Bug Blogger

Good to see you

We had a great time at our first Open House.  About 30 of you came by to play with the BUG firsthand, see the SDK in action, and meet and greet the Bug Labs team.  We had some fantastic questions, ranging from programming the BUG from the command line, what the hardware pinout looks like for constructing custom BUGmodules, and even specifics about the BUGmotion's (motion sensor/accelerometer module) microprocessor and conducting real time data sampling - sweet! Some of the best inquiries to date.  It's great to see so many of you excited to dig in and make the best of BUG.

This also means that we have to do another Open House soon.  For the next event, what do you think? Should we throw in an SDK installfest, BUGapp coding session, hardware demo and spec talk, or something else?  Let us know and stay tuned to bugblogger.com for details on our next get-together.

Thanks again, and hope to see you again soon!

Come on down...

Our doors are always open - but we'd thought we'd swing them open a bit wider on Wednesday, the 26th - between 6:00 - 8:00. 

You asked us about the hardware, you wanted to check out the office, you think BUG is the tool to solve your problem, you are a DIYer hacker and want to know more about what makes the BUG tick, you want to talk about your dream application, you are an entrepreneur and/or and artist with a great idea, or maybe you want to work with the Bug Labs team.... whatever the reason may be, we hope to see you.

You can find us at 915 Broadway (between 20th and 21st) on the 11th floor, at the end of the hall in Suite 1109.  If you can't make it this time, don't fret and stay tuned - we'll do it again before too long.

'Tis the Season....

The Bug+NY event and the Holiday season got us in the spirit to participate in a local community event.   A group of us got together for the day at the Yorkville Common Pantry (YCP).  The YCP is dedicated to reducing hunger and promoting dignity and self-sufficiency.  As the largest nonsectarian  neighborhood-based provider of emergency food in New York City, YCP provides 1,250,000 meals annually.  It's an amazing, welcoming place.   In addition to hot meals and 24/7 emergency family food bank, they also have an on-site barber and other services for all their clients living in the Upper East Side and East Harlem.  This Holiday season they plan to distribute more than 3,900 gifts to children in the community.

I saw that distributing gifts is much more difficult than reaching in a pile of donated gifts and passing them out.  Each gift is sorted by gender and age and matched to the profile of clients - so each family gets a bag of appropriate gifts for their family.  In addition, to donating, sorting, distributing, etc.... the YCP must record the price of each of these gifts for IRS purposes (yuck).   

The Bug Lab's group, armed with laptops, was very welcome and deemed perfect for the job.   A group of us, for the day, only made a tiny dent in what needs to get done in the next couple months - but it was a fun time.  It was great to see all the gifts waiting to go out to eager little kids - and to be part of it even in a small way.

Open Source Volunteering

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?

Bug volunteers at the Pine Street Inn

On our trip to Bug+ Boston the team wanted to contribute a bit of our elbow grease to help out in the community.  We came across a great organization, called Pine Street Inn , who was willing to let us park our rented RV in their lot and teach us what goes into feeding the hungry.

I think 'volunteering' doesn't generally come across as a fun word - especially after a long night of Bug+ing.  But we had a blast.  We cracked hundreds of eggs, mixed hundreds of pounds of ground beef with our hands (in sanitary gloves, of course), delicately arranged hundreds of lasagna noodles, and wrapped hundreds of sandwiches.  All told, I would guess our small team prepared a big 1,700 meals or so.  Where we generally spend our mental efforts on issues like configuration compatibility and making sure a service tracker doesn't interfere with application code, we suddenly found ourselves focused on the very different, bigger, but simpler task of feeding and distributing thousands of meals.

We knew Pine Street Inn had a great cafeteria service for all who came in, and that they had a night outreach program to bring food to the hungry.  We didn't know Pine Street was a big, efficient, and caring powerhouse firing on all cylinders (unlike the motorhome), allowing homeless people to secure permanent housing and get on the path to self-sufficiency.   We saw a clean and welcoming emergency shelter where 700 individuals sleep every night - which includes the largest shelter and resource for women in New England.   There was medical and psychiatric services, job training, literacy programs, work programs, elder programs, and outreach teams bringing food, clothing, blankets, medical assistance, and compassion to streets every night.

I don't know how all this gets done.   Obviously, it takes tons of activity, energy, resources, passion, and compassion.  What would happen if places like Pine Street Inn didn't exist?  How can we be more involved in our communities?   I think I can speak for us all when I say that spending a few hours at Pine Street allowed a glimpse at the bigger (more real) world that we tend to forget about when we are living our lives.