If you have yet to make a CentreSource mixer, we hope you make the next one. We’ll promote an invite soon (follow us on Twitter for the full scoop), but go ahead and mark your calendar: Thursday June 25th at 5PM.

Also, thanks to Nashvillest for a great summary of the May Interactive Mixer.

Finally, no mention of the Mixer is complete without a mention of our Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans winners.

Our Mixer Winners:

Golden Kraut — Justin Davis of GBOD

Silvery Beans — Matt Reed of redpepper

Our CentreSource Winners:

Golden Kraut — Morgan Zuehlke, Strategist

Silvery Beans — Chris Wage, Director of Operations

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?!!!

Instead we set out to push the limits of what we could code and what the MLS could handle. It is safe to say that we broke down long standing barriers and the work speaks for itself. This site is rich with functions such as:

- Individual Agent landing pages that display listings associated with that agent
- Auto-populating closing listings over the past several months specific to an agent
- Unique dynamic slide shows of property listings
- An intranet that houses company announcements, frequently used documents, and contact directory.
- AMAZING design without sacrificing content management flexibility

Congrats to the centresource team who put in the long hours and to the Fridrich and Clark team for their hard work as well!

We partnered with Kent Creative in order to bring this project to life, and planned with implementation in mind — a fixed budget required that our Planning process work closely to expand scope as much as possible without exceeeding budget. As a result, we focused on building a clickable prototype, which helped us reduce surprises, elminate uncertainty, and streamline the development process. And we also enjoyed working closely with podcasts — a process which yielded new procedures for making podcasts even better!

Congrats to the team at AuTube for a seamless launch!

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

Communication
Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im) - Multi Chat
Thunderbird (http://www.mozillamessaging.com) - Email Suite
Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org) - Blog Platform

Entertainment
Miro (http://www.getmiro.com) - Media Player (HD Content)
Tremulous (http://tremulous.net) - First Person Shooter Game
LinCity (http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) - Sim City
FlightGear (http://flightgear.org) - Flight Simulator

Graphics
Paint.net (http://www.getpaint.net) - Image Editing
GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) - Image Editing
Blender 3D (http://www.blender.org) - 3D Simulator
Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) - Vector Graphics Editor (like Illustrator/CorelDraw)

Audio/Video
MediaCoder (http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/dl/dvdcss.html) - Media Transcoder
Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr) - DVD Backup
Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) - Multi Track Audio Editor
VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) - Super Media Player, Caster

Productivity
OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) - Office Suite
Bluemarine (http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it) - Photo Manager

Enterprise
SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com) - Enterprise CRM
Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) - Web Publishing, Content Management
Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org) - Open Source Phone System
Zarafa (http://zarafa.com) - Exchange Competitor

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!

It didn’t always get it 100% right, but even if it didn’t, it was still a convenient shortcut and it would get a majority of the info right. It was also amazingly good at picking “events” out of e-mail — either casual e-mail from a person or automated/invite type messages.

Then one day, it disappeared. Poof. Gone. Has anyone else noticed this? Does it still exist for anyone else out there? Is it unique to traditional gmail versus google apps?

Google, please bring this back, or I swear on the Golden Kraut I’ll have my revenge!

When I first began at CentreSource, I demanded that the title on my business card be changed to “Solutions Consultant.” To this day, I have no clue what that actually means, but I would think it means I help people find opportunities and solve problems. In my effort to say something profound during the City Paper interview, I said, “We want to make sure we’re delivering the outcome the client wants, not just a list of deliverables.”

I’ll admit it’s not all that profound, but I do believe it’s true: as I sat in a room full of the brightest consultants in Nashville, I saw the common thread. Everyone there separated themselves from simply making the sale, and instead focused on doing what was right for the client. The sales naturally followed and didn’t take much prompting.

So in conclusion, if you feel like you’re not being given advice by your web firm….call me on my cell. (Sales Plug…Sales Plug…)

Gold Awards:

Southwestern Company
Thomas Miller & Partners
Yamaha: All Access 360

Bronze Awards:

ALOC Group
Belmont University: Debate 08
Giving Tree: Give Card Incentives promotion video
Golden Kraut
SHOUTAmerica
Trevecca University
As our team continues to grow in strength, I’m confident that this is just the beginning and there are more awards to come!  Sure, we have to pull late nights sometimes.. but it’s a great feeling being commended (nine times over!) for the work we are doing in the interactive world.   We are working on a TON of really awesome projects right now that I can’t wait to see entered for more Horizons next year.   Here in the creative department, we make it a point to not let projects out of our door until we’ve asked ourselves: “Is this an award-winning design?”   With goals like that, there will hopefully be many more blog posts in the future announcing achievements.

Good job, team.  Give yourselves a pat on the back.  :)

All Hail the Golden Kraut

Motivation can take many forms. At CentreSource, it takes the form of spray-painted canned food.

But first, a bit of backstory…

In 2008, we were the leading sponsor of Nashville’s Barcamp. We created a program for the day, acted as MCs, and designed some interactive games for what was a great day of speaking, learning, and networking. We forgot one thing, though, until the last minute: prizes for said games. So in desperation at the 11th hour, Nick grabbed the only free things in the house: two cans of spraypaint and two cans of canned food. And this begat the dumbest prizes ever — Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans.

The next day, at the culmination of this event with everyone gathered together in the main hall, Nick gave these prizes away. The Silvery Beans, given first, elicited mostly confusion from the audience. Lucky for us, however, the winner of The Golden Kraut played along with our game and announced his excitement by running through the aisles with his prize in hand, shouting like a madman.

Afterwards, I suggested we had two options for dealing with something so ridiculous: either we pretend it never happened, or we own up to it so tenaciously that it becomes the joke that never dies. We choose the latter.

So, we implemented Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans as an interactive tool. How?  We give one Golden Kraut and one Silvery Beans each month to the most deserving members of our team. We use the free Google Docs Form tool to submit nominations in a single location that is reviewed at the end of the month by our management team. The nominations are frequently so genuinely complementary (and hilarious) that we share them openly at our weekly staff meetings.

Jason "Shamus" O'Brien's Silvery Beans Win

And we built a website at www.thegoldenkraut.com where we feature a gallery of winners. Everyone who receives the Kraut or Beans gets to answer a questionnaire (again, collected using the free Google Forms tool) that is then posted to the site — a ritual that has become well-loved for the cleverness of answers. It gives us something to laugh about, and links to send around to our peers.

After five months of giving Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans, we’ve found that its already made a noticeable impact on our culture: we’re more likely to rely on each other, reward each other openly for outstanding performance, and collaborate to develop Kraut-worthy ideas. When the winners aren’t announced promptly, our team is openly asking for the results — proving that even silly ideas can be highly engaging.  It also proves that incentive can come from, well, anything – as long as you’ve earned it by earning the respect of your peers.

With an idea this ridiculous, we decided to expand it outside our little house and into our community. Each month, CentreSource hosts an Interactive Mixer for our growing interactive and web community, and each month we award one Golden Kraut and one Silvery Beans to non-CentreSource attendees who participate in our interactive games. We circle up in the foyer of North Fourth — a community of partners, references, competition, and friends — and laugh along as someone is bestowed a tongue-in-cheek honor and given the chance to answer an equally tongue-in-cheek survey online.

Sure, it’s mostly all about humor — but we like to think it means something more. It gives us a moment each month to laugh about something as a community and recognize two people, even for something as silly as finding the most hidden silver coins in the house or getting enough signatures from other attendees. And as such, our community is beginning to recognize names and faces as being a part of a community that is moving, growing, and learning together. And that’s exactly what we want for Nashville.

Not bad for a can of paint and some canned vegetables.

Shaun is a long-time friend of the firm — several of us have known Shaun for a while and respected his leadership skills and passion for interactive. Shaun actually comes to us from the other side: he’s been a client of CentreSource many times over as the Director of Online Marketing for Word Entertainment. He has the unique perspective of knowing our processes from the other side.

Five days in and Shaun is settling into the Account Manager role with ease — we’re more than confident that clients are going to appreciate his expertise, organization skills, and deadline-focused mindset.

Welcome Shaun to c{s} team by sending him a message at www.twitter.com/globalblitz.