Photo Credit: Bret A. Ancowitz, M.D. of Garris Photography

Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 5:30pm – 9pm+
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

The March Geek Dinner will feature a presentation by long-time Providence Geek Tom Hoffman. Tom will present SchoolTool, the open source project he manages, and discuss free software philanthropy. Details here. Tom is a very smart guy, doing important work at the center of the open source movement – yup, you’ll want to be there Wednesday.

Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good—it’s actually great).


• Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.


• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.


• There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.

On Wednesday, February 21 at 6pm, the Business Innovation Factory’s N-Gen and AIGA Rhode Island will be co-hosting “Not Your Day Job” at the awesome Providence Athenaeum. This sounds like a seriously fun event. Find out more and RSVP here.

Note: There are still a couple of storyteller slots open, so if any of you Geeks are interested in sharing a tale, drop Melissa Whithers a line.

Providence Geek and Investment Instruments President Owen Johnson will be showing off his startup’s wares at tomorrow’s Geek Dinner.

Creator of systems and services for the real estate industry, Investment
Instruments first two systems are iiProperty, an online property
management solution, and the Rentometer, a comparative market analysis site for rentals. Owen will give a quick overview of his company and the changes afoot in the real estate industry, and then walkthrough
highlights of each system. Both systems are built using Ruby on Rails
and MySQL.

The Providence-Based American Mathematical Society just published an article detailing Google’s PageRank algorithm, How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack.

[Via Infoworld: Google’s Search Secret Revealed]

What do you want for the Holidays? Eco-friendly legislation? Better schools? Subsidies for open source software? At the December 6th Providence Geeks Dinner, CitzenSpeak founder and Providence Geek Jo Lee will present their free email advocacy service for grassroots organizations.

Inspired by MoveOn email campaigns, CitizenSpeak offers a free way to let a lot of people tell someone that they’re mad as hell. By doing so, CitizenSpeak has enabled civic activists across the country to educate representatives about local and national issues, promote causes and build their lists. Recently listed in the Wall Street Journal as a recommended online tool for social change, CitizenSpeak and its developer, George Hotelling have won a number of prestigious awards, including the Tides Foundation award for the best open source software in the public space, and a Webby honoree award. The code that runs CitizenSpeak is available as a free module on Drupal.

Holiday Bonus: Jim Willis will talk about how CitizenSpeak can take advantage of the webservice API’s offered by the RI Secretary of State’s office.