centre{source}

I live in the wonderful town of Pleasant View, Tennessee. It’s located about a 30 minute drive northwest of Nashville. Yesterday, as I passed exit 31 on I-24, I saw a sign in bold red letters proclaiming… “FIREWORKS Sold Here!” Nothing too fancy or flashy, just red paint on a white sign.

I began to recall fond memories from my childhood… memories of the all-too-seldom family vacation fireworks stop. At every exit with fireworks I would beg my parents to pull over and let me partake of explosive goodness. I’m not sure if it was the idea of blowing something up, or the large red arrow that caught my attention, but regardless…I wanted them…NOW.

In the fall of 2008, the Strategy team at centre{source} set out to create a plan for expanding the firm’s reach and involvement in the local Nashville Interactive Community. Over the course of a few months, a strategy was formed that involved looking inwardly for personal development opportunities and looking outwardly for ways to become more active and connected with community members. The cornerstone and most valuable component of this strategy has quickly become our practice of hosting a monthly mixer at the c{s} North Fourth office on the last Thursday of each month.
As the “hostess” and organizer of these events, I was initially unsure of what to expect as far as turnout and reception. As we geared up for the first mixer, held in January of 2009, I must have refreshed our Pingg invite list at least 50 times a day. As we got closer to D-Day and RSVPs began rolling in, I quickly realized that what we initially expected to be an event with attendance of around 30-40 was going to become much more!

The summer is here, which means that once again it is time for us to join forces to help out Ellie’s Run for Africa (ERFA), a 5k run and family fun day that raises awareness of and funding for Africans who struggle to meet basic needs such as health care, food, water, shelter, clothing and education.  Since the first event in 2004, ERFA has raised over $155,000 and helped to put over 420 kids in school.

At CentreSource, we include planning and/or strategy in every interactive and web project we begin.  The goal of this on-the-forefront project work is to assess the estimated scope, timeline, and budget as discussed during the sales meetings and re-evaluate it through a more refined lens.  Very often, this refining perspective is comprised of an interactive HTML prototype developed using Axure RP Pro.

While many projects can be successfully planned using by-hand sketches (and our simplest ‘portfolio’ sites are, in fact, prototyped this way), as the complexity of the desired user experience increases, so too increases the value of an online, “clickable” prototype rendition.  Axure RP’s integrated development environment (IDE) makes it quick and easy to create such prototypes.

Our May Interactive Mixer was a great time — amazing weather and another fantastic crowd. Nashville interactive events have been heating up as the weather gets warmer, so kudos to those faces who keep popping up at all these events. We love to see Nashville building such a strong, committed community of interactive experts; our mixers are designed to play a small part of that. And in the 5 months since we’ve started, we’ve met so many amazing people and learned so much from our beer and cupcake fueled conversations.

This week we launched the new www.fridrichandclark.com. For those of you not familiar with F&C (affectionately called by our team)…shame on you! For over 40 years they have been front runners in the Nashville real estate market.

For the past several years they have struggled to find an online identity. The site had become stale and hard to use. With this new site, it was our goal to place F&C back on the mantle where they belonged. It was clear that a traditional realty site would not suffice. For those of you familiar with real estate you might know of a tool called the “MLS.” This tool allows users to search for houses in middle Tennessee. It would have been easy enough to simply display the results that were associated with F&C through an API…but why do something simple?!!!

This week we launched a brand new site for another great cause. AuTube.tv — a project of the Dan Marino Foundation — focuses on building connectivity and community anyone either on the autism spectrum or in the autism community.  They call it an “issues-based social network” — it’s a unique concept in which each month a single topic is presented to the community, who then discusses the topic along with a panel of experts.

In preparation for my presentation (Try some Open Source…. Everybody’s doing it), I’ve compiled some of the best offerings in the land of OSS.

Utilities
Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com) - Browser
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net) - BitTorrent
FileZilla (http://www.FileZilla.com) - FTP Client
CLAMWIN (http://www.clamwin.com) - Open Source Anti-Virus
TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com) - Remote computer control

As the founder of centresource, I’ve always been tasked with choosing solutions that yield the best ROI - period. To that point, Open Source technologies have become an integral part of our business and as a result, also our personal lives. We don’t choose/use them simply because they’re free (in fact, some cost money) - we use them because they represent an excellent solution to an existing need.

Digital Nashville asked me to speak on the subject at their next Education Series. You can see the invite on Facebook (here) or on the actual Digital Nashville site (here). I’ll go through a variety of scenarios where Open Source technologies provide a wonderful solution - ranging from work-related to fun!