a2geeks Blog from Nov 26, 2008

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Eli Neiburger, Associate Director for IT and Production at AADL. I'm responsible for the Library's Community Relations, Marketing, IT, and Production departments, including library events, aadl.org, aadl.tv and our other web products, software development, networking and IT support for AADL's 5 locations, plus planning, budgeting, content partnerships and other CTO-type stuff.

Why are you attending ArbCamp?

I'm attending Arbcamp because we're a little disconnected from Ann Arbor's geek community here in our nonprofit world, and I'd like to get a better idea of what needs there are in the geek community that the Library could help meet. I'm also very interested in helping hacker culture hit critical mass in Ann Arbor and provide a foundation for truly geeky projects and events around the area.

If you were to lead a session, what would it be about?

I'd like to lead a session about geeks and the library if that's not too self-serving; also we've been doing a lot with Drupal here and I'm always interested in trading ideas with other Drupallers. I'm also interested in geekly informal education; I think that the whippersnappers of today don't have the same opportunities to get deep into hardware or programming the way that we children of the 70s and 80s did, and that there are some great opportunities to pull the geek community together and produce some awesome youth-oriented events that give kids a chance to see past the interface.

Tell us one random fact about yourself.

I aspire to form a Klezmer band that plays only covers of videogame music.

Where can we find you?

My personal blog is http://ulo.tricho.us and I'm ulotrichous on Twitter.

An interesting talk by Tim O'Reilly last week here at Stanford, at their weekly computing systems colloquium (which UM should do, in addition to the weekly entrepreneurship seminar series):

Watching the Alpha Geeks: What Hackers and Enthusiasts Tell Us About the Shape of the Future

Time after time, new industries are born through the activities of people having fun. The personal computer and the world wide web as well as sports like snowboarding and kitesurfing were pioneered not by entrepreneurs - they came later - but by hackers, enthusiasts, and other amateurs playing with technology in their spare time. In this talk, Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, will look at what the hackers are telling us now, in areas including Web 2.0, collective intelligence and the future of the internet, mobile computing, sensors, synthetic biology, personal genomics, and the future of manufacturing.

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PDF version here

Last day for early-bird registration to CodeMash is this Saturday!

http://groups.google.com/group/codemash/browse_thread/thread/dcb651262a9ea124

The conference, held annually in a safari-themed indoor waterpark and resort in Sandusky, OH in January, got very high marks from a number of local a2geeks last year, some of whom return this year as speakers. Dianne Marsh at SRT Solutions is an organizer for the conference.