February 2012
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DeMo Des Moines — February Edition
DeMo Des Moines returns to Startup City Des Moines on Tuesday, February 21 at 4pm.
Not clear on what DeMo is? Check out the recap from January’s event.
You don’t have to register to attend or present, but a heads-up is always appreciated. Hope to see you there.
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My BarCamp Cedar Valley Recap
My wife and I road-tripped to the UNI Campus in Cedar Falls this past weekend for BarCamp Cedar Valley. I really enjoyed myself. The audience was my favorite part — there were a lot of energetic, open-minded, and educated people asking good questions and enhancing every presentation with their participation.
Structurally, the event was nearly identical to the Des Moines BarCamp I attended in...
January 2012
7 posts
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2012 Information Architecture Summit Schedule
I’m excited to be attending and humbled and terrified to be speaking at the upcoming 2012 Information Architecture Summit. The Summit is a week of programming aimed at people who design, plan and build things like websites and software applications. Folks at the Summit have job titles like User Experience Director/Designer/Manger, Business Analyst, Content Strategist, User Researcher, and, of...
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DeMo Des Moines January 2012 Recap
I’m often asked if DeMo is just for “tech stuff”. It’s definitely not, and the conversation we had at January’s DeMo session proved that out. Four presenters shared a diverse group of projects and ideas including web startups and brick-and-mortar initiatives.
I used this slide deck to start things out. While it doesn’t contain info about the presentations (those are generally improvised...
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Help Me Solve DeMo’s Presenter Problem
If you’re not familiar with DeMo, read about it here, first.
I’ve been running DeMo for several months now with varying levels of success. With a full house and a slate of energetic presenters, it goes great. There’s one little problem: I’m having a hell of a time getting people to present. I don’t know why. I need your help.
I’m looking for whatever insights and opinions you can offer to see if...
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Chuck Grassley PIPA/SOPA Form Letter Response
Sent in comments a couple weeks back urging Iowa’s senators to publicly voice opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Got a form email back from Grassley today. Not too exciting; posting for posterity. You can read a lot more interesting malarky from Grassley, a co-sponsor of PIPA, in this collection of press releases. He honest-to-goodness rolled out some FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about...
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The Next DeMo Des Moines is on January 17th
DeMo returns to Startup City Des Moines on Tuesday, January 17 at 4 p.m. It’s in the Bank of America Building on the 5th floor, downtown. You can enter from the street or the skywalk.
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WHAT THE FIRETRUCK IS IT?
DeMo is a monthly check-up for Des Moines’ designers, developers, makers, builders, hackers and planners. Whatever you do, you can show it off at DeMo....
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December 2011
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Please Hire Scott Rocketship (That's Me) →
I created a résumé using Storify in just a few hours. Have keyboard, will travel.
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November 2011
13 posts
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“A trickle of retail entrepreneurs, many of them women, began locating in the...”
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Recap of Drake SJMC Career Panel →
Katie Minnick recaps the “Cutting Edge” themed careers panel for Journalism students I participated on.
The panel was well attended (surprisingly so in my opinion) and the students had good questions. As is typical with these things, I think I learned as much if not more than the students did, both from their questions and from my fellow panelists. It got me thinking about the hiring...
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Three Techniques I Use to Edit and Organize Blog...
Between work and other projects I’ve been doing quite a bit more writing over the past few weeks than is typical even for me. It’s given me some insight into how I actually put posts together. I thought putting my process down into words might help me improve it and learn from the feedback of others.
My current technical approach to editing and organizing blog posts is dominated by the...
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The Six-Hour Saga of #MikeDraperforMayor
I launched an impromptu online art project of sorts in my hometown of Des Moines on election day, 2011. It was kind of one of those “you had to be there” things, but I’ve done my best to document the experience.
Relive the Saga of #MikeDraperforMayor on Storify
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Cat Rocketship: We love the internet →
Had a lot of fun doing this project on a short timeline and small budget.
Cat’s write-up of this project far surpasses the amount of effort I was willing to put into writing it up so you may as well just go check out what she wrote. The only technical detail I would add for the nerds out there is that we used awe.sm as both our URL shortener and QR code generator for the project. Made it...
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Upcoming Panel at Drake's Journalism Days
I’ve been invited to speak on a panel called “The Cutting Edge” at Drake University’s Journalism Days event this week. The panel is described thusly:
Panel of professionals discuss exciting careers in media, moderated by SJMC multimedia instructor Chris Snider.
It will be held on Wednesday, November 9 at 7pm in Meredith Hall (the black steel and glass building...
October 2011
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What We Told Current Journalism Students About... →
Authored this blog post for BitMethod’s Brick by Brick after having the opportunity to indoctrinate some current Journalism students at Drake University.
September 2011
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“[It] was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the...”
– I found myself reading up on ampersands on Wikipedia, mainly trying to figure out where or how I picked up the habit of incorrectly pronouncing it with an “h” (am-pher-sand). No answer yet, but I found this bit on the etymology fascinating.
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August 2011
3 posts
“You may be one of the millions of people who are really struggling, or, maybe...”
– I am fascinated by the double-speak and word twisting of late night infomercials. Fascinated. This one is courtesy of Welltabs.
“Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel...”
– From a recently published Cornell study called “The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas”.
Reinforces a thought I’ve been chewing on lately: you can’t truly be creative without confidence, either individually or as an organization. Gotta get...
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July 2011
3 posts
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I'm a What Iffer: Week 2
Press Hits
Articles appeared this week about What if Des Moines on the website Silicon Prairie News and in the weekly Des Moines print publication Juice Magazine. The articles were great for generating interest in the project (emails, Tweets of support, etc). They didn’t drive any noticeable change in pageviews.
The interest from SPN and Juice was a big motivator over the second week. On a...
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Week one: What if Des Moines...
The Project
I was halfway through my shower Monday morning when I had an idea for a website. I called it “What if Des Moines…” and had a Tumblr site and my first post added not long after. The purpose of the site was to create a space where people could get really imaginative about their city. I also wanted to create a safe place to ask difficult questions and generate...
June 2011
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Dutch office space w/ rooms based on project... →
The project manager in me (not to mention coworking advocate) is drooling right now…
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May 2011
6 posts
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80/35 Mobile App Announcement →
I don’t mind saying I’m pretty proud of how my copy for this app announcement turned out. 80/35’s circus-themed branding has been a lot of fun to work with.
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“Bey! Bey! Ey bey!
Ya dumb ars lazy bey. No more dat layabout, readin’...”
– My first attempt at writing in a Bahamian dialect. Not totally happy with the readability, but it was fun.