Andru Edwards lives and works at the intersection of today’s chip-smart consumer electronics and network-savvy digital lifestyle.
At GearLive.com, the popular blog he founded for devout “gear-heads,” he posts daily reviews of cutting-edge E-gadgetry that guide the earliest of adopters on how to accessorize their lives for pure techno-tantalizing bliss.
The impre
ssario moved from cyberspace to face-to-face by organizing Seattle Mind Camp
Attention campers: Seattle Mind Camp was a twenty-four hour, free-form meeting of minds where you, as participant, set the agenda, swap stories, case histories, insights and observations and co-habitate in a mutual physical domain that is part brainstorm session, part conference, part camp.
Let’s Spend the Night Together
Seattle’s Mind Camp kicked off Saturday, Nov 5th, at the Riverfront Technical Park in South Seattle and ran overnight to 10am Sunday morning. Meals were furnished free of charge by a sponsor group headed up by MSN Searc
h and Sabey Corp. The keys to admission were an inquisitive mind, a willingness to share expertise, and, for those that managed to wind down from this wired state of offline collaboration, a sleeping bag.
Edwards sees MindCamp as a recurring event, an ongoing conversation, and is working on reassembling the Puget Sound’s cognoscenti every six months, wresting them away from their virtual habitats in front of LCD, IRC, Wiki and chat room, to do something increasingly rare in the age of iPod earplugs and virtual avatars—socialize. He admits that while he would be content to interact virtually, he sees enormous value in the synergy of this new, highly kinetic and interactive social component. Something this transplanted New Yorker felt was lacking in Seattle climes.
Riverfront Technical Park, scene of Mind Camp, is a redevelopment of a building previously designed for Boeing’s Space and Defense Group, to accommodate their main instructional and training divisions. The 175,000 usf building was improved by Mind Camp sponsor Sabey Corp with Class-A finishes and configured to meet the requireme
nts for modern call centers and training facilities. It is located in the South Seattle area, offerign easy accessibility via I-5 and Hwy 99 and East Marginal Way.
“”When I started Gear Live Media, my goal was to do more than bring news to the masses by blogging,” said Andru. ” I wanted to bring people together and create community, which blogging has enabled me to do. Seattle Mind Camp will allow me to take that mentality to the next level, as we bring together the smartest and most interesting people from the Seattle area. It’s a huge undertaking, but I think that great things are going to be created as a result of the Mind Camp experien
ce.”
For more information on Mind Camp, visit http://www.SeattleMind.com [24×7]
Andru Edwards is organizing Seattle Mind Camp as a social networking event for Seattle cognoscenti.
Seattle Mind Camp takes place Nov. 5-6, 2005
