We’re running an event up here where I live in the Fall that I suspect will interest at least a few Squeakers and other Smalltalkers, so I thought it might be nice to consider adding a Camp on the side.

The event is currently called the “Mid Island Tech Living Summit” or sometimes “Mid Island Tech Expo”. The idea is to 
a) bring out the local tech population
b) attract some newcomers to the area, bringing skills and work with them.

It turns out that there is a fairly large group of people around here that work at home doing tech work around the world. There is a social group based around the old railway station with over 200 members, several makerspaces and so on. Everywhere I go I seem to bump into people that work at home and think they’re the only ones in the region. So part of the idea is to get everyone out and meeting and maybe even realising that by working together they have collective skills to do that dream project.

The other part of the idea is to introduce non-local geeks to the possibility of moving out of expensive, busy, noisy places and up here to a world where you don’t spend 3 hours each day in traffic, breathing crap, spending $3000/month on a tiny apartment and sending the kids to school in body armour because of the rampaging murder-suicide whackjobs. Despite being very much a small town area we have very excellent internet access (I have gigabit fibre to my server room for USD50/month, for example) and local technology services for electronics, machining, admin & legal, and all that support cloud you need. And houses that are actually affordable. And a healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt you. And beaches and scuba diving and mountains and skiing and hiking trails (watch out for bears, cougars, and wolves etc) and… well, it’s nice. Geeks with young families should really look into it.

Thus my thought that some on this list might be interested in attending and making a Camp of it. When we held the last Camp in Naniamo in ’14 everyone seemed to have a really good time and believe me, Qualicum is a much nice place to be than Nan. The expo will be putting on some pretty serious food, plus talks on what is here, how to move here, and a beach party. Seems like a good excuse for us to get together! More formal publicity will be online soon.

tim
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tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: JSP: Jump on Sexy Programmer