From the Catskills to California: The growing Offline First community
One week from today, we’ll arrive at the gorgeous Oak Creek Ranch in Santa Margarita, California, for another weekend of conversation and relaxation with the Offline First community. We can’t wait to meet an amazing new group of campers who design and develop amazing apps, maintain the open source PouchDB project, create software to support hospitals in the developing world, manage web platforms, and nurture diverse tech groups. And with a few days left to register for Offline Camp California, we hope to see even more creative and dedicated folks joining our community.
In many ways, it feels like almost no time has passed since our inaugural Offline Camp in the Catskills this past June, when we joined a diverse group of campers around a campfire for the first time, bonding over s’mores and strumming on guitars before even making introductions. We couldn’t have asked for a better group of friendly, passionate, and creative collaborators to shape the discussion at our first Offline First event.
In the weeks since camp, our Catskills campers have recapped the wide variety of unconference discussions that began that weekend— and expanded on them — in articles about…
The problems Offline First can help solve:
- The Impact of Offline First on the Developing World
- Offline Maps: A Shared Problem in Need of a Shared Solution
- Take Your Pokemon GO Offline First
The challenges it exposes:
The solutions and tools that make it work:
- Let’s Talk about Tooling
- Offline/Low-Bandwith UX Design Patterns
- Offline First, the Decentralized Web, and Peer-to-Peer Technologies
- Enabling Offline First Experiences on the Web with Service Workers
The community we hope to build:
Campers have also shared background material to accompany videos of their fabulous passion talks, ranging from topics about Offline First…
… to topics not so much about Offline First…
One of our favorite things about the inaugural Offline Camp was the sense of community that it engendered, and the ways in which campers wanted to contribute to building the burgeoning Offline First movement. Since camp, we’ve seen discussion increasing on the Offline First Slack team, sessions about Offline First being accepted for upcoming events, and campers featured in articles and podcasts. Campers have volunteered to curate both case studies and an archive of conference session recordings that show Offline First in action.
The degree of passion and dedication that we’ve seen from our first batch of campers has been truly inspiring, and we expect no less of the fabulous folks we’ll meet next week. With a new set of campers comes a new set of concerns within the Offline First movement for us to focus on as we continue to hone in on the problems that need solving. We have a yoga instructor joining us this time around, a chef serving us eggs from his own chickens, and an absolutely gorgeous venue for a sunset hayride. But while we’re looking forward to new ideas and activities in a new location, we also feel like we’re coming home. We can’t wait for those same warm fuzzies we felt around the campfire in the Catskills four months ago. And we owe a huge debt of gratitude to that first group of campers who have propelled the Offline First community forward with their warmth, thoughtfulness, and dedication.
Thank you.
