Software Hamilton Launches

You can find the information contained below anytime on the About page (which also includes a FAQ left out here). Right now the portal is in an “open beta” phase so please excuse any quirks or downtime.

The Software Hamilton (Software Hamilton) is a social networking portal created with the aim of uniting the Greater Hamilton, McMaster University and Mohawk College computing and software communities.

More established communities such as Kitchener-Waterloo have organizations and portal-type websites like techvibes that allow computing and software students, academics, practitioners and firms to connect. Guelph has successfully adopted the DemoCamp “un-conference” style event that originated in the Toronto computing and software community. The Guelph DemoCamp now occurs regularly, and the Guelph computing and software community is home to successful startups such as well.ca.

We believe that it is time for the Greater Hamilton, McMaster University and Mohawk College computing and software communities to experience this level of synergy. If these nearby communities are able to do it so successfully, we’ve got to start asking ourselves… if not us, who? If not now, when?

When great institutions and individuals work together they can produce results greater than the sum of their individual efforts. We have some great startups and some great established computing and software firms in the Greater Hamilton area that produce world class software in diverse areas such as digital imaging, mobile applications, web development and scientific computing. We have firms providing consulting services and IT solutions to Fortune 500 companies. McMaster University and Mohawk College are great institutions that produce world class graduates who work the most difficult jobs at the most prestigious firms. We have great researchers at these same institutions pushing the cutting edge of computing and software technology forward. It’s time to work together and make even greater things happen.

Software Hamilton is a portal for the different elements of the community to become aware of each other and work together. Professionals and students should know what firms exist in the Greater Hamilton area, what they do, whether they are hiring and how to get in contact with them. Regular DemoCamps should be held where startups and established firms can get feedback on their work and younger entrepreneurs and developers can learn from the more experienced. Academics giving talks relevant to the local industry should have a way of reaching out to that community.

The events, groups, blog and job posting features of Software Hamilton are intended to facilitate these sorts of interactions. If your firm releases a new or updated product, you can make a blog post and share it with the rest of the community. If you are looking for a job in the community, companies will soon be posting positions here. If you are a Perl hacker who knows a few like-minded Perl hackers, you can start a group and find others in the community, as well as make events like a meet-up at a pub or coffee shop to discuss the latest happenings with Perl6.

If you have a suggestion for a way that GHSCN can better achieve its purpose, or if you would like to become involved, please do not hesitate to contact us.

The Software Hamilton blog on the Home page can be used by any registered member to post news relevant to the community. Registered members will also be able to add friends, create and join groups, participate in discussion threads, create and join events, and chat in real-time using the chat client. The Activity page, much like a newsfeed on Facebook, is a feed of all of the network events (who has joined, who has friended who, what has been posted to the blog, what group has been created, etc.) The Event page notably contains a calendar showing all of the public events that have been created. If you click on an event, you can enter it into an iPhone or Outlook calendar. The Jobs page lets employers post jobs for the community (only registered members can apply). The Directory page is a listing of computing and software firms in Greater Hamilton, or with associations with McMaster/Mohawk.

Keep in mind that virtually everything you do on Software Hamilton is public, much like a Twitter account. Groups and Events can be made private and invisible, which will keep certain things like discussion threads hidden from other users (unless the group creator changes that option). Messages between users and private chats are of course private.

Some cool stuff:

• – You can attach documents to Groups, which hopefully makes Software Hamilton a better tool for collaboration
• – You can make posts to the Activity page and your profile, much like the wall and newsfeed on Facebook
• – You can use “@” to tag other members in your posts to the Activity page
• – You can “like” basically everything in the Activity page, as well as blog posts
• – Events have a Google Map associated with them if given an address
• – Events can be inserted into your iPhone or Outlook calendar
• – Blog posts can be Facebook-liked and re-Tweeted for viral distribution to broader networks (e.g. product announcements!)
• – You can follow blog post updates on Twitter and Facebook (or of course the RSS feed)