Paul Graham wrote a much linked-to post last month called How to be Silicon Valley (You can read many responses to this on popularity aggregator and comment site Reddit).

As a quick summary, Graham contends that to create a technology hub, you need two types of people:

• Rich people
• Nerds

you don’t need:

• Bureaucrats
• Buildings

and you need to have:

• Universities
• Personality
• Things that appeal to nerds
• Youth and liberalism
• Time

Joey has written several interesting comments about this, particularly about its applicability to Toronto. I suggest you read at least Part 0 and Part 1:

• Part 0
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

My commentary: I believe Graham has missed three important parts to the success of Silicon Valley, with direct applicability to the situation in Toronto

• Big Tech: there’s lot of big tech companies in Silicon Valley. The Old West wasn’t all cowboys, it was mostly ranchers. People need somewhere to go that will pay them when their first, second and third startups fail. Startups need a place to draw employees from, once they get past the first dozen.
• Geography: south of San Francisco, it’s easy to get from anywhere to anywhere along the 101, 280 and 82. San Francisco is a traffic dead end, which is why we here a lot more about the strip malled Mountain View than the more beautiful (as I remember it) San Rafael.
• Age integration: one thing I’ve noticed at conferences and camps I’ve gone to in the Bay Area is age integration. It’s not weird or unusual to be 40 years old, or 50, or 30 or 60. You are what you can do, not what you look like.

Where does Toronto come up short here (on Graham’s list and on my amendments):

1. Personality. In particular, here’s Toronto’s idea of a world class civic center, which I think speaks for itself. Large granite slabs. Here’s some self-congratulatory drivel about how great this is. I understand they’re having the same jackasses redesign Bloor Street near Yonge.
2. The Commercial Concentration Tax, aka “Let’s f*ck Toronto and move all big businesses to 905” tax, passed by the Peterson Liberal government and tacitly approved by the Conservatives and NDP. The IBM Lab, where I first worked when I moved from Toronto, has moved from Don Mills/Eglinton to somewhere deep in Markham. Rogers is relocating many of its developers from Mt. Pleasant avenue to Brampton. Why not? It’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Thus, there’s no pool of potential employers, management, tech-aware support and HR people, and so forth for downtown startups to draw from.
3. Geography. Downtown Toronto is great for young people, but every meter you move away from the subway line, not so great for people with families. Liberty Village would be a great place to put BlogMatrix, if we really started making a go of it except I’d be commuting—within Toronto!—for 1 1/2 to 2 hours a day. Wilson station through Finch has great subway access, but the North York sector of Toronto (Mel Lastman Square, bah) is soulless as Dundas Square.
4. Possibly because the previous two points, the two TorCamps and one TorDemoCamp I have attended have skewed pretty young. Not that there’s any thing wrong with that, except for at the DemoCamp when there was a moderate amount of sneering at a enterprise level app. Believe it or not kid, there’s important issues out there that need solving that are important, even though you’ve never heard of them. And “enterprise” doesn’t (have to) mean boring and process-laden, it means it has to scale scale scale. Just like that Web 2.0 app you’re plugging away at. Just because it works with 5 people doesn’t mean it’s going to work for 50,000 “with a little more hardware”.

If the first two issues can be addressed, I think the third can be overcome (there’s lots of great reasons for concentrating businesses in the core) and that it turn will help fix the fourth. Should we be optimistic about a solution for the first two issues? Both are political in nature, but in the era of progressive paternalism—which lusts after the concentration of wealth and power in centralized government—well… let’s just say we’re making our own bed, anyway.

• 7th wedding anniversary (Thursday past)
• Trinity-Anne’s 5th birthday (Saturday)
• first sailing regatta, the Shark Trillium at RCYC. We came 9th, which is OK (though anything top 12 will make me happy, but the goal to get top 5s)
• three days of patch testing
  • the Greatest Health Care System In The World made me wait 6 months to get the tests
  • on Monday, two hours of waiting for about 15 minutes of work
  • today, I was scheduled to be the first person there. I still had to wait 20 minutes because they could be bothered to open up. Grrrr.
  • I’m really really really stomach sick; I’m not sure if this is related to the patch testing but it happened at the same time. I’ve slept almost all of today. This made me miss DemoCamp last night.
• TTC wildcat strike on Monday. David Miller, the Greatest Mayor In The History Of All Cities That Ever Were And Ever Will Be is paying the workers who wouldn’t cross the picket lines. Why not? It’s not his money. The city is suing the union, but let’s see how half hearted that becomes if it will affect the November elections.

I was nervous before the presentations started, but not at all as I was doing it. I’ve never presented in front of a 100+ crowd before! I had to rush through my demo because I had a lot of ground to cover and I’m afraid I didn’t quite get across all my points. That’s OK. As Randy says, I need to do this about 10 times to get the traction I need.

I was very gratified afterwards to have people come up to me and say they were mulling over in their heads what I had been saying. That’s exactly where I wanted people to end up (well, besides writing cheques!) — there’s a lot going on in the BlogMatrix Platform; it’s concept dense.

(Note: Toronto people, can you bring your damned business cards please; there’s something we can learn from the Japanese).

Here’s some reviews (I may update this if more come in):

Back from democamp tdot:

BlogMatrix was next. It’s a really impressive blogging engine that incorporates maps and calendar data into a blog post. The calendar’s scheduling features are really powerful and allow you to add all sorts of different events to your personal time management software. BlogMatrix uses Microformats extensively which is very geeky and very cool.

Thomas Purves:

Attended democamp number 5 last night. Another great event that somehow put itself together last (kudos to camp councelor David and and all those who helped out). Wow, some impressive technology demo’d last night including blogmatrix and DableDB. Even with democamps running every 4 weeks, this town is not running out of technology to show off.

Remarkk (I’ll be in touch):

What grabbed my attention and met the threshold of being remarkable?

Blogmatrix and Dabble DB.

Wow. Really. Pay attention to both of these guys. Blogmatrix is integrating an amazing amount of workflow, microformats and mash-able goodness into a blogging platform. Dabble DB rocked my world and made my head spin from the potential applications and its truly disruptive nature.

DemoCamp 5: Yet Another Hit!:

David Janes demonstrated BlogMatrix, his platform for structured blogging and microformats. He demo clearly showed the power of structured blogging and its ability to tie together disparate sources of information into something a little more cohesive and useful; I hope this sort of thing catches on. He also demonstrated a BlogMatrix site built for Toyota Canada proving that yes, DemoCamp projects do get actually paying customers—customers who pay well, in fact.

I’m quite pleased with these reviews, and I’m very happy to me mentioned in the same breath as Avi Bryant & Andrew Catton‘s incredible-but-unreleased Dabble DB. Here’s a picture of me sucking a lemon upon realization that I’m in the room with people much smarter than myself ;-)

(More)

BlogMatrix Platform by David Janes (Chris Nolan):

I admit, when I saw this on the wiki I thought oh great, yet another blogging platform. I didn’t have high hopes for it, but was pleasantly surprised by the stuff David Janes of BlogMatrix shared with us.

He’s taken structured blogging, thrown in microformats and a few mashups, and presented it in a manner that most marketing/pr type people can grasp without too much effort. I could tell he knows his stuff, both on the blogging front and the coding front, and made a well rounded presentation that would appeal to the whole cross section of the democamp audience from marketers to designers to code geeks.

I presented at DemoCamp 5 last night. Here’s some photos of me (and Tim to my left, your right) sitting about before and after my demo:

Kudo’s to David Crow (photo, with wife Kristin and friend Mark) for pulling this off and Greg Wilson (I’ll be in touch) for organizing the facilities.

David Crow scores big for future TorCamp TorDemoCamps.

This morning Mark Kuznicki and I met with Allen Gelberg, Director of the Collaboration Centre at MaRS. Allen has offered to sponsor future DemoCamps. The MaRS sponsorship would be for space and facilities for 10 events throughout the year. Allen and MaRS donated the space for DemoCamp4 and they were impressed by the openness, the energy and the people that attended (see I told you it was about the attendees ;-). This sponsorship would include the facility rental for the MaRS Auditorium which is roughly $2,500/night, that’s a $25,000 donation of in-kind services (Kristin might argue my not working would count as an equivalent or larger donation). There are a few conditions of the donation of space, including:

1. Guarrantee that the space is used by BarCamp/DemoCamp for the purpose outlined (an open space for people to share, learn and get excited about technology and what is going on online)
2. We may be bumped by a paying customer
3. We use preferred MaRS services including catering

BarCamp is inline with the MaRS mission of “accelerating the commercialization of new ideas and new technologies by fostering the coming together of capital, science and business.” Part of the discussion is that not all of the topics at BarCamp are commercialize-able and there is no reason that they should be, BarCamp is a place for people to share, learn and get excited about technology and what is going on online.

I was at MaRS for the iSummit conference and it’s a very nice facility, with great access to transit and nearby socialization nexii (i.e. bars)

I’ll be demoing the BlogMatrix Platform at the next DemoCamp on the 25th of April. This will be significantly different than what you see here even though the underlying software’s the same (well, with four more months of development). We’ll be showing structured blogging/CMS, mapping, calendaring and microformats all rolled together and if you’re lucky we’ll be showing some projects we’re doing for paying clients (along the lines of this in terms of navigation).

It’ll be sad though, IMHO, if MaRS is the only venue used for TorDemoCamp. We’ll have to see if the crowds (150+ at TDC4) keep growing.

Tagged: microformats, Toronto, DemoCamp, TorDemoCamp.