BarCampAustin III will be held Saturday, March 8th in Austin, Texas..Y'all

Proposed Sessions (30 minutes to 1 hour)

Attendees will vote on sessions in the AM; sessions with the most votes will be held later in the evening when SXSW folks can join in.

• On Twitter - Engineers Alex Payne, Blaine Cook and designer Ben Fullerton discuss where the popular microblogging/status/messaging service is at, where it's going, and whatever you'd like to get out of it. The discussion can be as developer- or user-focused as the crowd would like it to be :) (Session requested by whurley)
• Managing your Community - DawnFoster would love to lead a discussion about best practices (what works, what doesn't, etc.) I don't like to talk at people, so this will be some kind of interactive round table discussion for community peeps.
• Communication in International Projects - Kevin Ready would be happy to discuss how communication on international technical teams can become a roadblock to project success, and what managers can do to get things back on track (or keep them on track from the beginning).
• An API Design Postmortem - Ben Vinegar would be willing to share some lessons learned in designing/developing the FreshBooks API; mistakes, successes, woulda-coulda-shouldas, and so on
• Simple Semantics for Mashups Cyc is an AI project that's been going on in Austin for 20 years. Some of the results of that project have been released as free software, others under a research license, and now, some are being made available as web services. This session will cover what's available, and how to access Cyc semantics with REST to use in your mash-ups. Michael Witbrock (VP for Research at Cycorp) will present.
• Widgets and the Future of the Social Web - Justin Thorp of Clearspring Technologies would be interested in leading a discussion on the role of widgets (or modularizing your Web content) in the future of the social Web.
• Practical Semantic Markup ChristopherStJohn You know how to make your pages look pretty to people, learn how cool technologies from the folks who brought you HTML let you make your pages pretty to machines, too. See how RDFa (and microformats), GRDDL and SPARQL can work together to make your data come alive as well as just look good. This session is guaranteed not to use the words "Semantic Web", "RDF" or "Ontology", not even once. The focus is on stuff you can use, right away. In addition to the presentation in the evening (assuming it gets the votes), I'd like to do a workshop with people who will be at BarCamp during the day.
• The Connnected living room Ben Cote will talk about the connected living room and the future of content delivery on the open platform DivX Connected experience. Will also walk through the just-released-in-time-for-Barcamp SDK upon which developers can customize the experience and write custom plug-ins to extend the platform that much further.
• ASP.NET on Mono and Lighttpd, in ur enteprise savin ur monies R. Tyler Ballance will present a session on running high performance ASP.NET websites, on Mono, on Lighttpd. No need for Visual Studio, IIS, or even Windows (woot)
• Social Media / Community Media / Social Justice - Stefan Wray will facilitate a discussion about the intersection of these three spheres: (1) web-based social media, (2) non-commercial community media in the public interest, and (3) environmental and social justice struggles. What are the challenges and opportunities where these spheres meet? Stefan participated in an Austin Community Meeting on Media, Technology and Social Justice in 2005, helped organize an Austin Media Justice gathering in 2006, and was a lead organizer for the Texas Community Media Summit held in Austin on March 1, 2008. channelAustin (Public Access Community Television), where he works, is wanting to move "beyond television" to also embrace web-based video production and distribution. At the Save Our Springs Alliance , where he sits on the Board, the organization wants to become more savvy about social media technologies to better serve the community with environmental news and information.
• Accessibility: How Accessible Should Your Site Be? - Jeff Beckham would like to talk about the importance of building accessible websites at all levels (personal sites, small businesses, big companies, government) and also talk about the different demands placed on the owners of those sites (design considerations, business considerations, time-to-market, etc.).
• White House 2.0 – Campaign 2008 is often referred to as the first “Internet Election.” Presidential hopefuls quickly learned that Web sites offered more than just a fundraising tool. Rather, savvy campaign staffers incorporated online tactics into their overall communications strategy and scrambled to leverage social media sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter in an effort to gain votes at the ballot box. However, regardless of the outcome in November, the question still remains as to how all of this will translate to government post-election. Will there ever be a “Blogger-in-Chief” and how will technology change the way Americans interact with their public officials? Former White House Internet director David Almacy, Vice President of Digital Strategies, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide will discuss these and other issues surrounding the future of eGov.
• Mobility and Physical World Interactions, Information Ubiquity and Near Field Communication - C. Enrique Ortiz, eZee inc. - Everything around us is data. And it doesn't stop there. Everything around us is actionable. Imagine a world where we can interact with the objects around us, using your mobile handset. In this session Enrique will cover physical world interactions and information ubiquity, uses-cases and the related technologies.
• Helping the Disconnected: Using Your Sweet Social Media Skillz to Help Bring Freedom to Burma Elaine Allan. You can do everything you can to get connected to as many people as possible, but do you really understand how powerful you can be when you use these tools for good? Austin currently serves as home to hundreds of Burmese, Burundian, and Rwandan refugees, many of whom have a hard time making ends meet. Learn how you can use your connections to help get these people off their feet and spread the message of the real devastation currently occurring in Burma.
• Hug the XO Anne Gentle would like to get togother with other XOers. If you haven't gotten your hands on an XO from the One Laptop Per Child Project yet, or if you want to bring your XO to let it play with the other XOs, let's have a session about hugging your XO. Find out how to trick out the XO icon colors, make the turtle in Turtle Art spell your name, and chat with other XO users. Bring your tips and tricks.
• Ask A Video Guy Ever wondered what makes a good video? Rex Hollingsworth will be on hand to answer any of your questions, as well as have practical tips and demonstrations guaranteed to improve your end product, no matter what the client or how it is delivered! Some subjects that will be covered include: storyboarding, FOSS, editing techniques, titling, homebrew equipment, and more.

Demo Sessions (10 to 20 minute product/technology/tricks demos)

• Photonic - Mac OS X Leopard Flickr browser, searcher, and uploader. Jeremy Derr from Austin-based Mac developer Barton Springs Software will be on-hand to demo their new application, which allows you to view your Flickr streams, sets, groups, and contacts in a slick Leopard application with Core Animation.

• WebClip2Go - Software developer Michael Yuan discusses a new open source project WebClip2Go to do content adaption from the regular web to mobile devices. The project allows humans, instead of machines, to pick out interesting parts of live web pages (i.e., web clips) and automatically make them available on mobile phones. The web application generates different views for different devices, including a special "native" look and feel for the iphone. WebClip2Go also powers the SXSW Mobile Companion.

• OrgSync.com - On today's college campus, the need for a mass communication solution is becoming more and more apparent. OrgSync.com provides online social networking software to universities nationwide. By connecting students to their student organizations, campus life has never been more interactive.

• Viewzi.com - Viewzi, a Dallas, TX based startup working on a visual search engine/data mashup. Instead of displaying search in the default text list, results are tailored to the type of search you are performing.

• PostaBargain.com - PostaBargain.com, Ever had a hard time finding a bargain through the hundreds of online listings on Ebay/Craigslist/etc? PostaBargain.com is a virtual space where users post, vote and find Great Bargains online. Together we bring efficiency to online shopping. We're a brand new local start up and we'd like to start our beta testing this Saturday at BarCamp Austin III!

• Radiant CMS - radiantcms.org, Ben Morrow discusses the advantages of using Radiant, a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams. Created around the Ruby on Rails framework, it provides:
  • An elegant user interface
  • Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language
  • A first-class extension/plugin system
  • Simple user management and permissions

• CommunityGoals.com - CommunityGoals catalyzes community change by connecting people who have goals, people who give money, and people who provide solutions.
  • Have a goal? - Just follow an easy-to-use process to help connect you with supporters, raise money for your goal, find solution providers, choose the best solution for your goal, and verify that the work is done as expected.
  • Have money to contribute? - Find a meaningful goal and give. But you also get to participate -- by discussing and voting on the proposed solutions.
  • Want to offer your services? - Offer solutions at a price that you choose. Winning bidders carry out the work and are paid when it is completed and verified.
  • (Presented by David James of Collective Insight LLC, looking forward to visiting Austin after recently moving to Washington, DC.)

• BoxCloud: Dead-simple file sharing - BoxCloud speeds up iterative design cycles by letting designers share files right from the desktop where they work - without any uploading, emailing, or ftping. Clients access, review, and edit files using just a web browser.

• CloudFire: Set your media free - CloudFire lets your share your photos, videos, and music right from your desktop or appliance - without any uploading, emailing, or ftping. This service is in private beta and has not yet officially launched.

Requested sessions

• Anything on iPhone development - The SDK SHOULD be live by then, so hopefully some crash course coding will have occurred.
• Merb vs Ruby on Rails
• Teach Me Quicksilver -- Chris Brogan..