Event Highlights for December 7 – December 13, 2009

Edited: Corrected time of BFTP.

Hope you weren’t trying to get any work done in these weeks before the holidays.

Our event calendar is as packed it has ever been, chock full of events for every kind of techie. Whether you want to brush up on your Python or throw down with your fellow new media heads, you have no excuse for driving straight home after work.

Start off the week at the home of our new Comcast overlords, taking in Chris Bartlett of Gay History Wiki, whom we’ve covered in the past, at this month’s Refresh Philly. Then, hold off until Thursday and take the day off to better familiarize yourself with Ben Franklin Technology Partners’ application process. When you are done plotting the next great Philadelphia business, head on over to PANMA’s holiday party to spend your future riches.

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TNT: Chris Bartlett of the Gay History Wiki project

The site, at the moment, is awfully ugly.

“A Web site for dead people shouldn’t be too fancy,” says Chris Bartlett.

That proclamation was met with laughs from an engaged audience of 200 or more during his presentation at Ignite Philly 4 earlier this month, video of which can be seen below. But that five-minute presentation was a bridge from 20 years in a community, three years of research and the nearly half-century old Philadelphia gay community.

Bartlett, 43, is the founder of the Gay History Wiki, which aims to collect the life stories of at least 4,600 gay Philadelphia men who since 1981 have died following complications to their battles with AIDS/HIV and the friends and places who helped develop one of the country’s richest LGBT traditions since the 1960s.

The profiles are notably and purposefully varied, showing the lack of order the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s followed, Bartlett says, from a 31-year-old deli clerk at the Bellvue Stratford hotel to a fashion designer with growing clout to who just might be Kensington’s most famous drag queen and a driving force in driving Bartlett’s passion for the project.

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Ignite Philly 4 hosts Free Library and Mayoral cabinet officials as VGI impresses

Videogame Growth Initiative's Mike Worth gives an energetic presentation at Ignite Philly 4 | Credit: Sean Blanda

‘Let’s continue these great conversations,’ he said in so many words.

Before an intermission of Ignite Philly 4 that could have been easily overlooked, Make:Philly’s Harris Romanoff made a modest call to presenters that the Ignite series has sorely lacked: an opportunity to keep the conversations and inspiration flowing and perhaps create truly definable, actionable steps.

“Make is extending an invitation to speakers past and present to speak and to answer more questions,” Romanoff said to a crowd of more than 250 gathered in the upstairs of Johnny Brenda’s bar in Fishtown.

Though it was apparent that no one was yet booked for Make’s monthly DIY tech/hack meetings, it was a notable recommendation for Ignite, having now surpassed four sold out events since 2007.

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