Bloomington Startup Feb. 8-10, 2008 [a startup weekend event]

We’ll begin profiling our event sponsors later tonight, beginning with Mallor Clendening Grodner & Bohrer LLP, a local Bloomington law firm specializing in estate planning and contract disputes. In the meantime, I wanted to post a note of thanks to Travis Brown for being the point man for the money flow.

Travis isn’t alone. Our organizing committee has grown to include about a dozen people:

• John Hill, Technology Directory
• Christian Briggs, Evangelist
• Katrina Panovich and Katie O’Donnell, Food Czars
• David Roedl, Sustainability Czar
• Jason de Runa, Hospitality Guy
• Nina Perry, Childcare Coordinator
• Lorraine Ball, PR
• Kevin Makice, Marketing and Materials Directory [added by John]

That doesn’t include the many more supporters in the region who have spread the word, paved the way, pulled the trigger, got the buy-in, and wrote the story about Bloomington Startup Weekend. We’re in for a great few days, thanks to all of the work everyone has put into this project.

More info about our sponsorship campaign is available at the main Startup Weekend site.

This weekend will move very fast, surprisingly so. That’s what happens when we try to cram months of work into about 2300 hours of human labor over three days. To help move quickly to a group decision on Friday night about what kind of company to build, it is important to be prepared with ideas before reaching City Hall.

We have an online community, powered by Ning, which we are using to suggest and discuss product and company ideas over the next 10 days. Please post any crazy ideas for services, widgets, devices or other things our new company might do. The more discussed an idea is before we pitch, the more effective the pitch will be.

Startup Weekend founder Andrew Hyde published the 8th podcast wrap-up of a weekend, interviewing Kimm Viebrock as a summary of what happened in Seattle. It is worth a listen. I also recommend looking at the results of past weekends for an idea about what to expect on the 8th.

Bloomington isn’t going to be like any other Startup Weekend, and at the same time we’ll be like them all. We are going to benefit from the transparency provided by the previous cities. Our ability to cope with whatever faulty group dynamics may arise is improved significantly by past reporting on how things went.

We thank the hundreds of past founders for sharing. Soon, it will be our turn to do the same.

I am challenging local bloggers to help our event out by posting something about our event this week, encouraging people to register or follow our activities at City Hall on February 8-10. We want to make sure Bloomington knows about this, even as we wait for the Herald-Times and IDS coverage.

Some local bloggers have already published entries about Bloomington Startup Weekend. We will keep a running list in our resources page, but here are the mentions we have already received:

• BlogSchmog, Kevin Makice
• Smaller Indiana, Pat Coyle
• The Glass People, John Hill
• First: Principles, Ben Fulton
• StrangeWork 2.0, Brad Williams
• phoenixblaze’s LiveJournal
• User Experience Network
• The Web Shop, Clay Mabbitt
• Pin-the-Tail

Thanks to all of these local bloggers.

Last night, I attended a meeting of Women Inspire, a three-year-old group promoting personal and professional connections between local women. It was an interesting evening that included a speech by 9th District Congressional candidate Gretchen Clearwater. My purpose for attending was to spread the word about Bloomington Startup Weekend, making a special appeal to local women to help us achieve gender equity.

Gender equity is a known problem. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 26.7% of employees in computer and mathematical fields in 2006 were female, earning 84.7% of what men do. Those numbers are in decline even as the jobs in the IT field are more plentiful. This is reflected in academia, where the number of female students is noticeably low. At Indiana University, approximately 11% of students in CS and Informatics are women. One of the groups locally working to reverse this trend is Women In Computing (WIC), who are currently finishing a two-day retreat at McCormicks Creek State Park in nearby Spencer, Indiana.

While we won’t fix the problem simply by getting a large number of local women to show up at City Hall in February, visible involvement by women can have impact. Seeing women collaborating in our photos and streaming video from our event might inspire others to follow their paths. Perhaps more importantly, the flavor and direction of the new company will be different with many women involved than without them.

At the moment, Bloomington Startup Weekend has 11 women on board with 28 spots remaining. Let’s see at least a dozen more women register before we run out of opportunities.

Resources on gender equity:

Association for Women in Computing (AWC)

The Anita Borg Institute

ACM’s Committee on Women and Computing

Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer Science

The Ada Project

Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research

Center for Women in Information Technology

Women-Related Science-Technology Email Lists

Last night, the 14th Startup Weekend host city—Seattle—kicked off the first day of the quest to build something new from scratch. For those planning to attend our event, it would be well worth paying attention to how things transpire in Seattle.

Read the official blog and follow Startup Weekend on Twitter.

Startup Weekend also announced two new weekends, in Portland (May 23-25) and Ann Arbor (June 20-22). Pending my summer plans (family and employment), I plan to attend the latter.

Two Fridays from now, the final preparations will be made and a few dozen motivated people will gather at City Hall to build something new. Up until that moment, the organizing committee will be busy recruiting participants and sponsors, making sure the logistics and materials are in place, and trying to do this while living other parts of their lives.

In the coming days, some local press should start to appear about Bloomington Startup Weekend. This should spur a registration drive to reach our participation and sponsorship goals. We still have some other needs, though, that will continue for the next two weeks. We are currently looking for people interested in helping:

• Music Director—talk to local musicians and get us a daily little dose of live break music.
• Childcare Director—coordinate the needs of participating parents with some local childcare providers to allow people with kids to contribute all weekend.
• Materials Director—make sure there are white boards, markers and other staples of a marathon development session.
• Meta Manager—we will be transparent with our process, which means making sure there are regular updates to local blogs, video and tweet streams, as well as generating the excitement for people to pay attention.
• Street Marketing Manager—chalk + sidewalks = free advertising. We also help locals be more aware of our event through bulletin board fliers.

My own computer issues are ending in the form of a replacement MacBook from Apple. Expect regular blog posts from here on out.

The most compelling of the past weekends to follow was the one in Atlanta last November. There are some nice lessons to be learned from Atlanta, as well as a nifty little blog widget, the outcome of their three days of work.

Skribit is a blog widget where readers can suggest posts to blog authors. I activated my blog this morning and added the widget here, as well. The widget helps move a blog from a broadcast to a collaborative paradigm, with suggestions for future posts coming from individual readers. Got a specific question you want answered? Post it in the sidebar on this blog, and we’ll likely be inspired.