tech-wednesday-presentation

Interactive Presentation

(psst, turn your phones on...)

My name is Daniel Hollands and I'm here today to give you an interactive presentation on Birmingham.IO - so please make sure your phones are turned on and connected to the internet.

Who Am I?

Now while you're doing that, I'm going to spend just a moment telling you a bit about myself.

As you can see, I'm a Web Developer, with experience using a range of different technologies. Apparantly I'm also Batman (don't tell anyone) Anyway, what this means is realistic terms is that most of my days look something like this..

Birmingham.IO

Bringing digital dialogue to Birmingham's connected community.

Anyway, getting to the point, Birmingham.IO is an online community forum aimed at the tech scene in Birmingham. It caters to entreprenerus, coders, designers, geeks, makers and business men, and let them communicate with one another.

Powered by Discourse

Now I could spend hours talking about its technology stack, such as the fact that its powered by discourse, which has a Ruby on Rails backend powering an Ember front end, but I'd much rather talk with you about some of the positive things which have already come as a result of the site.

Planet Birmingham

http://planet.birmingham.io/

The first of these is Planet Birmingham - an aggrigator which collects together blogs aimed at the tech scene within Birmingham. Richard Cunningham had the original idea, and working with Stuart Langridge, they used the forum to colloborate on the project.

Fantasy League Planet Birmingham

http://flpb.herokuapp.com/

Coming hot off the heels of this is Fantasy League Planet Birmingham, a fantasy football type game where you're given a budget to buy blogs, and depending on how many posts they make, you move up and down the ranks. There's only one problem with Fantasy League Planet Birmingham...

I suck at it!

Women in Technology Meet Up

Birmingham.IO is also really good place for promoting your events, while allowing you to get feedback from attendees. A good example of this is the Women in Technology meet up which happened a couple of weeks ago, which I'm told had a far greater turn out than expected, due to it's promotion on the forum.

Whisk App Beta Testing

I've also been working with Julie Yates of Whisk, who has been looking for people that can visit their office to beta test their app. Together we decided it would be a good idea to host an event one weekend, enticing people with the promice of pizza and games in exchange for their help. This is something which will not only will be promoted by the forum, but participants of the event will also gain a special badge on their community profile.

Lots and lots of conversation

As of Monday there are 115 members on the site, who have started 233 topics, made up of 1501 posts, of which 277 have been 'liked'.

And of course, lets not forget that it has brought a lot of people together, who visit it on a daily basis.

Please stand up

I promised you an interactive presentation, so lets get started (this part could go horribly wrong). I'd like you all to stand up. Now, If you're already a member of the community - you're free to sit back down again.

Now take your phone out of your pocket, open a browser, and visit birmingham.io. For people of suitable technical prowess, You can this QR code if you're too lazy to type. Once the site has loaded, you'll see a Log in button at the top, hit this, you'll be presented with the oppertunity to create an account - which is exactly what I would like for you to do now. For you social media connected type, you can get an account by clicking on one of the relevent buttons, else just follow the simple instructions and you'll be connected before you know it.

Thank You

Any questions?

Daniel Hollands

@limeblast

danielhollands.co.uk

limeblast.co.uk

tech-wednesday-presentation

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