JotBlog

Thanks to everyone who came out Monday for December’s JotSpot meetup. It was fun to put faces to names and meet new folks as we made ourselves home in Jot’s swanky new office.

After sampling flautas, guac and winter brew we settled amongst the cubes for some demos. Furthest-travelled ribbon goes to Michael Sampson, who looked remarkably fresh for being fresh off a flight from New Zealand. Mark your calendars and book your flights now for the next meetup on January 16th, 7p, Jot offices in Palo Alto. RSVP on the meetup page.

A big shout out to Reuben, Kathleen, Scott J., and Joe for the demos. Reuben kicked things off with a demo of the new Bug Reporter app, which we’ve been using internally for a couple of months. The entire product-side of the Jot team uses it every day – we’ve got something like 1400 bugs, issues, and feature requests in there thus far. (It will be in the app gallery later today…)

Kathleen Romano of Knowesys was up next with a more technical demo of how to use Jot forms to dynamically configure navigation in the wiki. Knowesys developed this technique while delivering custom apps for some of Jot’s larger customers.

Scott J. previewed the new Reunion app he’s lovingly crafted during his first month here at Jot. This particular app showcases the range of the JotSpot platform, which is equally at home supporting purpose-built collaborative apps as it is open-ended collaborative apps like the wiki.

The cherry on top was Joe’s demo of JotSpot Tracker, a new Jot ditty currently in beta. If you’ve got Excel spreadsheets that look more like mini-databases than financial plans, Tracker will lift them out of the email and shared drive ghetto and turn them into full-fledged web apps with a simple copy and paste.

After the demos we broke into smaller groups to talk shop. I hung with some Jot devs and brainstormed community development projects and processes. We’re at a critical mass of shared needs and Jot skillz and want to start co-developing in an open community process. More on that in a later post…

We plan on continuing the mix of demos and small group sessions where you can meet new folks and brainstorm. Happy Holidays all and hope to see you on the 16th of next month.

Monday Dec 5th in Palo Alto

JotSpot’s next meetup is Monday December 5th and you’re invited! We’ll meet at our new office in Downtown Palo Alto, 167 Hamilton Ave, 2nd floor. We’re a block and a half from the University Ave Caltrain station so SF and SJ folks can bypass 101 and take Caltrain (or Bart + Caltrain – that’s what I do from SF).

The last meetup was more about drinks and hanging out. This time we’ll do some of that up front but then “get down to business” with some demos and an interactive Jot theme tutorial Update: a set of BOF sessions.

Agenda

7:00 - 7:30 : drinks and snacks
7:30 - 8:15 : three 15-minute Jot demos exploring a range of apps and plugins

8:20 - 9:00 : BOF sessions

RSVP on the Wiki

As usual you can find this announcement on your favorite event sites for your calendaring pleasure:

• Eventful.com

• Upcoming.org

• Zvents.com

12/2 Update

We’re de-structuring the meetup a bit and are replacing the theme tutorial with some BOF sessions. This will give folks more time to connect around common areas of interest while together. We’ve also set up a wiki page to plan and coordinate this and future meetups:

http://feedback.jot.com/JotMeetupPages/MeetupDec5th

There will also be:

• open wifi so bring your laptops
• a remote desktop, conference call, and IRC channel set up for folks who can’t make it to Palo Alto on Monday night.

See the meetup page for details.

Anyone Know a Good RSVP Service?

Anyone know a good web-services-enabled RSVP service?

Right now these announcements are going to three different calendar services and three different JotSpot’s 3 blogs (blog.jot.com, developer.jot.com/WikiHome, and feedback.jot.com/WikiHome). A central place to collect, manage, and view RSVPs from anywhere on the web would be way better than having comments and attendance indicators spread out over 6 sites.

Sounds like a nice little Web 2.0 service to me… Until then, we’ll RSVP on the Wiki

We’ll have our first JotSpot meetup Thursday October 27th at the Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto. Come on by at 7p and have a drink and a bite with fellow Jot users and developers. A bunch of us Jot folks will be there and we hope to meet those of you who are local to Palo Alto.

This will be an informal get-together so come on by! Please RSVP by commenting on this blog post or via Upcoming.org or Eventful.com or Zvents..