BarCampKC – Late Summer/Fall 2002

I’m thrilled to be abusing this April Fool’s Day to announce three entirely serious participants confirmed for the BarCampKC 2008 roster. So far we’ve got two amazingly talented locals and one spectacular out-of-towner from San Francisco lined up. Read on for the details and we’ll of course be adding more people (you?) as things firm up:
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Steve Mitchell, President — Byteworks, Inc.:

Steve has run Byteworks since 1998 in both a full-time and part-time capacity and more recently left his role as Group Leader for Java Development at a financial services company to focus on enterprise consulting. For the past three years Steve has also been an instructor for Centriq Foss Java Career Changers and though at this point we’re not sure what exactly Steve will be presenting on we know it’s gonna be good.

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Tom Mornini, CTO and Co-Founder — EngineYard:

On top of being a great software developer Tom’s also a talented entrepreneur who in January helped secure EngineYard’s 3.5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital. He’s also co-author of O’Reilly’s Capistrano and the Rails Application Lifecycle. The only suggestion given to Tom for BarCampKC was to consider “any general Rails or EY-specific topic” and regardless of the specifics he’ll likely have compelling stories to tell and wisdom to share. Some sessions on local business development for small companies are also shaping up on the roster (see below) so I personally think Tom will prove a great resource for anyone interested in the Rails software framework for business or Rails in the large enterprise setting. Finally, Kansas City’s own Jason Clinton also has an O’Reilly book in the works and so hopefully he and other members of KCRUG can connect with Tom at some point if the timing works out.

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Phil Pell, Manager of Project Management — Sunflower Group, Inc.:

In addition to being one of Kansas City’s local coffee connoisseurs Phil has been in IT for over ten years and a professional program manager for much of that. Phil is helping to organize BarCampKC and hopes to lead up a session track tentatively entitled “How small businesses can collaborate and compete with Big Business for mutual benefit“. Currently Phil is working on a project which he plans to present on at BarCampKC known as InnovationSwarm.com: “…an online business collaboration tool designed to connect large businesses in need of novel or unconventional solutions or products with smaller firms that can provide them and to connect small firms to each other in “swarms” to enable collaboration between disparate core competencies.“.

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