OpenCo San Francisco 2013

Last week I attended the OpenCo Conference. It was attended by a couple of thousand people who visited places where people work in San Francisco, in groups of twenty or so visitors. It was the most rewarding conference I have ever attended. website. Here is where I went.


Thursday
9 am – EventBrite – 651 Brannan #110  @Flower Market (mid 5th&6th)– Event Registration
Julia Hartz presented an overview of their history and direction. She gave a cultural metric. More than 40 percent of their hiring has been through employee referral.

10:30 am – RackSpace – 620 Folsom #100  @ Second St – Cloud infrastructures
Rackspace San Francisco was not what I expected. Nobody in San Francisco has a lot to do with the core business of the 8 global data centers for web hosting and cloud services. There are three separate businesses that Rackspace bought. There is an email service Mailgun. There is a co-working space Geekdom. There is another that helps companies use Openstack software.

1:30 – TechShop – 926 Howard (From 5th toward 6th) – Maker support and space
TechShop looks like fun but the membership is expensive, $125/month. They have a lot of machines you can use. I'm going to get rid of my sewing machine and oxy-acetylene torch.

4:30 – Alonzo King Lines – 7th & Market, 3rd flr, Studio 5 – Ballet
Twelve dancers performed parts of an upcoming extravaganza. Alonzo King himself presided. He called on some of the dancers to provide some of the answers during the Q&A period.


Friday
9 am  - Adobe - 601 Townsend – Media Software
10:30 am – GitHub –  88 Colin P Kelly Jr St @ Brannan (Muni 2nd & King) - Change Control

I went from Adobe to GitHub. Both presentations made a big positive impression. The biggest difference came fielding questions from the audience concerning recent public moves by Yahoo and HP to rein in working outside the office.

Jeffrey Veen of Adobe clearly thought that having team members co-located was helpful to him, finding it a little difficult to include two team members in other parts of the country in a daily meeting.

Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub, having most employees outside the local area, stressed that if you want the company to work in distributed locations, you have to create an environment where access to meetings is available to everyone everywhere.

I was most impressed by Tom Preston-Werner. Sorry there not to hear about Adobe than TypeKit, a way to download fonts the user doesn't have to browsers.


12 am – USF – 101 Howard, 5th Flr, room 527,529 @Spear - Data Analytics

A professor presented how a big data project showed commuter patterns in the Ivory Coast of Africa.


At an early session I got close enough to a guy named Joe that he could let me try on his Google Glass contraption.  He put it on me over my glasses. That’s a lot of glasses. He told me to say “OK glass” to wake up the menu. The menu has a list of things you can do like
Take a picture
Send an email
Make a call to <someone>
Record a video
Get directions to  <google search>

I said “Take a picture” and I briefly saw him in double vision.

He said it is not as good as a cell phone to make a call so he keeps it tethered to his phone by a Bluetooth connection. It allows him to leave his phone in his pocket. We were attending a presentation at the offices of Eventbrite. After it started the audience couldn’t talk, so he made notes on his laptop.