Event Recap

Well, our Digital Citizens Unite event was fantastic! I really enjoyed presenting on Intellectual Property with Gabriel Meyr, and after practicing and reviewing our presentation extensively, I feel we nailed it! We made our position clear, we declared our challenge to the world, and we made our voices heard!

Prior to the event, I took seriously the challenge to personally invite at least 10 interested persons. Since I am a computer science major and I was presenting specifically on the patent system, it was fitting that I should invite people interested in the technology world. I invited:

1. Five fellow CS majors: Tobias Kin Hou Lei, Dallin Christensen, Jonathan Willis, Matt Berteaux, and Nathan Cerny.
2. A co-worker at Apple who will probably be my supervisor when I start there, Reed Olsen.
3. Another former Apple coworker who is studying at Cornell right now, Javier Campanini.
4. A former computer science professor: Dr. Charles Knutson, who has been called on as an expert witness in several cases.
5. Gina Smith, a tech writer I discovered on Google Plus and wrote a great article on patent trolls for Computer World.
6. Andy Baio, who writes the column "Codeword" for Wired, who wrote a great article called "How Yahoo Weaponized My Work."
7. A former coworker who is a software engineer at Qualtrics, Zack Young.
8. Of course, my wife, Madison Lottermoser.
9. I also posted a general invitation to Google Plus and Twitter about the event, and gave some flyers to some random people on BYU :)

At the time of this writing, the only people I know of for sure who were able to catch the event via the webcast was Javier, who took a screenshot and posted it on his Facebook wall, and my wife, who remembered to tune in to the question and answer period. I was certainly hoping to reach more of my friends, and was especially hoping Gina and Andy would be able to catch the event, but I haven't heard back from any of them yet except Reed, who was busy putting out fires related to his duties at Apple that night and couldn't catch the event. I think part of the problem was that it was the last day of classes, which meant all of my Computer Science friends were too busy to be able to come to the event as they rushed to finish and turn in final projects.

In all of my invitations, I included a description of our class, our goals, the event description, a link to the course web site, and a summary of what I would be presenting on. I did all I could to get people involved, but in the end, it was just a very busy day for a lot of people. Maybe next time :)