Here’s Erik’s description:

I like to learn and to share with others. Over the past three years, I have learned countless lessons as a business owner – both good and bad – and wanted to share part of the Focus Lab story and detail some of those lessons. Keep in mind this will be told through the eyes of a designer and developer, neither myself or my business partner Bill Kenney considered ourselves “businessmen” when we started. Since we entered this venture with numerous blind spots, we now want to shine some light on what we have learned to help others who are going through the process. I’ll talk about things I’ve learned about running a creative services business and hope to learn something from you as well.

We’ll be at ThincSavannah at 6PM on 2/21. I hope to see you all there!

Oh, and if you’re already a part of a creative business in Savannah, check out Made in Savannah and add your company to the list!

As I said last night, we don’t have a speaker for February yet, so if you’re interested in speaking, please come forward! If you’ve already agreed to speak in February, and I’ve forgotten, please remind me (and thank you).

And I also asked you guys what you wanted to hear in 2012, so, here’s a poll you can do to tell me (you can choose up to 3):

I’ll hopefully be back in a couple weeks to tell you what’s coming up in February. Stay tuned…

We’re back in our normal location: ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St (3rd floor) on Tuesday, 1/17 at 6PM. I hope to see you all there!

I’m also thinking of doing a Tech Book Trade-In this month too. I’ve got a bunch of geeky programming books I’m not using and don’t see myself needing anytime soon. It feels like an insult to the authors to let all this knowledge gather dust on the shelf, so I was thinking I could bring them to Refresh and you guys could help me find good homes for them all! What do you think?

I hope to see you all there!

The point of this post is to continue the discussion and open it up for folks who weren’t able to attend last night. We said we’d:

• post the list of the three things the Creative Coast is delivering to the city
• and the big list of ideas you guys came up with.

You guys (the Refresh Community) are supposed to:

• Share this post with your respective communities (the Savannah community on Reddit was mentioned, for example).
• Add links in the comments to cool things happening in other cities.
• Add comments adding new ideas or fleshing out ideas from the list.

And that’s it! Let’s keep this discussion going! It would be a shame if the energy and passion expressed last night fizzled and doesn’t end up helping to change anything for the better.

The three things the Creative Coast is supposed to deliver to the city are:

• A list of innovative things being done in other cities that could be done here.
• A job description for the role of CTO.
• The results of the meeting with the Refresh community.

Jake and Murray are going to see what they can provide of the work that’s already been done. If they can share more, I’ll add to this post.

And the moment you’ve all been waiting for… the giant list of ideas we came up with (plusses afterwards mean it was mentioned or upvoted by another person):

• Make computers easier to admin
• Pay city bills online! +
• City Bike Share +, pedicab rental
• Free city-wide wi-fi +
• Open parking spot finder
• Renewable energy alliance
• Traffic/congestion updates for truck drivers
• Smart energy meters for all new buildings & homes +
• Digital Divide/marginalization – access to hardware/software/signal +
• Maker/hacker space + – connect to areas w/ digital divide & (unintelligible) issues
• cost-saving technology – improve efficiency in existing systems +
• Resilient self-sufficient communities
• Restructure county/city websites
• Restructure public transit reliability & predictability ++
• Open, transparent government – open data
• Reach out to “normals”
• Connect cities within GA/statewide public transit +
• Citizen involvement in government/idea sharing with government/Participatory government
• Agile development practices adopted in government
• Relationship between wisdom and technology – tap into people in Savannah with practical wisdom
• Make history accessible with one click
• Practical, attainable, grounded in feasibility
• How do we close the digital divide and the “real world” divide at the same time?
  • How do we educate everyone on the potential of these ideas/technology
  • Most address the broadest common denominator/accessibility
• Human potential & infrastructure
• What’s the “scoring/rewards system” for Savannah? How do we decide the divide?
• The city as API-open data/community analytics
  • Code for America
• How do we get access to city interfaces
• An app for “What do you want, Savannah?”/Advocacy & “City Docent(??)”
• Crowd-sourcing data analytics/trouble spotting
• Crowd-sourcing crime reporting/statistics
• Crowd-sourcing text/email 911
• Crowd-sourcing Foursquare for crime!!
• How do we make these services analog?
• What happens to 311 data?
• What are the city’s core values, mission statement, personas?
• City coding competition – reward/public-private judges/kickstarter
• Involve local students!!
• Who are we?
  • Government
  • “Come heres”
  • “From heres”

Now bring on the discussion!!

The Creative Coast wishes to gather some insightful feedback from the Savannah community on what truly makes a city connected and technology-enabled. As our city grows we want to make certain our city’s technology infrastructure advances with innovative systems and approaches. Well here is your chance. Come along, bring your ideas however wild and crazy and we will capture them and present them to the city who has patiently offered to listen.

And instead of our usual location, we’re going to do this one at The Creative Coast’s office at 15 W York St, at 6 on 12/20! So, come along and bring some crazy ideas about what we can do as a community to enable innovation! I hope to see you there!

And as a special bonus, Jake is ready and waiting to sponsor some local teams of 1-3 people! So, if you were on the fence, now there’s absolutely no risk! If you’re interested, ping Jake for the details: jake@thecreativecoast.org.

I hope to see you there!

(there’s a chance I’ll be out of the country, but I’m going to do my best to be there to do my job as a mentor & judge)

As part of it, I’m hoping to actually build something – so I need your help! What kind of mashup should we build? Flickr? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Something else? Whatever it is, it needs to have an API we can play with and it signing up for a developer key should be a turnkey process (meaning I shouldn’t have to wait to be able to play with it).

Refresh is always the 3rd Tuesday of the month at 6PM over at ThincSavannah. For October, that means it’s on 10/18. I hope to see you there!

Update – This is mostly for me, but I’m going to be adding links to this post of APIs that I find that folks might find interesting/fun/useful (and which may make it into the demo – I still need suggestions because I’m not sure what I’m going to build). Here they are:

• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Weather Underground
• Twitpic
• Rdio
• Twilio
• Twitter’s Boostrap CSS

And the slides from tonight’s presentation are already up on Speakerdeck.

What others should I add? Which ones are you interested in seeing mashed up?

Symbolic Imagery in Interface Design

Giovanni DiFeterici will discuss the inherent symbolic nature of UI elements, how people interact with them in relation to their real world analogs and how to build a description of an element’s function into its visual presentation. Understanding how people think about the interactive visuals that we build can help us design more cleanly and to speak more clearly to our users.

Sign Up UX Design

Your web app’s sign up experience or the call-to-action on your website better be top-notch. People have short attention spans and take no mercy when shopping or passing judgement on your service or products. We’ll be looking at some best practices and review great examples that help demonstrate what goes into a solid sign up/call to action user experience: we’ll get into some psychology, patterns & design reviews. Gene Crawford will be delivering this one.

Wait, you want more info about these guys? They happened to give me that stuff too!

Gene Crawford (@genecrawford)

Gene is a designer with over a decade of experience in the industry with a degree in Graphic Design. In 1994, Gene met the Internet and has been honing his skills in information architecture and usable interface design ever since. He has overseen the design and architecture of hundreds of web sites and applications. An active member in the design community, he’s the editor & producer of unmatchedstyle.com, organizer of refreshcolumbia.org and the ConvergeSE.com conference.

Giovianni DiFeterici (@giodif)

Giovanni has a BFA in fine art and a BA in Graphic Design. After earning his BFA, he taught in public schools for a couple of years but found that he really wanted to work on projects with other creative people in the web design industry and hasn’t looked back. Giovanni is also an editor for unmatchedstyle.com and co-organizer for the ConvergeSE.com conference.

And now I’m guessing that you’ll want some details on when and where. Well, those don’t change much, but here you go:

• When: Tuesday, September 20th at 6PM
• Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor

And now, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve got a small favor to ask – please help me spread the word! I’m not a designer, and not a marketer, so I need help getting the word out to the local design community. Anything you can do to get people there would be much appreciated!

Today, I just want to cover things to help you get started. If you’ve never programmed anything more complex than a microwave, this list is for you. I tried most of these out on my oldest, so they’re kid-approved (which means they should work OK for curious adults too).

Web Tools and Tutorials

• Codecademy – A free website packed with lessons and exercises from the very basic to the very complex. It’s all online and looks pretty awesome (this is one I haven’t used but was recommended by a friend).
• Don’t Fear the Internet – A series of video tutorials from well-respected web designers and developers that should teach you the basics of building web pages.
• Computer Science 1 – Programming Methodology – From Stanford University, this is a series of lectures that make up their introductory computer science course. I’d start with Codecademy and if you really like it and want to learn more about “serious” development, check out the videos.
• Rails for Zombies: Ruby on Rails is a great framework for building web apps, and even better, a skillset that’s in great demand right now. This is a fun way to jump in and learn it without all the formality of a book (one without zombies at least).

Downloadable Apps

• Hackety Hack – You’ll need to download this app to use it, but it’s a great little tool and has tons of lessons that will teach you the basics of programming.
• Scratch – Another downloaded one. There’s no code at all in Scratch, just drag and drop. This is the tool my son has stuck with the longest (almost five years now) and has built everything from interactive fiction to a complex first-person shooter video game with it. It’s a fun way to introduce control structures, but if you’re a grownup, I’d start with Hackety Hack or Codecademy.
• Blue Griffon – Not really a way to teach you to program, but it’s a free web page editor that feels more like a word processor than a scary text editor.

Books

• Learn to Program – This is the book I gave my son when he wanted to learn what I do all day. It’s a fantastic introduction to programming. If you’re better with a book, this is the one to get.

I hope this is helpful. If you’ve got other resources, please share!