“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
-Steve Jobs

Thank you Steve.

Artwork by @gapingvoid

There tends to be some reservations within tech/startup communities to work together with their cities but this event would not be possible on the scale that we have achieved without our involvement with our local government.

Hack4Reno is a completely open source event that is currently being planned and executed openly on Github and after our event we will be going through the repositories and wikis to clean up and provide a template for other cities to do what we are currently doing for the Reno area. Follow along with the updates on Twitter @hack4reno or the organizers @elskwid, @yodasan, @ kristyfifelski or myself, @colinloretz.

Office of The Mayor
City of Reno, Nevada

Proclamation

WHEREAS, with the development of new technologies and an increasingly connected and engaged population, it is essential for government leadership to support open government practices that promote transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration; and

WHEREAS, the City of Reno has a community of talented individuals in the technology space and desires to retain and attract new talent to the area; and

WHEREAS, the City of Reno is committed to supporting economic development activity, including the encouragement of entrepreneurship in web technologies and the greater technology industry; and

WHEREAS, Hack4Reno is a 24-hour civic “hack-a-thon” event that will be held October 15 and 16 at the Pioneer Center for Performing Arts in downtown Reno; and

WHEREAS, Hack4Reno is a partnership with Reno Collective and the City of Reno to inspire developers, designers and entrepreneurs to build apps, websites or services that help the Reno community become a more engaged city; and

WHEREAS, Hack4Reno will help local developers, designers and entrepreneurs to meet one another, learn about other existing talent in the area and showcase local talent; and

WHEREAS, at the Hack4Reno event, civic developers will work with data shared by the City of Reno and surrounding agencies to demonstrate the value in government-citizen collaboration.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Robert A. Cashell, Sr., Mayor of the City of Reno, Nevada, do hereby proclaim

Saturday, October 15 & Sunday, October 16, 2011, as

Hack4Reno Weekend

In and for the City of Reno and I encourage all citizens to support the event by stopping by and encouraging the civic developers to stay awake through this long, 24-hour Hack4Reno event starting at noon on Saturday, October 15, continuing all throughout the night, and ending at noon on October 16, at the Pioneer Center in the downtown Reno.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have set my hand and caused the Seal of the City of Reno, Nevada, to be affixed this seventh day of October 2011.

The event is called Hack4Reno and includes a 24 hour hackathon where teams of developers and designers will build applications (web apps, websites, mobile apps, tools, etc) that either uses openly available data or collects it. We are working with companies like Github, Tropo and MediaTemple and other web applications that provide services for other developers to build their own apps and are looking for teams to build apps that benefit the Reno community.

Build the future, win prizes…fame and glory

The applications will be built over 24 hours at the event, which is being held at the Pioneer Center in downtown Reno. We are making this event very transparent and open to the community so that Reno can see what goes into building web apps. Teams will then have time to present their finished applications for judging to win various prizes like Apple products and a Best in Show cash prize.

An open source future

This event is a barn raising for the Reno tech community. We are not seeking any financial sponsorships as the entire event is being put on in a very open source manner and we instead are asking for support in terms of promotion and/or resources as they are available.

Not just for techies

While I keep talking about designers and developers, the kinds of apps that I’m talking about are even things like online news and aggregation websites. Things like The Bold Italic or GOOD are wonderful examples of story telling and technology/digital media coming together. We have quite a few classes leading up to the hackathon that are free and available for students (or professors) to learn new things about various technologies, open data and open government.

Reno-Tahoe WordCamp is in just over a week! This event will sell out so if you haven’t signed up yet, you can register here.

There is a whole lot of awesome planned for the weekend including the WordPress Genius Bar, great speakers, and the opportunity to meet a lot of WordPress users, developers, and designers. Chelsea has done a great job organizing the event this year and we hope to see you there!

My talk on Saturday

I’m going to be giving a lightning talk on June 4th at 4pm titled The Zen of WordPress. The possibilities are endless when you’re using WordPress but just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you always should. Before you touch that fancy new plugin, write a line of code or download a new theme, I’ll give you a few questions that you should ask yourself before making any changes to WordPress to ensure it keeps running smoothly and securely.

WordCamp Afterparty

Reno Collective and MediaTemple are putting on an after party for WordCamp attendees at Reno Collective! After you get your fill of WordPress knowledge, come on down and enjoy some libations and get to know your fellow WordPress enthusiasts.

Workshops on Sunday

On June 5th, I’ll be teaching the half-day WordPress Boot Camp for WordPress beginners and Chelsea will be teaching the Child Theme workshop for anyone interested in making kick-ass WordPress themes.

As I was looked further through the Unbounce dashboard, I was delighted to see “WebHooks POST to a URL”.

Adding Unbounce Leads to Salesforce using WebHooks

I’ve posted a PHP script to Github that shows how to catch the Unbounce lead data and send it to Salesforce.

A quick rundown of what happens:

• Catches the POST data and parses out the fields we need to use
• Links our parsed data to our Salesforce fields
• Sends the data to the Salesforce web-to-lead URL via CURL.

Check it out at https://github.com/colinloretz/leadhooks

Looking Ahead

It does appear as though Unbounce plans to introduce integration with Salesforce.com and other web services (which would be extremely valuable for customers on both sides of the fence) but at this point no details are available. Until then, we’re going to rely on our WebHook wizardry.

This post has two purposes. The first is as an entry for the Lean Startup Challenge and secondly, to provide our members and the community with a glimpse behind the Reno Collective curtain and what it takes to keep it going. This is the first post of many in which I plan to talk about the business of coworking and starting something new.

Reno Collective Coworking

Hold on, you’re not a web startup?

Nope, we are not a web startup or a web app like the majority of the the entries for the Lean Startup Challenge. We run a coworking space and are the epitome of a lean startup:

• We had an idea
• We tested the idea with our minimum viable product
• We listened to what our customers really wanted
• We iterated on the idea quickly

Inception of an Idea

In 2009, coworking was an infantile concept that seemed to be flourishing in cities like Austin, San Francisco and Portland, all of them known for their startup and tech culture. I had been working a four-day work week at a local web development company and on fridays, Ed and I would spend all day working on side projects at a coffee shop. We had ideas for web apps that spanned the gamut of niches including music, movies, food, and events, trying to become the next X of Y.

In doing so, we started to meet other coffee shop regulars: freelancers meeting with clients, businessmen grabbing their coffee while on a conference call and creatives honing their craft. It was in that coffee shop we decided to start a coworking space.

Reno Collective started off as a side project. In July 2009, I incorporated Reno Collective as an LLC and we started garnering attention for the concept by hosting events (Ignite Reno and Reno-Tahoe WordCamp) to help inspire and build our own tech culture in Reno.

In September 2009, the company I had been working for was acquired and as a pink slip casualty, Reno Collective suddenly became my primary focus.

Minimum Viable Product

We opened our doors for business in December 2009. We were excited. We had a building that was quite possibly the coolest place to work in Reno. We had only 1,200 square feet of workspace but we had a lot of shared space with the landlords that included indoor basketball courts, a gym, showers, and plenty of room to host large events. It was perfect for the busy entrepreneurs and freelancers we were hoping to have as members of our community.

MVP: Reno Collective version 1.0

Rapid, Customer Driven Development

Just about everything that we have in the space today including our amenities, events and value-added services have come from working directly with our members. In our first year of business, we made a lot of improvements by introducing new events, more desks, and more amenities. We are helping our members to be better at their own businesses by following our example.

We use the same web based tools for communication, membership management, analytics and testing that web startups use in building their own apps but instead of trying to make sense out of analytic and subscription numbers with an amorphous blob of paid subscribers, email lists and Facebook fans, we have the luxury of getting to know our “users” very well, face-to-face, in our office.

With such a close proximity to our members, it is impossible to ignore their needs. It soon became evident that while we had an inspiring and productive workspace, something was missing from our MVP and we were falling short somewhere. We had responded to the needs of our members with new amenities and new opportunities for growth but now it was time for a bigger iteration.

Iteration & Continuous Development: Manual Labor

At the beginning of this year, we took Reno Collective to the next level by moving to a new building. We went from 1,200 square feet of working space to 3,800 square feet of space. Not only did we have more space but we also happened to get a great deal that cut our monthly burn rate by 40%.

Reno Collective version 2.0

Bootstrapping & The Power of Trickle Financing

Reno Collective has not been financed by venture or angel capital. It is not the result of trust funds or bank loans. It is the product of pure bootstrapping.

At 23-years-old, with no mortgage, no car payments and only 2 small credit cards, my credit history has been described as “too short” to go after bank loans or revolving lines of credit and I’m ok with that. Having access to such funds would have made starting Reno Collective easier but not better.

Bootstrapping has made us focus our time and attention. It has made it necessary to weigh and measure each action to determine if everything we are doing is somehow providing value to our members. Since we’ve opened, we’ve added new features for our members including more furniture, more conference rooms, our ever expanding business and tech library and will be introducing more new technology including projectors and RFID 24/7 access in the next month.

We now have 15 full-time members from various business, technology and creative industries with a healthy stream of folks who drop-in when they feel like getting a lot of things done.

Reno Collective Coworking

If you add game mechanics to motivate behavior and you ingrain that action as a habit (perhaps for more than ~22 days), what happens when you take away the game elements?

Will new behaviors continue to stand on their own without these game elements? As luck might have it, instead of having to do my own experiment, I got to see what this might look like using the website 750words.

750 Words

750words, a website created by Buster Benson, encourages people to write at least 3 pages (or 750 words) every day. Buster has built many features into the site that actually make writing more fun including tracking of days completed as writing streaks, badges for various levels of streaks, points of number of words written, a postmortem analysis of your writing, leader boards and more.

While game mechanics seems to be the new buzzword for marketers and companies trying to figure out how to turn replying to emails, checking in to your office or walking the dog into a game, I believe Buster is doing some of the most remarkable work in gamification today. He isn’t doing it to increase customer acquisition and lifetime value, he’s doing it to make positive effects in the real world by inspiring creativity (with 750words) and wellness (with HealthMonth).

If you look at my last two posts, you’ll see that I’ve been using 750 Words to become a better writer and after just 9 days, I feel addicted. I have always enjoyed writing but would neglect to find the time to sit down and do it. 750 Words has helped me focus on my writing. While the badges and points are great for tracking progress, I am most impressed and excited about the postmortem analysis of my writing which includes a breakdown of things like grammar, words per minute, emotions, concerns, sense of time and others. I became addicted to writing. In the grand scheme of things, its a wonderful thing to be addicted to!

750 Words Outage

On March 5th, the website was migrated to a new server and a glitch surfaced. People could write and save their words up to 749 words. If you typed 750 words, it would not save completely and you would not get credit for that day. In Buster’s defense, these kind of things happen when dealing with technology and before the migration he did announce that he would fix any broken writing streaks that may occur from the move. He’s been great about getting these things sorted out and the site is a great tool for writing, it just happened to have a small hiccup.

What happened?

People were frustrated, some were pissed. As of this writing, there are 42 comments on the 750Words tumblr and over 35 pleads for help on GetSatifsaction. Now fortunately, many people have voiced their understanding (shit happens) but there were a few people who were muttering self-censored obscenities. The moods on GetSatifsaction ranged from “frustrated” to “confused”. It was as if people were robbed of an experience.

There were even a few people  who had written for very long streaks, say 196 days of 750+ words a day (at least 147,000 words). A standard novel is approximately 70,000-90,000 words. They had written the equivalent of 1-2 novels over 6 months and were very unhappy and seemingly frantic because they might not get credit in the form of a virtual badge.

Buster wrote about intrinsic value and intrinsic signifiers on his blog, which I thought described the value of virtual badges very well but after this outage, it has amused me that the fact that these folks were achieving their goal was not enough for them. They are writing 750 words a day, every day for long streaks of time. Don’t these words have some intrinsic value? The whole point was to write every day and these people had accomplished that but have lost the forest through the trees, or in this case, virtual badges and status.

There are certainly far fewer people who have a 200 day streak than have a 15 day streak and I have a hard time believing that anyone is participating in 750words for status but rather to become better writers, get thoughts on paper or finish their first novel.

The book Drive by Daniel Pink talks about three values important to intrinsic value: autonomy, mastery and purpose. 750words implements autonomy well, it does not control when you write, how you write, or what you write, it just simply asks that you write your words between each 24 hour period to get “credit.” However, the glitch was a virtual barrier, a mocking and teasingly invisible forcefield holding you back from getting a badge, despite having accomplished the actual goal of writing 3 pages a day.

I know that Buster will have the problem sorted out soon (he’s currently working on it and repairing any broken streaks) and look forward to getting back to my new found addiction of writing with 750Words, in the meantime, I’ll just be writing in my journal.

I’ve heard that it takes about 22 days for something to become a habit. It’s been only 9 days since I made my goal of writing everyday and I ended up forgetting to login and write on the second day. However, now that I have a chain going on the calendar and it is acting as a great way to stay motivated. I don’t want to break the chain!

When I first started this, I figured I would have no problem having enough to write about as my mind is always racing with ideas and random thoughts. However, translating those thoughts and ideas into coherent words and sentences is not as easy as I was hoping. I am starting to improve. The graph below shows my writing over the 15 minutes it took me to write today’s entry:

You can see that I start out at a very low WPM rate. This is because I find myself writing a few words and deleting a few every now. Instead of stopping to think about what I’m going to write, I try to just keep writing. Slowly, I start gaining momentum as I settle into a topic or a train of thought and start cranking away.

Here are some more stats from today’s entry.