Bounty Up is a service to collect online donations for a project, like the wildly successful MyFreeImplants.com, but for the rest of us — I wish I was kiddin’ about that site’s success. The tagline on BountyUp is “Ask for what you want, let the crowd pay for it.” Like the tagline, I’m being tongue in cheek, BountyUp has actually been used for a lot of wonderful projects.

It’s awesome to see an article about BountyUp’s service in the Times Colonist. The TC is Vancouver Island’s only widely distributed paper and is owned by CanWest Global Communications.

There is at least a couple of egregious errors in Tom Mcmillan’s article. The first “crowd-surfing” being comical, the second “millions” being a reminder of BountyUp’s potential.

The article also shares some of the wonderful details of the BountyUp story so far including:

• “… donations to fund projects for Oak Bay science students, North Carolina choirs and Middle East social activists.”
• “Starting out, I really wanted to change the world,” McKenty said.

I think I was among the first Joshua shared the idea with, and the passion to change the world was an important part of the equation from the beginning. He has done a great job applying his Web 2.0 expertise on this service, while continuing to work on other projects.

Hopefully, this article reflects momentum for the service, and BountyUp will have much deserved success!

Friday, Feb 22, day 1 of the 4th annual Northern Voice including an “internet bootcamp” for people new to blogging, Facebook, podcasting, wikis, and more. It is an awesome logging conference being held again at the Forestry Sciences Centre at UBC! It’s Tim Bray’s “favorite little blogger conclave.” This conclave is really for everyone, but if you don’t already have a ticket, see you next year.

The other part of day 1 will be the MooseCamp Unconference, the third year of this self-organizing, community from chaos event. The moose are loose and they converge to converse again! Organic and from the hip and with food this year!

Like any good participant in creations from chaos, I’m late in organizing a session — or maybe early because many sessions will be unveiled right at the event. Anyway, over the last week, I’ve been making some virtual calls to WordPress aficionados attending Northern Voice, very modest ones at that, and the result is a dynamic session where we will work together to solve our WordPress problems, WordPress and your Problems.

The plan — plan to change — is for the first half to be spent discussing problems and experiences in small groups and then us all coming together to discuss the groups’ discoveries and some of the problems that still taught us with the whole group.

Hopefully, in the small groups, you will also swap blogging stories and 411.

Some of the small groups could be solving problems related to:

• Getting going on WordPress.com – Richard Eriksson (sightings) also doing the Blogging 101 session of Internet Bootcamp (Podcast of his 2007 session of the same title)
• Setting up WordPress (+ using it for CMS) – Jim Groom (sightings) (notes) brings all his experience on using WordPress MU for the campus-wide blogging initiative at the University of Mary Washington and running WordPress on his personal blog. Saturday with D’Arcy, he is presenting Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform (NV 2007: with D’Arcy More than just a Blog)
• Beautiful prose and pictures – Rebecca Bollwitt (miss604) (sightings) is a Vancouver blogger, who loves WordPress, and is amoug the best I know for putting together prose and pictures into a tasty post. Or maybe you need some technical help with live blogging. She is a Northern Voice volunteer, and Saturday will be leading the panel Sports Blogging and Podcasting.
• Themes & CSS – you? Could really use a themer or designer to lay down some cascading flavor .
• Plugins – Duane Storey (sightings) author of numerous awesome WordPress plugins including Crossroads Flickr Plugin, CoolExcerpts, WordTwit Twitter, and he is currently working on Viper Cache.
  
• Messing up the code and contributing to WordPress – me, I guess.

Additional experts on hands:

• Chris “WordPress code is messy” Lott (sightings) and he still likes it! Saturday presenting The Blog is Dead! Long live bloggers (NV 2007: with Darcy Mashups for Non-Programmers and Social Software for Learning Environments [podcast])
• D’Arcy Norman from WordPress to Drupal and back again. (sightings) Saturday with Jim doing, Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform (NV 2007: with Jim More than just a Blog, with Chris Mashups for Non-Programmers and Social Software for Learning Environments [podcast])
• David Peralty (sightings) Head of Marketing at Splashpress Media, he is a pro blogger, has published over 4000 articles, and contributes to many blogging news. He has also been know to hack up a theme, make multiple loops, and streamline upgrading.
• Lorraine Murphy (sightings) as well as her famous pop culture blog raincoaster.com, she regularly runs Blogging for Beginners course with titles like “From zero to Technorati in 7 hours”. She is also volunteering at Northern Voice. (NV 2007 Stats: The Forbidden Love)
• Joshua McKenty (sightings), founder of BountyUp.com. serial entrepreneur, long-term technologist and amateur WordPress
  hacker, he’s had good luck glueing WP and BBpress into other sites,
  from Smarty integration to Single-Sign-On (using cookie hacks and SQL
  views).

The groups will be formed around your problems. What problem do you need help with? Post a comment here or add to the wiki page.

As I mentioned each of these aficionados is modest — some I had to trick to volunteer — and I bet you are modest too. WordPress is a rich environment, and by sharing your insights with us, you will surprise yourself with your own expertise . You will also be surprised that we have the same problems. Is there an interesting problem that you have solved and can help others solve to?

Depending on where the interest is we will reconfigure the session on the fly.

It won’t be scheduled during Blogging 101 or Photocamp. Any other sessions to avoid butting heads with? I won’t be arriving until Friday morning, because I’m still through mid-April at the Pregnancy Conference and after that I will be at the First Baby Conference for at least a few months. If there is interest some of us can get together later in the day and take a look at WordPress 2.5 which is still in development, but nearing beta quality, but I want this to be focused on solving people’s problems today.

Welcome to the Thunderdome! Bloggers and problems enter, only bloggers exit!

Yesterday, I found out that Victoria, BC, Canada software consultant development company Mercurial Communications is no more, though you wouldn’t know it looking at their web site.

I only worked there a short time, but it was a great time, full of learning, laughing and creating great software, as wrote in my article “No longer a Merc“.

Writing this article, I am reminded of the informational interview I had with Mercurial CEO Chris Coldwell, which Chris Campbell helped me arrange, prior to me graduating from university. Although it seemed that there was an opportunity to be further explored with his company, his insights helped me solidify my decision to join IBM. Although Mercurial was not the company then in 2000 that it later became, the generosity of Chris Coldwell stuck with me — and I have been told numerous similar stories.

Chris Coldwell greatly cares about his people, and I imagine thse events are very hard for him (and also on his right hand person Leon Carl who also cares enormously about the people he works with).

The good news is that the technology industry in Victoria is very healthy, and I am certain that all the wonderful ex-Mercs will be back on top soon.

Mercurial itself was on the very top mid-year 2005, a few months before I left. This was reflected in Mercurial winning numerous awards that year and continuing to be among Profit Magazine’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies.

Since I left Mercurial, it has been on a spiralling fall, and many mercs had left before this end.

As I have written before, I do know some of these wonderful people well, and quite a few of them joined the Flock: Raj Paul (no longer), Joshua McKenty, Richard Phan, Steve Bengston, Chris Campbell , Jacky Zhang , Ishika Paul, Clayton Stark, Rick Tessner (was contract), Brij Charan, Mark Lise, Marcus Redivo, Bryan Hudson, Ryan Tomaselli, Len Kirby, Justin Louie, and now Leon Carl! That is one fantastic team!

I look forward to seeing the great things ahead for Chris Coldwell and all us ex-Mercs.