Thanks to all who attended our Refresh Philly January event this past Monday at the Comcast Center. Almost 100 people RSVP’d for the event on Facebook. The room was packed with community members from many different backgrounds: college students, designers, developers, activists, photographers, etc. Before the speakers started, there was plenty of time for everyone to network, hang out and get to know one another. Refresh Philly January was sponsored by CIM, who provided the space and the delicious snacks and drinks. We livestreamed this event on Mogulus and will have video content shortly.
The event kicked off with a demo of Chirp from Shaun Gehring. Chirp is a website that allows you to share what you are watching on tv with your friends on social networks like Plaxo. How often are you sitting in front of your laptop while watching tv? Log into Chirp while you’re at it and see what your friends are watching and start chatting about your favorite shows. Read more on the Chirp blog.
Next up was Tom Boutell from P’unk Ave leading a presentation on Symfony, a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5. Tom explained in detail how Symfony made developing Philly-centric sites like Salsadelphia and the GPTMC Pressroom a breeze! Want to get a better handle on Symfony? Tom’s your guy!
Check out Tom’s Symfony Slides »
A sketch by Jonny Goldstein (@jonnygoldstein)
We finished off the night with an interactive discussion led by Phil Charron and Russ Starke, Experience Design Directors from Think Brownstone. From SMART goals to SuperFriends, Phil & Russ dared us to make real change in Philadelphia. Where will we take it from here? Stay tuned!
We’ll be back again on Monday February 2nd for our next Refresh event. RSVP today on Facebook!
We had a blast on Monday and hope you did, too. We want to make this event awesome for you, so PLEASE provide feedback in the comments to help us improve Refresh Philly! See you next month!
Check out these other great recaps:
Jim Cavanagh - the long shadow
refresh philly recap
Tom Boutell
What the heck is a front end developer?
Phil Charron - Think Brownstone
Refresh Philly Recap
January 15th, 2009 at 9:46 am
I had a wonderful time at Refresh and I’m excited about the possibilities for the future.
I enjoyed Tom’s Symfony presentation a lot! Tom has a very pragmatic way of disseminating information while sprinkling in humor, anecdotes, and logical examples to help get his points across. Alex Hillman commented that Tom would be great a doing screen casts. I heartily agree.
I liked what Phil and Russ had to say when I could follow where the discussion was doing. I think a slide show would have added a little bit more structure to their talk to help describe what they wanted to cover. I often felt a little lost and struggled to follow the conversation at points. Having said that, their enthusiasm was top notch and they obviously are excellent at what they do.
Big thanks to everyone who presented and to CIM for hosting Philly’s first Refresh!
January 15th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I’d be interested in knowing the City to Suburb attendee ratio.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:45 am
That’s some good feedback, JP - we talked afterward about how we may have gone a bit far down the free-form discussion path for a first meeting - especially with the size of the turnout and the diversity of disciplines represented! We also walked away agreeing with you that a small handful of slides to anchor things a bit would have helped our original intent to keep things loose - some more structure is always a good thing with larger audiences. That said, thanks for the good words too - we look forward to being participants in the upcoming meetings. See you there!
January 17th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
[...] then check out the official recap at RefreshPhilly.org or see it for yourself at the next meeting RSVP [...]