This is just another reminder that the February CodeAway event will be this Saturday, the 24th from 1-5pm at the Sprague library.

As part of the meeting we are very pleased to welcome Xmission. Not only are they providing free wifi for the event - they will also be talking about all the readily available free wifi in the Salt Lake area and how best to take advantage of it.

Following Xmission we’ll have our usual unstructured time of conversation, code, and collaboration; this is your time to work on those ideas that may have been lingering. CodeAway is all about building a supportive community to help you execute your ideas. There is no subversive agenda. There are no membership fees. We are simply a group of creators who are building a livelihood on the web’s cornerstones - bloggers, designers, developers, mash-up artists, etc. If that sounds like something you’d like to participate in we look forward to seeing you Saturday!

Robert Scoble is currently turing the US giving a variety of talks on social media. As announced on Chris Knudsen’s blog he’ll be in Utah on March 2 for “Podcast interviews with select executives, entrepreneurs, or technologists” and a talk entitled “Living in a Google World”.

Details:

Location: Café Trio [map] - Cottonwood, 6405 South 3000 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84121 Agenda: 10:00 – 11:30 :: Podcast interviews 11:30 – 12:00 :: Mingling 12:00 – 1:30 :: Lunch and Robert Scoble presentation: “Living in a Google Worldâ€? REGISTRATION AND COST Registration is required for this event. Due to room capacity, the event will be limited to the first 100 participants. Cost: $25, lunch included.

From Geeksugar comes the Washington Post story of China’s Shanxi province. It’s a place where the local internet cafes were recently shut down due to their ‘bad influence on minors’. While the cafes have closed down, however, a whole new set of information age speak-easies has sprung up to fill the demand.

“Whenever people talked about Internet cafes, they got crazy,” Zhang told the paper. “We came to a conclusion: Internet cafes bring more bad than good to young people. So we decided to shut them down. The harm to children is no less than from drugs.”

Startbucks Wifi - is that like cocaine or closer to heroin?

I’ve been closely following the discussion on Web Worker Daily about the Terra Bite Cafe concept. From the WWD article by Chris Gilmer:

Imagine walking into a cafe, ordering a coffee and a biscuit, grabbing a seat and plugging away on your laptop. Then at the end of the week you drop a $20 into the anonymous drop box. Notice the missing step? The coins and bills to pay for your order when you receive it? Welcome to the Terra Bite cafe. It’s all about pure karma.

In the realm of way-out, maybe someday ideas I’ve thought about doing something like this with CodeAway; instead of monthly, 4 hour social sit-downs we provide a continuous usable space for those laptop workers to commiserate, commune, and ‘commute’. This would be for the freelance journalists, writers, code slingers, designers, remix artists, etc.

But any illusions of techno-utopia are quickly dissipated by some of the articulate comments - which are falling about 50/50 on whether such an idea could work. The biggest hurdle seems to be that this example exists in a rather affluent neighborhood with strong tech sector providing plenty of disposable income. Can a comfortable wifi workspace that gets by on karma survive an economic downturn? Is such an effort doomed to be undone by freeloaders? Thoughts?

The next CodeAway in in a couple of weeks. Now’s the time to start gathering up your braggin’ code to show off.

CodeAway can be a lot of things. It’s a great way to network with people who are in the industry. It’s a great way to blow off some steam with people who understand what you’re going through. It’s also a great place to show off your best stuff to people who actually understand how hard it was for you to do it.

So, whatcha gonna brag about at CodeAway this month?

February 2007 CodeAway

Saturday, February 24, 2007 1-5pm

Sprague Library - 2131 S 1100 E, Salt Lake City, UT

Google Map

Downstairs Conference Room

Free wi-fi courtesy of X-Mission

Embedded somewhere within the slew of new societal norms in the digital age is a changing relationship that we have with work. We are witness to the ascension of the knowledge worker; someone who’s stock and trade is being a nodal point for ideas. It’s very much the modus operandi that I’m in: have wifi’d laptop, will make a living. CodeAway’s mission is to provide opportunities for this new breed to enrich and enhance each others efforts; that, and give us an forum to brag about our latest Wii triumphs.

The power behind web working and my personal involvement make me pleased to announce a new side gig as contributing writer for Web Worker Daily. WWD is an online media property from Om Malik. Om is an award winning technology journalist and former senior writer for Business 2.0. He’s since struck out on his own and is building his own ‘online media publisher’ (the mechanics of which I hope to also learn from this vantage point). Most importantly, he (so far) is a great guy. I initially was a little nervous about the time commitment the gig would require and if there were article quotas that had to be met. Om’s response on what to post?

No expectations - just the posts which come from your heart and your brain, not from your wallet.

He’s also got a interview with Robert Scoble, for those interested.

What does this mean for CodeAway? Probably not much. There might be some cross linking for relevant pieces but for the most part I’ll continue posting relevant stuff here. As long as time permits, I’ll be writing.

Cross coded on mutednoise.com and BloomBurst.com.

From Web Worker Daily:

New York’s Freelancers Union is a 40,000-strong association of the new type of worker in New York state. They offer message boards, job postings, discounts, and advocacy, but their main draw is access to group insurance programs. Without any sort of collective bargaining, Freelancers Union is more like a giant buying club open to freelancers only than a traditional union, but it does serve to indicate the size of our sector of the economy in one chunk of the country. Even if you’re not in New York, you can join (it’s free); they’re planning a nationwide push and expansion of their insurance benefits, and are trying to guage interest in different areas of the country to see where to go next.

Membership is free and they are looking to expand their insurance protection to other states. Is this kind of organization something that could be useful to Utah’s web workers?