pariSoma innovation loft. coworking and tech events.

Date: Thursday, July 2

Time:  6:30p.m.

RSVP on Meetup

For Post Peak Living’s second Meetup, they will be showing this fabulous and inspiring movie:

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

It shows how Cubans rallied after they lost half their oil imports when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Come see how a country has already — successfully — handled peak oil.
Arrive at 6:30 and meet other people
Screening time: 7pm

After the screening, we are lucky to have Kirsten Schwind from BayLocalize.org as our special guest. She will discuss some of the great work going on in the region to support urban food production and localization in Bay Area. Kirsten is the co-author of the Bay Area-specific report “Tapping the Potential of Urban Rooftops” and she will lead the Question and Answer session as we explore what people can do immediately to start becoming local food producers.

Here is a bit about Kirsten:
Kirsten brings over eleven years of organizing, research, and program development in the fields of social justice, global trade, food policy, labor organizing, clean energy, and local resources. The report she co-authored “Tapping the Potential of Urban Rooftops” won an award from the American Planning Association’s California Chapter. Kirsten holds a B.A. in Economics and Public Policy from Swarthmore College and an M.S. in Natural Resources Management from the University of Michigan. At Bay Localize she focuses on program and organizational development. She has worked with a number of Bay Area nonprofits including as Program Director at Food First, and currently serves on the City of Berkeley’s Energy Commission. Kirsten lived for several years in Latin America and is fluent in Spanish.

Please come watch the movie and discuss food production options in the Bay Area and what you can do right now. The screening starts promptly at 7pm so please arrive at 6:30pm or earlier to get settled in. There is no admission and please invite your friends!

Designers and design fans: come join us July 16 for one of the most intriguing events we’ve had at pariSoma to date: the UX Book Club of San Francisco’s monthly gathering.

We’re digging into a book that changed my life: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander.

This seminal book sent me down the route of geeking out about urban planning and architecture back in my undergrad years, and it shaped my view of user experience, the Web and at all sorts of design. It was written in 1977, long before the buzzword “UX” was invented, yet it’s one of the best books about user experience ever written. Alexander is a lunatic and a genius. He will piss you off and he will change the way you think.

It’s also the book that laid the groundwork, many years later, for the concept of design patterns which have become a staple in the world of software design.

Now this is coming full circle and design patterns are not just used by software engineers, but also by digital media designers. The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is one of the most useful repositories of Web design patterns anywhere. Our discussion will be moderated by Christian Crumlish, the curator of that library.

RSVP here and join in!

– Sean

Tuesdays, June 30 – August 18
7-9pm at KSW @ pariSoma, 1436 Howard St.

BLOGGING FOR BEGINNERS: Learn how to set up, write, manage, and market a blog. Develop podcasting and video blogging (vlogging) skills.

YOU’VE GOT A VOICE: Blogs can project your voice across the nation and around the world. For KSW constituents, the blogosphere conducts an ongoing discourse on race at a level you can’t find anywhere else. For artists and writers, blogging offers a method of professional arts marketing; and for everyone else, blogging is the route to citizen journalism and the transformation of the media.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR: Claire Light is a fiction writer living in Oakland. She co-founded Hyphen magazine and worked as a contributing editor at Other magazine until 2007. She currently serves on the Board of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting writers of color who work with speculative genres.

Registration fee is $200. Pay online at kearnystreet.org. To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, P.O. Box 14545, San Francisco, CA 94114. Please include your full name and contact info. Registration deadline is June 23.

RSVP on Upcoming.

Join us for Web, Wine & Wisdom at pariSoma on June 25th from 6.30 to 8.30pm.

Why? Because we love new Web apps and because we enjoy discovering new wines, it seemed natural to mix it all into one event.

Check out the program :

Rob Spiro will be presenting Aardvark.

Jeffrey Jenkins will be presenting Reframe It

There will also be wine demonstrations by two professional winemakers, one Californian, one French.

• Château Plaisance – Montagne Saint Emilion 2005

• The 5ive Russians – Syrah – Russian River Valley

WWW is a networking event made for tech lovers, entrepreneurs, developers, inventors and and anyone who is curious about new tech applications and who loves wine.

Buy tickets online for $20 or $25 at the door.

The event is hosted by the FACCSF and pariSoma.

More information :

Rob Spiro & Aardvark

Rob, Assistant Curator to Birds, leads all quantitative and qualitative user research initiatives. Previously, Rob co-founded Mifly, a mobile software startup, and Reelblogs, a new media company. Rob holds a BA in History from Yale.

Aardvark is a live channel that enables people to tap into the wisdom of their networks, conversationally, in real-time. Aardvark is not a website — it is a contact that lives on your existing buddylist in your IM program, your email address book, and (soon) your mobile phone.

Jeffrey Jenkins & Reframe It

Jeffrey is the Community Director of Reframe It. He coordinates external advocacy projects and liasons with Reframe It users to maximize open transparent dialogue. He is obsessed with the promise of data portability, the semantic web, and creating new democratic channels for art and media.

Reframe It is a service that lets you read, reply to, post, and share comments about the text or images of any webpage. Either by working with publishers or through a browser extension (sometime called a plugin) we allow readers to bring their voice to any selectable part of the web. With Reframe It the comment you make live in a margin next to the web page’s text you select, where they can be shared via email, facebook twitter, rss, etc. Anyone can then directly link to your comment and see your words in context.

FACCSF

The French American Chamber of Commerce SF was created in 1978 to pursue 2 main goals:

1. To serve the needs of the French American business community
2. To help French and American companies with their trade needs.

Ticket Info: $20 online, $25 at the door. Purchase tickets here.