I have many of my own opinions about Burlington Telecom, its role in our community, and its future. As a member of this committee, I’m more interested in bringing the opinions of others forward. If you’re part of the Burlington community, please share with me your thoughts about Burlington Telecom. What do you want out of Burlington Telecom? What attributes of Burlington Telecom are important to you? Please share these thoughts publicly on Google Moderator. I’ve shared a few of my own thoughts to get things started.

As I mentioned, I have my own opinions about Burlington Telecom. To understand further where I’m coming from, I’ve included here a truncated version of the letter I sent applying to be on the committee.

Dear City Councilors:

Enclosed for your consideration is my application to join the Burlington Telecom Advisory Committee. I was one of the first beta customers when Burlington Telecom launched. I am now both a residential and a business customer. I was enthusiastic about the vision for Burlington Telecom from the moment I first heard about it. As someone who spends a good portion of his personal and professional life online, I understood immediately the cultural and economic benefits that an advanced fiber optic network could bring to our city.

…

Burlington Telecom is the 21st century equivalent of rural electrification, at a local scale. Like electricity in the 1930s, private companies are unwilling to invest in a telecommunications infrastructure that will spur economic growth in less populated areas. Companies like Verizon have gone so far as to divest their networks in non-metropolitan areas so that they don’t need to build-out modern broadband infrastructure in these places.

The Burlington Electric Department proudly states, “public power since 1905.” The City of Burlington created the Burlington Electric Department a full 30 years before the forming of the Rural Electrification Administration at the federal level. The City of Burlington seemed to have similar foresight when they created Burlington Telecom. Perhaps Burlington Telecom is an idea that is ahead of its time. Maybe we should wait several decades for a national initiative on telecommunications infrastructure. Alternatively, we can be proud of what has been done with Burlington Telecom. There are serious challenges to maintaining Burlington Telecom as a public resource, but these are challenges worth addressing.

Like the Burlington Electric Department, I believe that the people of Burlington can again be proud of Burlington Telecom. During Tropical Storm Irene, my house lost power for only 30 minutes. This was a point of civic pride for me and provided an exemplar of how our public utilities can be operated. Burlington taxpayers have regularly voted to fund Burlington Electric Department initiatives around green energy, energy efficiency, and general infrastructure improvement. If people can be proud of things as intrinsically boring as utilities and electricity, then we can be proud of a state-of-the-art fiber optic network that provides high-speed Internet, television, and telephone services.

As a member of the Burlington Telecom Advisory Committee, I hope to understand more fully the challenges facing Burlington Telecom and advise the City Council on addressing these challenges while maintaining Burlington Telecom as the vital public resource that it is. I am an advocate for a vision of Burlington Telecom not as a burden, but as a source of great opportunity for our city.

…

Personally, I’d like to encourage submissions on the following topics:

• More talks related to free/open source software (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.)
• Arduino and/or other hardware programming
• Software development patterns and practices
• Web analytics and metrics
• Front-end web development (JavaScript, CSS, etc.)
• Node.js and other emerging technologies
• Mobile application development
• Anything you’re passionate about!

Propose a session or two now—you know you want to!

We’re a new startup with some venture backing. We’re looking to add an experienced developer to help us out for the next five weeks (and possibly more). Qualifications are:

• experienced PHP hacker (5+ years)
• full understanding of MVC frameworks (codeignitor, cake, symfony, zend, kohana or the like)
• comfortable with the LAMP stack
• understanding of git
• able to plug into a new project and start coding in under a day

You’ll be working with a team of 6 developers in downtown Burlington.

Kohort was featured in TechCrunch the other day for raising a “seed” round of $3 million. If you’re interested, contact Steve Blood. You can find Steve’s email address in this thread, or let me know and I can put you in touch with him.

Brown Bag by Jeffrey Beall, on Flickr

Working at a small company (Found Line), there aren’t as many opportunities to talk with and learn from a diverse set of co-workers as there might be at a larger organization. This is part of the reason why I organize our local PHP Users Group and am involved with other community events (VAGUE, Vermont Code Camp, Burlington Web Application Group, etc.). These are all technically-focused groups—I’d like to try something new.

Found Line would like to start hosting brown bag lunches. Each lunch will feature one speaker from the local community and will be about an hour long. The talk itself can be up to 30 minutes long, but can be as short as 10 minutes (we want to reserve at least half of the time for discussion). We will provide the monitor or projector, if needed. As the name suggests, BYOL. If you’ve been to our studio, then you’ll know that it isn’t very big. This means that space will be limited, but I think a smaller group has its benefits.

We’d really like the first speaker to be someone from outside of Found Line. If you’re here in the Burlington, Vermont area and have a topic you’d like to talk about for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes with a small group of colleagues, then please let me know. The only requirements are that your talk isn’t a sales pitch and that it’s on a topic that you’re passionate about.

Update (4/4/2011): Please fill out this form if you’d like to speak at an upcoming brown bag lunch.

Update (11/19/2010): I forget to mention that the original slides and code examples are available on GitHub.

There will be four rooms with sessions on .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, and more. Two of the rooms will have .NET topics and another will have sessions on free/open source software. There will be a fourth room where developers will be introduced to various technologies that they may not use every day. For example, are you a .NET developer? Come and learn about PHP, Ruby, Python, or Java. A Ruby developer? Learn about .NET, PHP, Python, or Java. You get the idea.

Vermont Code Camp is a great way to bring together technology user groups from around Vermont. The Vermont.NET User Group is the primary organizer of the event but we hope to see others from the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group (which I organize), the Vermont Ruby On Rails User Group, the Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE), the Green Mountain Oracle Users Group, the New England Adobe User Group, and the VT SQL Server Users Group there. Do you know of any other Vermont technology user groups? Please let me know so that we can invite them!

1. Network and make new connections
2. Learn from your peers
3. Share your expertise and knowledge
4. Meet experts
5. Find job opportunities
6. Get solutions to problems