Today Mary Anne Moorman, story strategist extraordinaire, was in OfficeXpats and explained Strategic Storytelling. At its core is the Story Wheel: Layup > situation > means > flaws > triumph!

Also:

1. keep it short. 3 minutes!
2. speak from the heart. Vilnerability is okay!
3. be passionate and energetic.
4. watch listener and customize on the spot, ask questions to engage them.
5. end with a question. You want action!

One tip she did not mention is this: PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! And OfficeXpats provide many opportunities for practice for folks on or near Bainbridge Island – at events like the Thursday afternoon happy hour, Friday morning Bainbridge Business Connection and many Tuesday workshops where participants introduce themselves. (have you seen my new unofficial OfficeXpats events calendar?).

I created a google calendar for OfficeXpats events and copied them all over from the OfficeXpats website so now they all appear alongside my own calendars on my phone and computer. You are welcome to get the calendar for yourself by subscribing (subscribe links: xml ical) or bookmarking the html version in your browser.

I will do my best to keep my (unofficial) OfficeXpats events calendar updated as I get information through the weekly newsletters but I make no accuracy guarantees! Contact me for write access to the calendar if you want to help keep it updated or email me with corrections. Thanks!

Update: I am curious to see how Google Calendar can be used collaboratively to maintain a community events calendar. Some learnings already:

• by default it is not possible to know when someone changes the calendar, which creates a potentially dangerous situation where events disappear or appear without warning. However, this can be addressed by setting up notifications by email. 
• it is possible to have a repeating event (e.g. workshops on Tuesdays at noon and Bainbridge Business Connections on Fridays at 7:30am) and then go in later to change a specific event to add details about it as they become known. This is great!
• It is possible to copy an event from the community calendar into your own calendar when you plan to join that event.
• I also like the Google Calendar feature to be sent a daily agenda by email at 5am.

Update: I added events from this week’s OfficeXpats newsletter and am enjoying having the calendar events in Google.

Meanwhile, I experimented with importing the official calendar into Google which appears to work fine –  just right click on the “ical import” link below the calendar at http://www.officexpats.com/events/. Then paste the link in Google Calendar’s “Add by URL” option.

There is a bug, however – the timezone is wrong on the calendar so all events are skewed by a few hours. Also I noticed that not all events are in the calendar and repeating events don’t have updated information about speakers at specific events.

My favorite part though is the long drawn out singing and rhyming of Botswana and Ghana.

And again with the lyrics:

The biggest problem with making your own kegerator is that the freezers and fridges available tend to be the wrong shape and size to fit what needs to go in the fridge. The solution posted here uses a regular chest freezer and a self-made wooden frame to make it taller. The result is a not-so-ugly kegerator serving four beers on tap! I love the idea.

The craigslist post will go away when it is sold, but I saved the pictures and original text here for future reference.

4 tap kegerator w/ kegs and gas – $400 (Maple Leaf, Seattle, WA)

Don’t make me think of you every day

Each user gets a daily budget of 3 “use it or lose it” TrustCloud points to give out to others. I don’t understand the rationale behind this stingy budget at all. It is so modest that when you get going endorsing your friends you immediately run out of points and are told to come back tomorrow.

I think it’s a bit much for a “utility service” to ask users to come back every day. It is never going to ever be the center of any user’s universe no matter how useful it is. Just wait until someone endorses me and send me a notification, or send me an update occasionally with a summary of how my reputation score is going up (or down). While you’re at it, you can send me progress updates on the development of the platform, new connection methods that are coming online, ask for feedback, etc.

Don’t make me shoot in the dark

I’ve been using TrustCloud to shoot in the dark by endorsing 3 friends a day for two weeks now and only very few people are reciprocating. As you can see in the screenshot, I haven’t earned a single “virtue badge” yet and I’m a very connected and well-loved (and humble) person! So I have pretty much given up on endorsing others unless they endorse me.

Am I spamming my friends?

There’s another reason for giving up too which I will come to next. TrustCloud makes it difficult for users to tell which of their friends are on TrustCloud already. You connect TrustCloud to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay etc to build up your reputation score, but I guess your friends and contacts are supposed to come across your TrustCloud reputation not on TrustCloud.com but via the Trust Card you put on your blog and craigslist postings. This seems like a missed opportunity and I think makes TrustCloud less useful than it could be to enable users to help each other.

Sorry!

This brings me to my apology to Facebook friends I may have been spamming. Basically, you can’t tell which of your friends are on TrustCloud already unless you search names at random or are endorsed by someone else. I asked about this and,  according to @trustcloud on twitter, “the people that are not yet on trustcloud you are indirectly inviting by endorsing them.” This seems to imply that I am basically Facebook spamming my friends over and over again through TrustCloud. If this is true, then I apologize and will stop endorsing people until this bug is ironed out.

So now I will just relax and just continue being a trustworthy, good person and let my trust badges come to me.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”. In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas. If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl…

[source: the interwebs. and most recently Simona Opitz]

This starts to get really interesting only when more people get on board. So if you know me and want to join my web of trust online, please do the following:

1) create an account at http://www.trustcloud.com – it’s quick and easy. Then follow the directions to connect it to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other networks you use that are supported.

2) go to my profile at https://trustcloud.com/!/tobiaseigen and endorse me! I will then be notified and can endorse you back. We each get three +T endorsements we can give a day to people we trust.

3) send me your feedback, especially if you have concerns. Please drop me a line by email directly or add a comment to this blog post.

Thanks!

TrustCloud is a startup that provides, currently for free, a web interface for quickly and easily setting up an account that lets you “claim your trustworthy online data” and then use it “anywhere” using a so-called “TrustCard”. I went through the process and within a few minutes verified myself via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and eBay, as well as my email addresses, mobile phone (sms code) and mailing address (postcard with code to come in the mail).

TrustCloud gives you a score measured against what it calls “existential”, “behavioral” and “transactional” measurements. Both the score and actions you (and your contacts) can take to improve your score are displayed on your dashboard in a simple, very streamlined interface. They calculate your score via the networks you connect your account to and what you do over there (e.g. Facebook posts, ebay purchases and reviews). You can then use your TrustCard to show your reputation in everything you do – by linking to it as you would to your other online profiles (mine is at https://trustcloud.com/!/tobiaseigen), showing a widget on your blog (mine is at http://saidia.org on the right), in your email signature, in your Craigslist postings (I tried this out on a post selling a Roomba), etc. Below are some screenshots.

TrustCloud also has an API which would hint at the possibility that it’s possible to, for example, add functionality to community platforms like Kabissa to enable Kabissa members to add their TrustCard to their Kabissa account which would then be displayed on their profile page and blog posts. Since Kabissa uses Drupal, this would probably be fairly trivial to set up as a module.

All of this would be helpful for any online community, if TrustCloud takes off that is. Right now it’s hard to tell how far TrustCloud is and I haven’t seen anyone I know using it. As is often the case for startups like this, the target audience seems to be less civil society organizations working at the grassroots in Africa and more consumers in  the United States trying to save money on services and stuff they need by using peer to peer social platforms like craigslist.org, airbnb.com, couchsurfing.org etc.

I am getting ready for the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit taking place this weekend in Seattle. I’m looking forward to it – should be fun to feed my inner geek by delving into Drupal, the open source software platform that powers Kabissa, and to connect with local area Drupalistas in attendance to find out what they are working on and where we might be able to work together. I’m also looking forward to catching up with old friends who are coming to town for the event like Kurt Voelker and Ivan Boothe. It’s been a while.

What follows is a shameless copy-paste job of cherry picked session descriptions from the Drupal Summit program for Saturday followed by some notes on my goals for each session. I am not able to come Sunday. Suggestions and comments most welcome.

[Oh - and this reminds me that we should get the next Bainbridge Island Drupal User Group meeting on the calendar so we can keep working on issues like this and nurture our island Drupal community. It's not always easy for us to get into Seattle for the monthly Seattle Drupal Users Group meetups. Note to self to check in with Leif Utne, Marc Shor and the rest of the island Drupalistas to get this going.] 

Git super basics (10:00)

Git has continued to be the version control system of choice for Drupal and the related projects. If you have yet to take the plunge or are unsure of how to use git with Drupal during development this session is for you. This will be an interactive session so bring your laptop and take the plunge into git.

If you want to start contributing code to modules as patches, share work with others in your team, or start your own project you will want to use git.

• Create an ssh key on your platform of choice – Windows, Mac, Nix
• Initialize a repository for your project and check in some code.
• Make changes to your code and review it against your original code.
• Create a separate branch and merge those changes into your production branch.
• Clone Drupal 8

The above interactive examples will be done via your systems terminal application not a GUI. GUI’s are great but I believe clouds what is really happening with git when first learning how it works. The goal of this session is for you to leave with a solid understanding of git so that when you start to use a GUI you are confident about what you are doing.

Pre-session prep. Github has a great walk-through on setting git up on your system.

Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Personal goal: set up git and a working development environment on my laptop that lets me install and work on clean Drupal profiles.

Agile Project Management – Scrum & Drupal (11:15)

You’ve heard of Agile, and probably even worked on a team that said it was agile. You may have attended a scrum, or a standup worked off of a back log, and with iterative sprints, but do you really know what Scrum is? In this session, GregoryHeller, certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner will walk you through the various aspects of The Scrum Methodology, explain the different roles on a scrum team, and talk about applying scrum to Drupal projects, and applying scrum to projects for external clients.

Personal goal: learn about Scrum from the master, Gregory Heller, and reflect on how it might apply to Kabissa and the development of our platform with inputs from volunteer and contract developers. Think about how Scrum Methodology works with Redmine (the tracker we use at Kabissa)

Git it on (13:30)

Git is the latest and most exciting piece of SCM in a long time, even better it’s 100% open source. Git is now the main source control on drupal.org. Easy to install and super flexible, source control isn’t just for the corporate types anymore. This introductory session highlights how to use Git not only as a source control client in a team setting, but how to manage just about any kind of electronic information.

Providing the unique perspectives of a serial team developer and a freelance designer, this session will cover topics like:

• How to set up your repository
• How to commit
• How to share with others
• Branching and merging to maximize efficiency on a project
• How to use git to do other neat things besides manage your project code
• How to contribute back to the community by using git
• Tricky tips and tricks to make git fly – with a publicly shared git config file, shared using (what else) GIT!
• Why git is so special, why should anyone who works in web design / development should use it.
• Identifying the suck, how git helps find what broke & (if you care) whodunnit.
• Besides D.O. who else is using Git? (Hint: the answer may surprise you)

Warning: This session may contain odd humor, awkward metaphors, sudden flashes of inspiration and an intense desire to register for a GitHub account.

Personal goal: properly set up the git repository for Kabissa to make it as easy as possible for anyone who wants to contribute to Kabissa to do so and to make sure that code developed for Kabissa that can be shared back to Drupal is in fact shared back. Learn how it fits in with Redmine.

Drupal Archaeology (15:00)