So every day in the life of a blogger is not glitz and glamour.
This Valentine’s Day and this blog post will likely prove that.
Some days you just have to put up the links for what are potential future subjects of blog posts and hope for the best.
Along with my post about The Six Corners I will also be blogging about open tech in Chicago and perhaps later elsewhere. The journey begins with a few words in a tv news report. The report said the University of Illinois was offering free online classes. Google quickly lead me to a site called Coursera. There indeed the University of Illinois offered a wonderful group of classes in business, English and Philosophy. Or some such grouping of classes I personally had enough of. All enjoyable but only if you do not have to be under the gun to become like the prof when it is just not you. Luckily there were offerings from other universities that were more me.
The first one I decided to take was offered by Dr. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan. A fun romp through the world of Internet History, Technology and Security. At the end of the class he came to the Starbuck’s In Chicago’s Palmer House for office hours. That was a nice turn I thought and really enjoyed the cross-section of being in a physical place with a virtual world instructor.
I had Googled Dr. Charles Severance as well and found a site where he taught a computer language called Python. When I mentioned that he was also teaching me Python he looked confused because he had not yet begun to teach it for Coursera. He did so though soon after and so I took it again more formally.
This introduction to Python led me to ChiPy. Chipy led me to Python Office Hours. Python Office Hours introduced me to Pumping Station: One and FreeGeek Chicago. There were other Coursera Python classes offered by the University of Toronto and Rice University.
Back in the real world Meetup which was used by Python Office Hours for rsvp’s and other sources lead me to many places. These included 1871, Blue1647, Braintree and The Chicago Community Trust. The Chicago CommunityTrust was preceded by OpenGoverment Chicagoland and in turn led to Knight Labs. Knight Labs is run by, well I cannot tell you that without getting into a little glitz and glamour so I will stop.
OK, so maybe just one or two more. At 1871 OpenGov had ChiHackNights. We out grew that venue and have moved to Braintree. Last year a totally interesting person came to one of our hack nights and eventually introduced me to ITKAN.