funding and business consulting for startups. I founded TrueGift Donations, a charity providing free school supplies to teachers. I took graduate engineering classes in image processing, robotics, and silicon processing. I kept up with changes in technology and programming languages. Also, Judith and I had two children and finally found a nanny we trust to stay home with both of them. Now I can go back to work.

The perfect position is a company or business unit of between 20 and 200 employees, based in Silicon Valley, with a truly cool technology. I am flexible about the level, compensation, and type of position. I am willing to travel extensively. My greatest skill is creating practical scenarios to build relationships with clients.

Please let me know when you see a possibility.

Have a wonderful, great, super day!

Charles Merriam

(Charles.Merriam at Gmail)

Assuming you have been in the loop, you have noticed or attended a number of “unconferences”. An unconference is a new trick that people of learned, or at least that people have learned again, to meet, greet and share information. An unconference strips away the preparation and glitz of a conference back to a chaotic meeting place, and bypasses the hospitality industry’s high service/high cost offerings ($15 per guest for coffee service). Unconferences are growing in diversity and longevity.

The journey of unconferences unfolds with repeated occasions of each unconference. The first occasion of an unconference begins with the pure chaos of a few organizers and infectious altruism. The next time that unconference is held, it usually has a few organizing guidelines and a following. Best practices evolve the conference with each successive event, and new ideas start facing some resistance to adoption. If the resistance becomes to high, someone else starts a competing unconference.

A general consensus has arisen concerning the need for a central conference board, the need for snacks and drinks, the transition into a party or bar chat, a basic infrastructure of a wiki and wifi, and a dozen other small concerns. I propose some additional ideas for the journey.

Badges

Badges challenge participants to mingle and talk to each other.

SuperHappyDevHouse had the best badges that I’ve seen. Each badge had a discrete number of ambiguous color coded interests. For example, a red sticker meant either that you liked the Perl language or that you liked Zombies. Having some information was great for building common ground and providing an excuse for less extroverted people to chat. Having too detailed information tends to limit conversations. All unconferences could learn from this ambiguous structure.

A second item, a structure, is to number badges. Episodes of The Prisoner aside, it would be convenient to have a large number on each badge tied to contact information in a wiki and a mailing list manager. It makes it trivial for session attendees or hallway conversations to continue their conversations; just record the badge numbers. There permission system is still there: only those who choose to update the wiki can be contacted by the badge number.

Printing Station

A printing station improves the signage at an unconference. Hand written notices abound about session topics, meeting places, new guidelines or rules, sign-up sheets, and more. A single computer and printer that allowed people to print would eliminate a lot of the useless confusion and foster useful confusion.

Note Taking Template

Most sessions have one or more bloggers. Providing a template for note taking would improve the quality and usability of the resulting notes. A good template would include both the conference tag words as well as tag word for the particular session. Having all blog posts start with the name of the session and link back to the wiki is good, as well as writing down the badge numbers of attendees to catch up on missed connections. Single page blogs, like lists of links or short write-ups, can be printed out and posted opposite the program grid.

Session Classifications

While not usually one to impinge on the informality of sessions, I believe sessions should provide a smidge more information to conference participants. I would like each session to have an icon or keyword to differentiate between the type of session the poster expects. Unconference sessions break into Prepared Presentations, Prepared Tutorials, Thinking About Hard Problems, and others. This lets people vote with their heads before voting with their feet.

So here are some improvements for organizers of unconferences. I hope the journey of unconferences leads to a full spectrum of conferences for more efficient merry making, information transfer, networking, and business.

Problem: People lie when asked, “what are you wearing?”

Solution: Smart clothing with cryptographically secure signing.

OK, a joke about wearing bikinis came up on a mailing list. This may be the worst idea I’ve ever published. It may be so bad that it goes into your head instead of mine.

Great for that visualization when you query and find that ‘trusted investement advisor’ is really wearing kid’s size 8. Or for when you wonder if this person is at least the same size as that girl you met at the party last night. Or truth in dating. Or, er, for gratituious overuse of technology. It is fairly trivial in the technical details.

Now, version two would have stress guages on the waist and bust line to meaure the tightness of the clothing….