Hi, I’m Brian Jimdar and I am the organizer of the Seattle MaidSafe Meetup group and I wanted to share a few thoughts from the event and my experience.
We’ve had about 20 people from the Seattle area join the Meetup group online and we had 5 show up for the event on Friday night. It lasted about an hour. We watched some of the videos on MaidSafe from the YouTube channels, had some discussion and I did a presentation on MaidSafe farming.
It was fascinating for me to get out of my office and actually talk to other people about the possibilities for the platform. What I discovered is that at this early stage, MaidSafe is kind of like a Rorschach test in the sense that each person is seeing in it their own personal take on what they would like the future to be.
For example, my presentation: “Sustainable Farming in the Coming Ambient Cloud” was about the potential to generate revenue off of an investment in hardware by becoming a MaidSafe Vault Farmer. The presentation was a reflection of my personal view of what excites me about MaidSafe.
The reaction to my presentation was polarized: two people who were IT-Admin types without programmer skills we’re completely sold and wanted to know “where to sign” and how soon they could setup their “farming-rigs” and start mining coin. Another individual was a programmer and seems to have shown up with a vision of MaidSafe as a distributed “buddy-share” network where all storage, network and compute resources would quickly approach zero cost, and was excited about the application possibilities in an environment without infrastructure costs.
From my experience it seems to me that there is a need for separate user groups for Builders and Farmers and it’s probably too early to start evangelizing becoming a Farmer. I think the focus of this Meetup group going forward is going to be strictly on the MaidSafe developer API and opportunity, and I’m thinking of starting a separate “MaidSafe: Farmers” meetup group after the beta goes live.
@brianJimdar It’s really cool to see that this happened;
There’s definitely a lot of logistics one could follow with regard to farming and I’m sure that could become a study of it’s own. For example things like self sustaining energy platforms to power rigs, etc.
Right, although in my presentation I was using the word “sustainable” to mean ongoing sustainable revenue generation from farming, rather then anything having to do with it being ecologically sustainable. I compared MaidSafe farming to BitCoin mining, which was a good opportunity for revenue generation from computers running in a private home, but only for a small window at the very beginning (not sustainable).
Alas, I didn’t get the it recorded. If I find time I might be able to record the presentation as a screencast and post it if anyone is interested.
Brian, that is fantastic. Another meetup is great and to get five right off is very good indeed. I like what happened too - different people having different visions is interesting to hear and makes sense. I’m glad you shared here and think you’re right about needing different groups for different interests.
I think you should do what you are most passionate about. Your first audience may have been polarized. But that will happen until you attract more people that resonate with your passion. In this case, it seems to be farming.
If people are more interested in the application “builder” aspect, they can connect through this forum with other like-minded people.
We have a very diverse community here. I’m sure everyone will find a place to fit in.
Sounds like a great start Brian, you are testing the market and finding a niche for your self. Hopefully you will be able to attend the live Q & A later today, playing a recording of the event may be a useful focus for your next meet up.
Hey Brian - it would definitely be beneficial to get devs excited about what they can build with the network. If you find there’s a lot of interested developers, we can coordinate for future Google hangouts to include your group as well.