Seattle Startup Weekend

The non-Dev side of the room has been quietly consulting amongst ourselves about a skillbit(tm) blog. We’ll have one. We’re working now on pulling together all the pieces needed to make that happen - like where to get the blog, where to have it hosted (need some Dev input on that one) and making it look at least compatible with the rest of the site  so we’ll post more info on that as it’s ready.

Chuck in Design showed me the pages that he’s working on - they’ve got the design worked out and are starting to push out content. Someone else in Design is working with Dev on the functional UI and they’re preparing to mash that all together so that it works and looks good.

I came in thinking about how I was going to immediately start posting. Instead, before I even had my jacket off and stuff set down, I was in two quick back-to-back meetings. The first was on support costs for the financial model and the second was looking at next steps in BizDev, which includes synching up the actions and public-facing language.

The public-facing language is important - once we got past the thrashing and wheel-spinning yesterday, we started moving pretty quickly, albeit very organically - and the result is a mish-mash of language that’s not yet cohesive. In fact, there were some branding errors that went out in last night’s press releases that have to be corrected now today. Oops. And you know what - these things happen in real life too, so it’s good to notice now, fix it, and move on.

Maybe that’s the motto for how we work - Notice, Fix, Move On

I managed to get some tea in there somewhere too, and some awesome Costco bagels, courtesy nPost, and while I was still not yet set up and connected on the laptop, I took the opportunity to wander through and see what everyone else is up to already this morning.

UserEx is continuing to hash out look and feel with Design and functional specs with Dev Liaison while the Dev folks are off in their corner doing what they do to “make it work”. Wish I could provide more detail on exactly how that’s happening except that in my effort to mostly leave them alone to do their work and as a result, it’s mostly black box to me at the moment. Heck, I only just learned that the D in Django is not silent. Silly me.

Literally cool - we got to eat an ice cream cake (thank you again, Chris and Ponzi & thanks to Hans for arranging it) decorated with our new logo!

While the larger Dev work is underway and the rest of everyone is making progress on other major initiatives, the quick hit focus is on making a splash page so that when the press releases go out, we have something besides a parked page to show off.

Current thinking is that the splash page doesn’t even really have to be ‘finished’ as watching it evolve will show movement. Movement is good.

So - after running around asking each group what they feel is necessary to put up a splash page, the answers are:

• Dev is ready. If design send them some html, they can push it out
• Design has a logo about finished and thinks it would be good to have a tagline to go with it
• Marketing has some tag lines under consideration and we’re waiting for the coffee break folks to come back to either let us know which one we should use or hold off on the tagline for a later iteration of the splash page
• Back to the folks sending out press releases (which are being queued up in draft mode so that they’re all set to go once we’re ready to pull the trigger), they want an email address.
• Dev will let me know as soon as they have the email hosting part worked out.

And so it goes - these are exactly the kinds of dependencies that crop up in any project. It’s exciting to be going through it all in fast forward.

- Kimm