Twenty ten is going to be a big year for me, if I have anything to say about it …and I do.

As of this particular moment in time, I resolve to:

Run

The problems I have with working out in gyms are the reliance on a place and equipment, and sheer boredom. Running, on the other hand, requires only a good pair of shoes, and opens up my neighborhood (and anywhere I travel to on business) to exploration.

To make this goal concrete,

• I’m aiming to complete a half-marathon later in the year. I’ve narrowed it down to one of two particular events in September and October. Training begins now, and equates to 40 minute workouts, three times a week.

Introspect

What inspires, drives, and motivates me? I’m already putting some real thought into answering this question.

But I believe that a real journey to find myself is truly in order:

• I’m going to travel, by myself, to Africa, in the Fall. If I could go earlier, I would, but I need up at least three weeks of vacation days based on the options I’m interested in.

Challenge

It’s always good to step outside that zone of comfort we live within, in life.

To begin to challenge myself,

• I’m going to talk to at least one stranger every day. The rule is that I have to be the one to initiate the conversation.
• I’m finally going to go skydiving, around July.

Minimize

One must continually challenge the need and place of everything in your life, and I intend to do just that.

My storage locker is packed to the brim, and various “stuff” dominates the nooks of my home. This will be an ongoing exercise, but,

• I plan to immediately start purging, as my schedule allows me to give away, donate, or dispose.

I’ve already started getting rid of a lot of the material crap in my life. But this is the year I fully intend on pushing myself to the point where I’ve minimized as much as possible.

Build

Creating things is just part of my nature. While I shall endeavor to regularly update this here blog, and contribute to ProductCamp, I need some new projects.

To start, I intend to:

• Launch PresentationCamp, hopefully early this year. An event like this requires the assistance of many others, but the onus, this time, will be on me to pull it all together. I look forward to the challenge.

…Set More Goals

While that about sums up my concrete goals at the moment, I fully intend on evolving and adding to this list over the coming months.

So, what are your resolutions for 2010?

Want to learn how to make your presentations better? I know I do!

PresentationCamp is yet another BarCamp-style event that is focussed on helping each other learn more about the design and delivery of presentations. PresentationCamps have taken place in SF, Seattle, LA, and elsewhere, and have followed the traditional BarCamp format.

I want to launch PresentationCamp in Toronto, but we’re going to do things a little differently to begin. Rather than start off with a full-day event, let’s have a two-hour-long, weekday evening event, with eight (8) ten-minute presentations. If there’s enough interest — and I don’t doubt that there will be — we can expand this to a full-day affair.

You in? Great! Your first step is to follow @prescampTO.

Now, leave a comment below or contact me directly if you think you can help me with the following:

• Presenters. Do you give presentations for a living, and have tips to suggest around a given topic, such as a presentation style?
• A Venue. My guess is we’ll need a large auditorium, and we’ll aim for around 200 people to attend. I’m reaching out to Ryerson (host to ProductCamp and the next two DemoCamps), but if you have contacts at, say, Rogers or MaRS, please let me know.
• Sponsors? I’m hoping we can do this first event without the need for paying sponsors, but if the venue needs cash to open up for us, then we’ll need to offset the cost. Are you interested in sponsoring PresentationCamp?

Drop me a line, or simply follow @prescampTO for updates. Let’s do this thing!

(Photo courtesy of Thomas Purves. More photos of the event, here.)

DemoCamp was a blast!

First of all, a big thank you to the DemoCamp stewards for giving me the opportunity to present Requirements Center last night.

Despite demonstrating the product every week without giving it much thought, I was actually really nervous during the day of leading up to the event. Working within the five-minute time limit, while trying to make a sophisticated product make sense to a brand new audience, while knowing that my friends were out there–watching–all contributed to what kept my brain occupied over the past couple of days. Fortunately for everyone, I calmed down shortly after simply telling everybody my name, and things just naturally flowed from there. I even ended early!

My goals were to add a touch of humor, minimize the business babble, and keep it interesting for a technical audience. I hope I achieved these things. I was originally going to show how to go about adding things to the project, but after watching the first demo and gauging the resources I had, opted to just show and talk through the model. It seemed to work well.

After the show, it was great meeting some of the team behind the operation, as well as others in the community. All of whom were kind enough to share with me their insight on running BarCamp-style events, which I totally plan on socializing with the ProductCampToronto crew, soon.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing a full, live demo of the product, most weeks I co-host Blueprint’s free, weekly webinars, which you can sign up for here. You can also check out a series of videos in our Demo Center. For even more on Requirements Center, check out these gorgeous-looking pages.

The Toronto Product Management Association has been great at organizing enlightening events around product management, and got some really interesting speakers on board over the past couple of seasons that I’ve attended.

However, I have to be honest that I’ve been really itching to see these discussions expand beyond these sessions on to blogs, and larger venues. That’s why I was excited when I stumbled upon Chris Herbert’s effort to bring the ProductCamp idea to Toronto.

What is a ProductCamp?

A ProductCamp is a conference, of sorts, focused on Product Marketing and Product Management topics, and is based on the concept of the BarCamp:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.
When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

In Toronto, the number of these events–and those inspired by them–have really blossomed over the past while, and I’ve really enjoyed attending as many as I’ve deemed interesting. So, when the idea of a BarCamp focused on product management appeared, I had to jump on board to help make it happen.

Learning from the Pros

ProductCamp Austin recently held their first, day-long conference on June 14th (a Saturday) and had between 80-90 attendees. In my opinion, this is quite an accomplishment for a session held for the first time. (Congratulations, guys!) Organizer Paul Young summarized the experience over at ProductBeautiful.

Some of the TPMA sessions (particularly the free ones) that I have attended have been sizable, so I know that the interest definitely exists in Toronto!

What You Can Do to Help

The key is that the event is member supported, so we need volunteers to help make this happen.

To start the gears turning, we are planning on holding a PCT Pub Night on July 31st August 6th, at Fionn MacCool’s (at University & Adelaide). We’re finalizing the details and will announce event registration soon. (Update: Sign up for PCT Pub Night here.)

As for the conference itself, we’re tentatively thinking that it will take place during a Saturday in October… which should hopefully give us all time to organize and prepare.

Here’s how we can collaborate on this:

• The ProductCampToronto Wiki. Our home base on the web for the event is the PCT wiki. It will become a portal for everything related to the Event.
• Staying Updated. Over on Twitter, we’ll keep everybody posted frequent news updates, and upcoming events; think of this as the PCT blog, for now.
• Promotions. On Facebook, you can join our group. And if LinkedIn is more your speed, we have a group there too.
• Planning. We’ll be using Google Groups as an open discussion forum, for announcements, and to help plan these events.

But most of all…

Talk about Product Management!

If you’re thinking of coming to ProductCamp and have a blog, feel free to promote it on the the PCT wiki. You’ll also find badges there if you’d like to promote the event on your blog. (Please tag your posts with “ProductCampToronto”.) I’m personally curious to see who else is out there.

We’ve also created a PCT FriendFeed Room to aggregate discussions on blogs, and other assorted content about product management, and the event itself. Please feel free to share anything you find interesting.

Lastly, if you’ve done this sort of thing before, please join the discussion, or drop us a line. We could always use your help.

Here’s to making ProductCampToronto a success!

Sweet! I was selected to do a demonstration of Blueprint Requirements Center at DemoCampToronto18!

Now, the trick will be squeezing what’s typically a 40 minute demo into 5 minutes… Or, rather, the trick will be selecting the appropriate things to remove.

Wish me luck!

Tonight I attended my second Toronto tech event, taking advantage of get-togethers orchestrated by various members of Toronto’s tech community, around various technologies and themes.

The first event I attended was the awesome DemoCamp 17 back in February (at The Toronto Board of Trade, in First Canadian Place), which played host to over 400 people. It really was a great way for me to start to learn about who the players are in Toronto.

Tonight’s event was Toronto Flex Camp 2, at the MaRS Centre (located at University & College), a venue I had been looking forward to checking out.

Continue reading Camping Around Toronto »