I recently became involved with the New York Volunteering Meetup.  After my first meeting, I was most interested in the range of involvement of participants.  First of all, group membership is around 275, but each meeting generally brings in less than 15 folks.  Secondly, it seemed some attendees came ready to sign up to serve, others were explaining their causes, and others wanted to share what they’ve done in the past or just meet like minded people.  Engaging everyone, or harnessing their energy, towards the same causes doesn’t seem easy.

Thinking of our group here at Bug Labs …. the avid cyclists in our office all took interest in volunteering their time to serve as guides for the Transportation Alternatives bike ride – which involved waking up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday.   More recently, Heather, Bug Labs’ Queen of QA, signed on to be a buddy to an elderly New Yorker as part of the Caring Community program.   I think we are all passionate and giving, but it’s easy to see that if you want to volunteer and get involved – it’s personal.

As we plan our next Volunteer Meetup, I’m thinking about how we can create meaning for the entire  group.  How can you create involvement, or better yet, continued interest?   I mean, there are 275 people that went out of their way to join the Meetup, but don’t seem to be active.

Allison Fine, in her book Momentum, takes a good deal of time to explain the parallels of community involvement and open source programming.   I thought this ironic as Bug Labs is all about open source, and I had never related it to volunteering, or giving back to the community.  How naive!  That’s what open source is.  In the open source software community, people contribute their ideas and they can participate how they want to.  Power flows from people who self-organize.  While this may seem chaotic, when it is managed well (like all good open source projects) a diffuse network of builders all interested in creating a better whole, make amazing progress.  The Meetup forum itself, is a great example of open source collaboration.  It provides an organized format for people to create and contribute based on the very topics that are of interest to them.

Perhaps applying this philosophy down one more level, into our own Volunteer Meetup group, has some value?   Maybe we could facilitate the posting of causes, as well as make it easier for those wanting to give their time and expertise.  This could allow people to be active in just the way they want.   Have you volunteered and enjoyed it?  What made it a good or bad experience?  Would you participate more if it was more related to a specific cause or if it was easier?  What makes it easier for you?

As a dual citizen let me wish my Canadian comrades a belated happy Thanksgiving and to my fellow Americans, an early happy Thanksgiving.  We are quite a bit swamped getting ready for launch and CES, not to mention prepping our turkey and stuffing and all that.  But we can’t let the year run out without a couple more BUG+ events, so we’re doing one in San Francisco at the end of November, followed by New York City in December.

BUG+SF is at Swig, a cool bar near Union Square (we call it the TenderNob, but that’s not too official or anything), on Thursday, November 29th.  The event starts at 6:00pm and goes until 9:00pm.  As always, all are welcome, and there’s no special VIP/l33t passes – all you have to do is show up.  We are using Upcoming to try to track RSVPs, which is always helpful, but again, not required.  Drinks are on us, and Peter (Bug’s founder and CEO) is flying out to hang with us West Coasters.  And he’s bringing a working unit, so this time we can truly get our geek on.  It’s been a long while since our first discussions in SF this past Summer, and we’re looking forward to meeting anyone who can join us for a fine beverage.

We are still firming up the timing and location for BUG+NY, but it’s probably going to happen around the 2nd week of December.  We’ll of course post here when we have the deets, but if you’d like to suggest an interesting spot, please comment away!

There’s been some questions posted asking, in essence, "why would you name a technology product BUG!"?  I agree it’s sorta counterintuitive so let me explain why we decided to do it.  There are three parts to the answer: 

Technically speaking, bugs are things that need to be fixed.  They are the proverbial moths in the mainframe.   Bugs are indicators of areas in a system that need improvement or at least attention.  Cast in that light, Bug Labs wants to be  a "bug" in the system of consumer electronics.  We want to be an agent of change and an indicator that things can, in fact, be different and, in our opinion, better for people.

Literally speaking, bugs (i.e. insects) comprise over 80% of all known species on Earth.  That’s a staggering percentage.  And, upon further investigation, it becomes clear why.  Insects have adapted themselves to an enormous variety of geographic areas and environmental conditions worldwide and have thrived in the process.  So what better example could there be for the power of localized, highly personalized and customized innovation (or in this case nature’s way of inventing – evolution)?  They are a perfect metaphor for what we’re trying to embody as a company.

Lastly, we think it’s a fun name.   And since we’re trying to put some of the fun back into hardware innovation, it feels right

So while it may strike some as a weird name for a technology company, so far it’s served us well!

We launched a new version of our website tonight and for the first time we’ve included pictures of how the actual product looks.  It’s an exciting moment because it’s the culmination of close to 18 months of hard work by the awesome Bug Labs team and it’s incredibly gratifying to see it all released to the public. 

It’s also a slightly scary moment because now, for the first time, we get to hear what everyone thinks of our work.  But this is where the discussion really begins.  Because everything we’re doing is open source, you are free to make it perfect yourself.  You want to change something?  Go right ahead.  And when you do, we’re hoping you share your improvement with everyone else so we all benefit.  It’s why we call our work community electronics instead of simply consumer electronics.  We, Bug Labs, don’t own the keys to your satisfaction, you do.  And this, in our humble opinion, is how it should be. 

Please let us know what you think!

Here’s some of the discussion so far:

Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, CrunchGear, Popular Science, MAKE