Over the past couple of months I’ve been working with a few people down in Charlotte, NC to get the first Barcamp started.  Everyone’s hard work is paying off and we are in the process of getting everything fixed up ready for the Jan 24th.

If you are in the area, or near enough to get here, it should be a great event and we are expecting a high turnout.  We already have a confirmed sponsor and we are working locking in a couple more.  Check out the new site, and register there to keep up to date with the event. 

See in you Charlotte in January!

I have been wrapped up in lots of stuff lately, including moving down to Ballantyne and starting work on a few new things.

Anyone in Charlotte should get down and meet up the Charlotte JUG for the December Drinks.   Also I have been messed around far too much with themes - though hopefully that will settle down soon.  And also we will have a big update on the BarCamp Charlotte.

Well I had a good Christmas and with the New Year I have a really busy January planned.   The news is finally out there,  DevZuz has been acquired by Exist Global and I have taken a role there.  We will continue forward with its Maestro product suite and we are continuing to look at the codeATLAS project (more on that in the future),  however now I find myself working within a services organization.  Having worked a lot of my life in the consulting game and also in professional services organizations I have to admit it is interesting to return.  Even the past year with DevZuz had shown me that the adoption of much Open Source products tended to trend toward a services relationship since the collaborative support model that we used was usually more akin to a services relationship than a traditional closed-source software vendor - since it allowed the customer to see value.

So what does 2008 hold for me,  well no less travel it seems  though I am becoming a more seasoned traveller (even if Brett still picked on me complaining when I can’t a business class ticket every time!).  Also it’s an opportunity to work with a wider range of projects and technologies (I have been picking up my RoR skills a little more again),  also working with a number of different customers in a services delivery model leveraging a lot of the open source technologies but also the development models.   I did get a day in LA meeting with a number of people in the outsourcing space and it was very interesting to learn more about the strategies that can be leveraged and also the models that are commonly being used by medium or large Enterprises.  Also, we are working with a number of smaller start-ups building whole product offerings - commonly based on many of the Web2.0/Social Networking technologies, which are the talk of the town.  I’m sure this will change the conference schedule for the year,  but I’m hoping I’ll still make it out to a couple of OSS events.