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BBC Backstage London Christmas Party – signup now!

Remember that party I mentioned a while ago? Well the sign up page just went live about 2 hours ago and there's already 150+ people signed up. There's only room for about 400 people. So I highly suggest you sign up now.

Ok what an amazing 6 hours it has been. 225 signups in a quater of a day. Seriously, if your interested in attending the Christmas Bash, sign up tonight or you may lose out. Our next step is to hit Eventful.com and of course Upcoming.org. So we're expecting quite a spike. Not many people are blogging the signup yet, but I'm sure that will change.

Ok now its midnight on Saturday morning (roughly 12hours since the form went live) and I've counted about 320+ signups. So signup quickly or loose out later…

And after 35 hours, were full to the brim with signups. I have started a waiting list for new signups.

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Even more complicated Calendaring setup

Hey and you thought my last calendar setup was crazy enough. Think again, welcome to the world where 2 mobile devices, 3 computers and 3 services isn't that hard to imagine. Well welcome to my insane syncing setup for calendars, contacts and tasks. No wonder it gets so messed up without too much effort. I've also included the SVG from Inkscape if you want a better quality version.

So starting from the mobile phone (SPV M600) its got a few things on it now. I'm using the Funambol Sync plugin with Schedule world but I can't seem to get it working all the time. So I've also stuck WebIS Mobilesync on there too which I have a 30 day trial of. This sync's directly with Plaxo which does away with my problems with Activesync not syncing. I say not syncing but actually it does sync with my computer at home nicely but not my computer at work. I would also sync with my laptop but someone at Microsoft decided that syncing with 2 machines would be all anyone would need. So now on to my other mobile phone (Nokia N80). Its my work phone but I still want it to fit in the sync system otherwise theres little point in having it. So Nokia has its own communication suite which actually isn't that bad. Its bulky yes and a hog on memory but consistently works unlike Activesync. So at the moment the suite is installed on my desktop machines at work and home but I only sync at work (only got one sync cable right now, and simply can't be bothered to take it out everyday). At some point I will start syncing on both machines. I've attempted to use the build in SyncML client to talk to schedule world too but failed so far.

So the biggest addition to my sync setup is ScheduleWorld. Its basically a Funambol server with lots of custom code to keep it working and running as a service. Ideally it could be thought of as the more open source version of Plaxo as it supports everything Plaxo does and even more. It supports contacts, notes and calendaring. Its web calendar is not as nice as google calendar but is reasonable. It also has a Google Calendar Sync link built in and supports SyncML. So I would like to one day replace Plaxo with Schedule World but its still quite some time off. For example the SyncML client on Windows Mobile 5 uses Visual Basic and so requires another download to work correctly. This is a pain because Windows Mobile 5 is pretty much all written with the compact .Net framework. Yes this is not schedule worlds fault and some would say Microsoft should build SyncML into its Mobile Operating system. And I would agree but its a pain none the less. Another flaky thing is the Outlook plugins. They seem to crash a lot, so its not reliable for everyday use. This is why Plaxo is still number one for daily syncing. Once you get stuff into Schedule world its easy to get things back out again. It also makes available everything using the SyncML API and I think it supports ATOM too. Plaxo does have an API but its no where near as open as Schedule World. So yeah Plaxo do hold your data hostage from yourself.

So going forward I would switch to using Schedule world or something similar if the plugins for outlook were more stable. I would even settle for no Activesync if the Windows Mobile 5 plugin was better developed. I'm also holding out some kind of hope that I will get the SyncML client working with the Nokia. I don't think I've spent nearly enough time looking into that issue.

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What next for London geekdinners?

I was reading Sarah Blow's summary of the girl geekdinner which happened on the same day as the first werewolf night (shame on you Sarah). Anyway, a quick quote from her entry

If anyone has feedback on the event who turned up then please feel free to give feedback here or on the wiki pages: http://londongirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/Ideas
If you would like to suggest a speaker, subject etc then feel free to do so here: http://londongirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/SpeakerRequests

I've been meaning to do a simular thing for quite some time to geekdinners. People do suggest guests to me and to be fair I'm not very good at following up. This is usually the case when I don't know the guest well. But that level of tranparency would allow the geekdinner community to take things upon themsleves. I see this as a good thing.

Now I don't know what Sarah said in her speech but I'm guessing she may have mentioned turing london girl geekdinners into a charity? If not, I'm sorry Sarah. But we did talk about it a while ago and I'm sure she won't mind me mentioning it now (i hope).

Why would girl geekdinners and geekdinners benefit from being a charity or non-profit? Well I think it makes perfect sense. At the moment its the work of Sarah Blow on the girl side and myself on the other side. This means it relies on the time and effort of one person. This is cool, but what happens if that one person is too busy, on holiday or I hope not dies. This could mean geekdinners would die or slowly die. Someone might pick it up, like I did with geekdinners but should things be left to chance? Specially with the traction it might have already?

From another point of view what if the person who runs the geekdinner starts to abuse the name? spoils it for the community and other geekdinners? Yes you don't have to be a non-profit or charity to deal with this problem but its at the core of geekdinners is something which I and Sarah think is important. What that is, is difficult to put in words. I guess but its something to do with the next generation and geek culture.

Sarah in her entry titled Techcrunch launch and Girlgeekdinners said this…

The idea of the girl geek dinners was to get the girls/ women feeling happier in a social tech environment and not worry about being the only female there… I was also hoping that by providing a way of getting people to meet each other that they would arrange to meet at such events having been to a girl geek dinner. I hope that this trend continues and that it really does help to bring more females into the industry and for those in the industry to not feel like they are the only ones out there!

So I would say the geekdinners are about self described geeks sharing there passion for what they love in a social environment without the worry of having to tone down their passion.

I heard this great little piece from Alex Lindsey on This week in media recently (had to link to mp3 because flash player doesn't like the sampling rate). The point of the quote is that I never mention geek being linked to technology. Geeks are people who are really into what there into, know the subject/item/thing inside out and would happily talk about it. Geek culture is on the rise and I personally believe this is a good thing.

Geekdinner embodies this rise and says, hey – its all good, go out and socialise too. There should be geekdinners appearing all over the country. Yes Meetup.com is a perfect example. Everyday across the world there is knitting, design, cooking, drinking, etc meetups. But Meetup.com is a commercial company and they want everything to happen on there domain. Geekdinner should or could be the open source version of Meetup.com. Technically how that would happen I have some thoughts but generally yes meetup.com is certainly a good level to aim for. And you know what its not going to get there with a few people doing it off there own back. It needs to be self-supporting. I think thats the key thing about it being the status of charity or non-profit foundation.

More people and companies will feel comfitable helping out knowing its money, time, hard work is going to something bigger than one person. For example, being a non-profit we could finally sort out a wiki. Mayeb have one which everyone could use without the fear of it being owned by one person. Domain names could be paid for owned by the geekdinner charity instead of one person who could sell the domain on for tons of money once it gets big. Not that Nick would do that of course. But you know what I mean. I've also had plenty of offers to help out with geekdinners and this is great but if it was a charity, people could really help out

Anyway, as I said before, it looks like Geekdinners will follow London girl geekdinners into this one if Sarah chooses to go that way.

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Werewolf night yesterday

Sheila vs Sheila, but are they both werewolves really?

So yesterday I setup the first Werewolf only night in London. It started badly, with me running late. I should have factored in 40mins from White City to Moorgate not 20mins. Plus work demands meant I was running late full stop. Turned up and the bar had set a-side a area, but it was right next to the main bar and it simply wouldn't have worked. However what had happened was a mixup on the bar's part. They had booked the wrong area. So after 15mins of drinks and talking, we moved to the private suite which held about 25 people. There was a large table which made things tricky, so our circle looked more like a squashed triangle. Anyway once a few of us had explained the rules and run through a few tatics, we were off into the 1st game.

I don't remember all the games (think we ended up playing up to 6?)but I certainly remember the one when I was a werewolf with Tiff and Frances. Sheila (australian sheila) pointed the finger at me early on because I had pointed the camera at the victim of the first night attack. I think it was a guess but she was right, so I came out as the seer. Then someone else did and after a while Sheila (aus) did too. But it started to work, I got off and started to pretend to check people every round. People started to believe after a while. And my thoughts about killing myself off to keep the werewolves winning, didn't need to happen. We won and I believe the other werewolves never got fingered once. It was certainly an adrenalin rush and couldn't help but stand up and put my arms up in the air at the end. Harry was gutted because he never believed me as the seer then slowly started to believe and so got taken in by my lies. Oh well thats the way it goes… Deception is such a great thing.

So without going into more detail about the games played, we had roughtly at one point 17 or 18 people enough for 3 werewolves, a seer and a healer. The smallest game was 14 people with 2 werewolves and a seer. Everyone enjoyed the night and would happily go to another one. So I'm going to speak to the venue about removing the table next time and maybe getting a large food order at the start of the game instead. Maybe it might also be worth spending money on getting all our drinks delivered to the room, so the breaks between won't be so long? As usual there's my pictures here and public pictures here.

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London Backstage Christmas Party, Saturday 9th Dec

So its now no real secret. I'm planning a big christmas party for BBC Backstage. The difference is that rather than going it alone and creating a whole lot of havoc with everyone elses plans. I decided that Backstage should actually talk to the rest of the community groups in London and encourage one big party. This is core to the BBC Backstage values, rather than go it alone we're going to see whats already out there and see if we can help out, encourage more take up or parcipitation. Anyway, so after the emails went out, I started getting into conversations with different groups and got a line up to rival all line ups. And on Friday night at the geekdinner I revealed the party plans.

To make things clearer, I posted up the details on the Backstage blog and then with the advice of Rob, hit Upcoming and Eventful

Yes the rumours are true…

There is a BBC Backstage Christmas Party being planned for Saturday 9th December in London.

Rather than host it ourselves and clash with everyone else's parties. We decided that it would be very fitting to backstage if we collaborated together some of the best groups and communities in London. Then got them under one roof to share in the Christmas Party…

Seemed like a crazy idea, but I would like to introduce our fantastic partners for the Christmas Bash,

Swedish Beers
London Girl Geekdinners
Geekdinners
London Perlmongers
London Webstandards Group
London Ruby user group
Open rights group
London 2.0
Momo Monday

We have an excellent Cuban venue (TBC) all to ourselves deep in the area of Moorgate and Citypoint.

So please keep a note in your calendar, as Saturday 9th December looks to be a fantastic night to be in London.

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Last night’s Geekdinner with Molly was great

So once again, another highly successful geekdinner, this time with Molly. Believe it or not, but I was late for the party and as host, this is very bad form. I thought to myself, as I ran from waterloo up and down stairs till I reached City Thameslink. If I get there before Molly at least that would be a good thing. When I arrived, I was met with about 40 people drinking and enjoying themselves and Molly's great smile. Oh well I failed. But by the time I had got a drink and cooled off a little, everything was in full swing.

Its great that geekdinner's has got to such a point that people can just gather and enjoy the evening. I just wondered around looking for people who I've never met. Give them a nice introduction to others and geekdinners. In total I counted 60 people which was a great achivement. I do worry about geekdinners getting too big, but to date its still not happened quite yet. I feel the day I can't have a word with everyone, then geekdinners will have lost something. Not to say I won't do large events in the future, they just won't be geekdinners.

At the speaking part of the Geekdinner, Chris Helimann gave Molly some Lush goodies (chris i owe you one), Molly announced that she's going to live in London for a month trial in January and I announced the BBC Backstage London Christmas bash. So there is quite alot to talk about, but I may seperate my news out into another blog post.

The only down side to the night was the venue. See I had a deal with the old management that we could stay till 11pm, which is normal pub drink up time. But the bottlescrew have this thing about closing at 10pm, So last orders got called about 9:50pm and they started kicking us out by about 10:20pm. People gathered outside saying what the hell was that about and that we should find somewhere to drink. So in the hour between 10:30pm and 11:30pm we (about 20+ people) kind of slowly walked up the road towards Holborn station. It was wicked fun and there was great fun had outside some building as we tried to get everyone in for a group photo. By the time we actually got Holborn, most of the pubs were shut and people didn't want to walk all the way to Soho for one more drink. I think, me, sheila and a guy from Norway were the last to leave from the geekdinner. And that must have been just before midnight.

So seriously that was a great geekdinner, I really enjoyed it and totally forgot I was shattered and had not slept well the whole week.

Molly, when your over here for the month, we either need to do a geekdinner or have a welcome to London party for you. And for all those interested, I'm going to look into using another venue for the next geekdinner. The venue has lots of advantages when it was summer

You can find pictures here and here. Oh my god there's a crazy picture of me.

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Statistics and hints for Werewolf

A Game of Deception, Paranoia, and Mob Rule

I was looking around for more information to link to on the upcoming werewolf night. And anyway found one of the best resources for Werewolf playing. But what I found very interesting was the statictics page.


one wolf)
 3 players: humans win 0
 4 players: humans win 0
 5 players: humans win 0.334
 6 players: humans win 0.250
 7 players: humans win 0.466
 8 players: humans win 0.374
 9 players: humans win 0.544
10 players: humans win 0.453
11 players: humans win 0.593
12 players: humans win 0.508
13 players: humans win 0.630
14 players: humans win 0.548
15 players: humans win 0.659

two wolves)
 5 players: humans win 0
 6 players: humans win 0
 7 players: humans win 0.133
 8 players: humans win 0.083
 9 players: humans win 0.229
10 players: humans win 0.157
11 players: humans win 0.299
12 players: humans win 0.215
13 players: humans win 0.352
14 players: humans win 0.264
15 players: humans win 0.395

On the tactics front, I was reading lots of stuff but it seems like this all makes sense to any player. Notice who supports certain people when voting and debating. Notice who doesn't say anything and who speaks a lot during the daytime. Consider who acts differently and under what conditions.

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BarCampLondon in .Net magazine

Paul Annett's article on BarCampLondon made it into issue number 156 of .net Magazine (hits the newsagents tomorrow – 18th October). You can see some previews on his flickr stream. But not everything is rosey, there was a miss quote by some freelance sub-editor who rewrote a sentence by Sarah Blow, who wrote the whole lot up in a good blog post. Paul has a response…

Apologies to girls who came for the bit about “token” girl attendees – this was re-written by the mag after I submitted the article, and is not my words. It's disrespectful and goes completely against the sentiment of the paragraph, which was about encouraging more girls to attend – now it sounds unwelcoming, as if there was only one girl and her attendance was worthless.

I look forward to seeing Future Publishing's official response to this. But according to a brief chat with Sarah earlier today. .Net Magazine may be sponsoring a girl geek dinner as an apology for their mistake in the print of the last BarCampLondon female representation. Good on you Sarah…

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Events planned for Friday and the next few months

So I've been very quiet about my Backstage job on my own blog, according someone I recently spoke to (yes you who just got a new flat, you know who you are). But its not because I don't want to talk about it or because I can't. Its because I'm so damm busy! This is a good thing because everyday there is something new to deal with and on going projects which were just kick starting.

Along with my new job at Backstage.bbc.co.uk, is event planning. Being the public facing developer network which backstage is, this will mean lots of events up and down the country (yes not just London). Its not a problem to give you an insight into some of the events were planning. Yes this is a good chance to get them in your diary or calendar so you don't miss them…

So first up is the Geekdinner with Molly which has nothing to do with backstage at all. This is shaping up to be a large geekdinner with at least 70 people signed up to come. I'm going to have a word with the pub manager because actually were going to take over the whole bar if it rains or is cold outside. In the past, we've been able to use the benches but in late October this may be a problem. I may also have to invest in a microphone and speaker setup because with so many people it may be a problem hearing Molly, although being from New York shes use to making herself heard.

On October 31st we got the same venue for a great game of Werewolf, and what better day to play it? If you've never played before, don't worry come along its easy to pick up and ever so much fun. Specially when everyones been drinking. Don't drink too much or you may turn into a real werewolf…

Now were heading into new waters. On Monday 6th November were going to have the first new Backstage meetup to go with the backstage widget contest. The venue is not confirmed but it looks to be somewhere in the city maybe moorgate? We were thinking Fireworks but couldn't find a venue where we could set off fireworks (kidding!).

Now were certainly in new waters. I've contacted most of the groups and communities around London like Swedish Beers, Girl Geekdinners, etc and asked if they would like to take part in a large scale Christmas Bash. The Christmas Bash looks like it will happen sometime between Wednesday 6th December and Saturday 9th December. The venue is still under lots of consideration and partly depends on the amount of london groups who agreed to take part in the bash. But honestly it looks to be a good one, so please keep that part of December free if you can.

Hummm I've missed something? Ah yes, BarCampLondon2. Yes I'm still working on it and I might know soon what date and where it will be. I'm still going for late November but I don't have any more details to give quite yet sorry. Once I know anything all those who asked if they could help with the next one will know and I'll announce it to the world soon afterwards.

So yes quite a few London events, but fear not. I might have news for other parts of the UK soon. The best way to keep up to date with my events and others is using upcoming and also now the google calendar

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