For those of you planning to volunteer in person for Geeksgiving at Home of the Innocents tomorrow, here are details via HOI’s Linda Medley:

Attached is a campus map for dissemination.  “Geeksgiving Central” will be in the Kay & Jim Morrissey Advanced Therapy Center (North end of campus) in the therapy gym.  We will have signs posted for those volunteers who come and go from Noon until 9:00 p.m.  We have a series of user names and passwords for your convenience and will be testing connectivity and speed well before you guys are due to arrive.  And of course we will be available throughout that entire period to provide information and help with trouble shooting should the need arise.

Volunteers can park on Mellwood, which runs parallel to the Advanced Therapy Center.  There is also parking in front, and across from the ATC.  If that seems tight then feel free to park in Lot A wherever there is availability.

For those with particular aspirations of (or aversions to) appearing on television, Mayor Greg Fischer is expected to visit the Geeksgiving command center at Home of the Innocents between 6 and 7pm tomorrow, likely with the local media in tow. Plan your presence accordingly.

As always, you can help Geeksgiving from anywhere, but if you’d like to sit shoulder to shoulder with some fellow geek-givers, we’re certainly glad to have you.

BONUS: Louisville’s own Gyroskope will be hosting a Geeksgiving Afterparty at 9pm at Butchertown Pub & Studios, 1335 Story Avenue. Any and all Geeksgiving participants are welcome.

Leia the Riveter courtesy RedBubble

As part of Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer’s Give A Day week of service, the Louisville Digital Association is spearheading Geeksgiving, a pledge drive to generate donations and support for the Home of the Innocents. From noon to 9pm, a group of LDA volunteers — which can and should include you — will be using online tools to urge our citizens to donate goods and cash to one of the Derby City’s most deserving charities.

In other words, for nine hours on Oct. 19 we’ll be tweeting, blogging, Facebook-ing and G+-ing our fingers off until our various and sundry online followers have stocked Home of the Innocents with all the supplies it needs to keep Louisville’s most vulnerable citizens safe, warm, and able to face the holiday season with some measure of dignity and comfort. (We’ll even resort ot LinkedIn, AOL and MySpace if we have to.)

If you’d like to be part of the Geeksgiving team, register here. All it takes is a commitment to spread the word during the nine hours of Geeksgiving (and hyping the Geeksgiving event in advance). Work from home, the office, pretty much anywhere you’ve got Internet connectivity. If you’d like to be part of the in-person team working from Home of the Innocents during Geeksgiving, contact us. We’d love to have you there, sharing the strength of Louisville geeks united in service to a good cause.

It’s time to show Louisville what the power of Geekdom harnessed for good can accomplish. Register for Geeksgiving today.

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As per October tradition, the Louisville Digital Association elected its new Board of Directors and Board Officers for the 2011-2012 operating year. In other words, these are the new folks in charge. While Jay Garmon (me) was retained as President, the remaining three Officer positions saw new faces, and there was healthy turnover in the remaining Directorships. Check the leadership roster below for details.

President: Jay Garmon
After proposing the transformation of the former Social Media Club of Louisville into the LDA, Jay was tasked with actually making the transition happen. In other words, this is all his fault, so they won’t let him stop. In his mild-mannered alter-ego, Jay is the Marketing Director for one-time Louisville (now Boston) startup Backupify. Jay refused to move to Beantown with his job, and his inspiration for the LDA was in part a desire to ensure no other Louisville tech company has to make that choice again.

Vice President: Grace Simrall
The LDA”s Hacker-in-Chief, Grace is a top-flight Business Intelligence consultant by day and the the LDA’s liason to LVL1 and the the larger Louisville maker community by night.

Treasurer: Nick Huhn
Digital strategy consultant slash tech startup co-founder, the LDA is designed to create more Nick Huhns, and Nick is here to make sure we can keep paying for catering at our events.

Secretary: Deborah Boyer
Despite her years as a number-crunching business consultant and turnaround specialist, Deborah still finds time to serve on several charitable boards and activites, including the LDA where she’s our lead ambassador to other non-profits here in town.

Directors:

• Jason Falls (formerly Secretary)
  One of the country’s Top 10 Social Media consultants, we aren’t letting Falls get away no matter how busy he gets.
• David Finch (formerly Treasurer)
  Our man at Doe Anderson and one of our many Bloggers At Large, Finch brings the quiet wisdom to our proceedings.
• Jason Hiner
  Our favorite star from CBS (Interactive), Hiner is our direct link to the tech journalism circuit nationally and internationally.
• Ben Jennings
  Our resident inside man at the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation, Jennings keeps us in the loop on public tech financing and legislation.
• Michelle Jones (formerly Vice President)
  The voice behind Consuming Louisville, Let Them Tweet Cake, and, in addition to her notable tech savvy, our emissary to the larger Possibility Citizenry
• Jason Loehr
  One of the mad men behind Mad*Pow Creative, Loehr is the utility man who tackles everything from design projects to fundraising collateral, and does it with style.

Retiring Directors:

• Elle Waters
• Jim McDonnell
• Chris Hall

If anything good comes from the Louisville Digital Association in the next 12 months, this is who to thank. If it all goes down in flames, it was Garmon’s fault.

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When pundits discuss the “post-PC era” that’s code for a world where more people surf the web on smartphones than conventional computers. And that world is now. If you’re marketing online and not focusing on the mobile space, you’re missing the biggest target out there.

LDA’s own Jim McDonnell, the guru of emerging channels at Papa John’s, has been perfecting the art of selling pizza via smartphones for years. On Oct. 4, he’ll show you the roadmap he developed at the cost of thousands of dollars, and let you in on the dirty secrets of mobile marketing. Join us at the Price Weber auditorium, 10701 Shelbyville Road, from 6:30-8:30 pm as the LDA gets the down-low on mobile marketing. (There will be hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar, so we’ve got that goin’ for us, which is nice, too.)

Seating is limited, so reserve your spot today.

Admission is free. The wisdom is priceless.

It’s been too long since the Louisville Digital Association socialized, so we’re teaming up with Cardinal Venture Club for a Louisville Tech Happy Hour at Flanagan’s Ale House, 934 Baxter Avenue, from 6-9pm on Friday, Aug. 19.

Come rub elbows and trade war stories with the University of Louisville’s most entrepreneurial MBA students and/or the Derby City’s top tech talent — and enjoy some cocktails and pub fare while you’re at it. There’s no better way to round out your work week.

Admission is free (but the food ain’t) and reservations are not required, though if you’d register on Facebook we’d be mighty obliged. See you next Friday!

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LVL1, KSTC, the Louisville Metro Inventors Council and Enterprise Corp are joining forces like a techno-entrepreneurial Justice League to teach makers how to make money, and maybe make Louisville more awesome in the process. From Tinkering to Commercialization – A “How To” Guide is a workshop set up for hardware hackers and inventors that teaches the ins and outs of bootstrapping and commercializing your designs for fun and profit.

Quoth the website:

Attendees will be introduced to the basics of how to take one’s projects from the garage to commercialization … with an emphasis on prototype manufacturing.

The event will be held August 25, from 6-8pm at Enterprise Corp HQ, 614 West Main Street (the offices share an entrance with the downtown Bristol location). Admission is free, but seating is limited to the first 30 registrants. Act now while supplies last. See store website for details.

Louisville has one of the finest makerspaces in the region. Let’s make sure we have equally awesome maker-preneurs, too. LDA-observant makers, get thee to the workshop!

UPDATE: This workshop is now filled.

It continues to baffle us here at the LDA how many Louisvillians have never heard of IdeaFestival, the offbeat 3-day conference of unlikely ideas that is held annually in our hometown. Well, we’re going to address that in the most efficient manner possible: Bribery! As a member of Louisville Digital Association, you are entitled to a 10% discount for any IdeaFestival 2011 All Access Pass purchase, while they last.  Simply include the discount code IF10 when you register.

(As an added bonus, All Access Pass purchasers will receive a complimentary one-year subscription to Fast Company, MAKE and Oxford American magazines. Yes, it’s dead-tree media, but it’s still free.)

OK, so we made it cheaper to attend IdeaFestival 2011, but we still haven’t told you why you should bother to attend at all. How does this partial list of speakers strike you?

• Aneesh Chopra: Chief Technology Officer for the United States and assistant to President Obama.
• Elizabeth Scharpf: founder of the global Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), a group using banana leaves to develop sanitary products considered too unmentionable for most charities.
• Leonard Mlodinow: Physicist, author, screenwriter and expert on chaos theory. Mlodinow was a writer for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation and co-author with Stephen Hawking of the recent best-seller The Grand Design.
• Cesar Millan: The world’s most famous Dog Whisperer

How can not want to see what bubbles forth from that stew of non-sequitur expertise? IdeaFestival 2011 is less than two months away and new partnerships, speakers and sessions are being announced each week.

The LDA is contemplating a post-event tweetup, so we can digest, debate and remix and the received wisdom of the speaker set. Details soon, but you have to be at IdeaFestival to play the afterparty games. See you there.

Startup Drinks social hour: Tonight, from 5-7 pm, Success Louisville and ParkVu Mobile are hosting the event at 806 East Market. Louisville technorati are encouraged to imbibe and expound upon local technical innovation. The LDA seal of approval is thusly applied.

Louisville/Lexington Startup Slam: Wednesday, August 3 from 5:30-8:30 pm at the BBC Bourbon Barrel Loft, 300 W. Main. KSTC, IN2LEX, Startup Advantage, Cardinal Venture Club, and a host of others are collaborating on and attending a startup slam event, wherein local entrepreneurs can share advice, talent and cocktails. The Lexington attendees are renting a party bus to make sure their contingent arrives in style. LDA endorses this on all fronts.

Let Them Tweet Cake: Also Wednesday, August 3 from 6:30-8:30 pm at Sweet Surrender, 1804 Frankfort Avenue. Consuming Louisville‘s own Michelle Jones hosts a tech-centric dessert social for the ladies of innovation in town (though guys are allowed, provided they mind their Ps and Qs). If you can’t or won’t do Startup Slam, LDA’ers must attend this.

Organizations that regularly host LDA-endorsed awesomeness:

LVL1: Louisville hacker space, feature a free-to-use laser cutter, 3D printer and soldering shop

Build Guild Louisville: A web developer’s social club, with an emphasis on social

Forge Louisville: The quasi-official network of Louisville startup founders and entrepreneurs

Image by ds-foto :: bembelkandidat via Flickr

Wednesday, June 22 is the second day of summer — and your first opportunity to simultaneously mix it up with members of the Louisville Digital Association and Success Louisville. We’ll be collectively invading the Java Brewing Company at Landis Lakes, 135 South English Station Road, at 6pm this Wednesday. Together we’ll brainstorm how to bootstrap Louisville out of the current recession whilst imbibing the finest in caffeinated beverages and indulging in a selection of luxurious pastries.

Got issues you want to see help the LDA tackle? Need to bounce ideas off some digitally savvy peers? Just want an excuse to leave the office early on Wednesday? Then the LDA June meetup is for you.

Admission is free, the conversation likewise. Refreshments are cash and carry. Be there or be square.

The Louisville Digital Association and LVL1, Louisville’s official makerspace, are joining forces to distribute some mobile app development wisdom with our first collaborative Idea to Execution workshop from 7 to 10 pm on Feb. 16 at LVL1, 814 East Broadway.

How (and Why) to Build an Android OS Application is two events in one: The opening portion features a brief overview of making the business case for a mobile application, the must-have features any professional mobile app should include, and the landmines to avoid when taking your mobile application from concept to deliverable. Following the 30-minute best-practices seminar, attendees will engage in a two-hour hands-on workshop to develop a functioning Android App.

That’s right, attendees of the Feb. 2011 LDA event will leave the session with a functioning Android application they coded themselves. A $10 cover charge and a functioning laptop are required to participate in the hands-on session.

Seating for the Idea to Execution Android App Workshop is limited to 15, so sign up now. The in-person event is targeted at experienced developers looking to get some firsthand exposure to Android development. However, for non-coders and overflow attendees, the business-case portion of the seminar will be live-streamed online. Stay tuned for details on how to catch that broadcast.

Thus, coders can get hands-on training, and everyone else gets a crash course in Android planning from the comfort of their computer screen. Seats are disappearing fast, so sign up now for the workshop. (If enough interest is shown in the initial workshop, we’ll arrange some repeat sessions to accommodate additional developers.)

Details and schedule for the workshop are listed below:

For this workshop, please bring a laptop to use with the Android SDK installed in advance if possible. Follow the Android SDK installation instructions detailed here. If you have trouble installing the SDK, we can help troubleshoot the installation at 7pm before the workshop begins.

7:00pm – Meet and greet, Eclipse and Android SDK help
7:30pm – Mobile app case lessons presentation from Jay Garmon
8:00pm – LVL1 Android Development Workshop led by Mike Borsuk
- Android intro / history / OS architecture overview
- API overview
- Development tools overview / setup
- Build / deploy ‘Hello World’ sample app to emulator and device
- Give users choice of a few sample apps to build and deploy, help with customizations for interested users
- Optional: display and discuss a custom hardware platform running running android as well as some commodity devices running custom Android builds

For any questions about this workshop please email workshops@lvl1.org.

Sign up for the workshop here.