Category: social-hardware

How to run a BarCamp – the wikibook

For a while I’ve been writing a new book (as such). Its titled How to run a barcamp and i’ve contacted a few people I know who have run them in the past to contribute towards it. Unfortunately not many people have actually added ink to the wiki book, so I’m opening the effort to anyone who wants to help contribute.

BarCamp and other derivative events are a fun and rewarding experience for everyone involved. Since you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking about setting up your own or helping out on one which is going ahead in the near future.

This guide is meant as a introduction to the BarCamp phenomenon and bring together tips, tricks and clever use of social engineering to make the event take place and be the best it could.

Why the need for this wikibook at all? Well BarCamp.org is a great place, but it’s frankly too alive and good information is scatter across the site and burred underneath the next lot of BarCamps. There was also no where to collaboratively come to a decision about the best way to do certain things or what things should be avoided based on the experience of other BarCamps around the world.

The format is punchy one liners of advice opposed to long length discussions (which are best served on the discussion/talk pages).

The whole idea is pretty straight forward, I’ve already added sections and started filling in parts which I’ve found from my own experience, on barcamp.org or the all new mailing list.

Massive Totem found at BoConcept

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

I went to the BoConcept Manchester shop yesterday and couldn’t help but buy this Spinning top which looks like Cobb’s Totem.

If you are one of the few who haven’t seen Inception, then first where have you been? And second don’t read the spoiler filled link above. Basically a totem is a device which allows the owner to decide if they are in the real world or a dream world. Your not meant to allow anyone to touch or play with your totem, because obviously that would then allow someone to craft another one in there mind. In short Totem’s are a…

"elegent solution for keeping track of reality…"

Mal came up with the idea out of necessity to help differentiate between the dream world and the real world. To that end, there were several rules to be observed with the totems – never let someone else handle your totem so as to keep them from controlling your perspective of reality by duplicating your totem perfectly. The totem was also to be something small and intimate to you for reasons of portability.

My massive spinning top is maybe a little over kill for a totem, but heck its all good fun, and its a talking point for those who have seen the film inception.

Data portability in dating, we can only hope

From OnlineDatingPost

Speaking of sharing, Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers. Data portability isn’t something discussed in the dating industry very often in public. Dating sites sell profiles up and down the river every day, but that’s a big shhhh! topic. Everywhere else, data portability is the topic of the moment, and will be for many quarters to come.

While I’m glad the message is getting through, without some standards like APML your not going to see any portability in the dating field. Even OKCupid.com who is one of the enlighten sites doesn’t have support for Openid, Oauth or anything like that. Supporting profile and data sharing or portability is going to be a major stumbling block for any dating site, simply because the revenue models rely upon data being held, locked down and processed by the company. This doesn’t fit with data portability right now.

Once they work out they can track people around the web using cookies and other techniques (which I assume will make there searches stronger and there for make for better matches) I’m sure you will start to see they at least providing openid if not oauth between partner sites.

Media Guardian’s top 100 so far…

Like the Wired 100 I really don’t see the point in these top 100’s they seem to serve the purpose of making people feel underwhelmed and under appreciated. Either way the Media Guardian’s 100 at least has a better scope of what people are doing all over the country including the north.

At the time of writing only 100-60 was available.

Excellent to see Herb Kim (new entry) at number 83. Someone is obviously reading wired magazine and taking note of the feedback. and our own Peter Salmon director of BBC North at number 84. Noel Clarke at number 81 is a interesting decision, I would personally put him higher because his films have been such a inspiration over the years. Really showing what street life is like without going up its own ass.

It is a shame to see Stephen Fry going from 45 to 64 but to be fair he’s been rather quiet recently. But what the hell is Big Brother doing in the chart at number 100? I thought the top 100 was about people not shows or formats?

The Data Visualisation Manchester Weekender

So as you may have already seen, Data.gov.uk, BBC Backstage and Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA) will be running an ‘unconference’ focussing on data visualisations. The unconference will team up 100 developers and 100 designers to create diverse and imaginative data visualisations from open data. The aim of the event is to facilitate an unusual opportunity allowing the diversity of the two traditional job roles to bring together imaginative use of open data sources.

The website for more information and to sign up is dvwm.weebly.com

Whats the schedule?

April 9th will see a pre-party get together at a central Manchester venue (TBA)

April 10th will be the first day of the event complete with open sessions to help get you inspired

April 11th will be the day when you can show off your visualisation on stage

This may also help answer your questions?

  • It will be a mix of hackday/mashed with a unconference type event, its the same format as we have used for Over the Air 2008
  • There will be lots of coding, designing and general hacking.
  • We have secured a venue in central Manchester which will allow over night stay, so theres no need to worry about hotels on the Saturday night.
  • A small but good amount of food and drink will be available, but if you ever feel hungry for more theres plenty of shops and restaurants in central Manchester.
  • The venue isn’t far from Piccadilly station, so getting to and from the South, East and West should be pretty easy.
  • Anyone coming into Victoria Station should change on to the tram heading to Piccadilly.
  • The event is totally free but requires signup beforehand and confirmation from the organisers.
  • Visualisations don’t have to be just virtual, they can be physical too.
  • You can use the hashtag or tag – DVWM to find related stuff
  • Yes its in Central Manchester not Central London
  • Yes we all love open data

Interested designers and developers can find out more and apply for an invitation via the DVWM website.

Geeks of London takes over from London Geekdinners

london geekdinner logo medium

Sad moment to see the London Geekdinners are no more. As the Formerly organized of Geek Dinners its wasn’t really a surprise. Cristiano Betta and Melinda Seckington took over the running of the events back over a year and half ago when I left London for Manchester. And last year spoke to me about the possibility of changing the direction of geekdinners into something else.

Its been amazing over the years, some of the guests we’ve had include, Stowe Boyd, Tim Oreilly, Adrian and Dan Hon, Brady Forrest, Jen Pahlka, Jyri Engeström, Julie Howell, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Chris Anderson, Kevin Marks, Dave Winer, Betsy Weber, Molly Holzschlag, Robert Scoble, Jeff Keni Pulver, Mozilia Labs, Ben Metcalfe, Marc Carter, Dr Sophie Kain, Jeremy Zawodny Howard Rheingold, Holmes Wilson, Dean Jansen, Moo.com, Paul Boag, Dave Shea, Eric Meyers, Mike Culver, Dave Crossland, BBC iplayer team, Ryan Carson, Paul Jones, Richard Clayton, Becky Hogge, David Terrar, myself and many many more…. (sorry if I didnt remember your name).

Our biggest geekdinner by its self was with Chris Anderson of Wired magazine, although the joint girl geekdinner with Scoble have been huge in the past too. The biggest so called geekdinner was the backstage p. arty/geekdinner/community party which took place in the Cuban Bar back in Christmas of 2006. Over 200 people attended that event and who could forget the massive trustedplaces.com cake. The most dinners we have done for one single person has got to be for Molly Holzschlag who will remain in our hearts as the Geekdinner queen with 3 geekdinners.

Geekdinner.co.uk had a bumpy time. The domain name is still owned by Nick Swan and the original server which the blog use to sit on has never been recovered. So if you go back in time on geekdinner.co.uk (the current server which Cristiano owns) you get to a point where there is no more blog entries. Archive.org has most of the old stuff thankfully. One of the best things which came out of geekdinners has to be the girl geekdinners which was the idea of Sarah Blow (not of my ex-wife, as I once heard recently). Sarah and the girlygeekdom have done a great job growing the event and looking back done exactly what maybe geekdinners should have done ages ago. I guess by the time we should have got serious, we were already on to running barcamps. Its great what Sarah Blow has done and I wish her good luck into the future.

We certainly moved around in venues for geekdinners. We started off in the cellar of a bar (bonds) just on Derring Street near Bond Street tube, tried a few places including the crown and anchor. Settled on the Polar Bear just behind Leicester Square before it got shut down (as we found out one day after BarCampLondon1). Tried a few more places and settled again at a very quiet place (The Bottlescrue) in the Holborn Viaduct area. It was summertime and we use to take over the whole bar including the outside seating for our geekdinners. This was also the bar we used for the biggest geekdinner with Chris Anderson. But it wasn’t to last, the reason why? Well it was in area of the city where people don’t hang around after 6pm. The bar closed its doors for good after a few months. After a little more bar shuffling including to the bear in trendy clerkenwell, we ended up at the Ye Olde Cock Taven which is still open and sits in Fleet street. We had that for quite a while before the owner drove me nuts and we moved elsewhere. This is about the time I left for Manchester and Cristiano took over. The venue he seemed to use the most was Hummus Bros in Holborn.

So as they say in the Matrix Revolutions, everything that has a beginning has an end. Geekdinners have been an amazing part of my life and I kept considering doing something like Geekdinners in Manchester. But its time to move on. I met some amazing geeks over the time of running the dinners. Some of them I’m still good friends with even now. Flicking through some of the photos, has had me thinking wow so many people, such good times. Geeks of London could be a interesting framework for other smaller events which fell in the shadow of geekdinners. Things like Bowling, Karaoke, heck even Roller Coaster riding might be your thing and there’s always usually another 4-10 people (at least) who also would go if theres interest shown. Who knows maybe there will be a geeks of Manchester one day…

One social web

Its so odd, the guys behind storytlr were at FOSDEM and I actually watched there presentation but didn’t put two and two together. So I marked down One social web as a project to watch for myself and the BBC but I didn’t twig it was the same guys. If I had known, I would have tracked them down at FOSDEM for some serious conversation about what I want to do with Storytlr and what I thought of the One social web project.

alardw or Alard Weisscher left a comment on my blog post about FOSDEM and then the Lifestreaming blog post talking about One social web, finally made me slap my forehead, oh yeah those two guys were Storytlr.

Anyway, what there aiming to do is impressive and is much more interesting that whats happening with Google Buzz or even Facebook’s XMPP opening.

What should the character limit be on microblogging?

Evan Prodromou who I finally met at FOSDEM recently, has been running a poll to find out whats the best character limit for microblogging.

For our flagship site, Identi.ca, which runs on the status.net cloud service and uses the 0.9.0 beta, we’d like to open up the discussion of what an appropriate character limit should be. Setting a site-wide limit is a community decision we’d like to leave in the community’s hands. In a conversation on Identi.ca we’ve solicited some candidate character limits that we’d like people to decide on.

  • 140 is compatible with Twitter; in many languages a notice with 140 characters fits into a single SMS message*
  • 280 can fit into two Twitter or SMS messages
  • 300 is a fan favorite
  • 420 is Facebook’s status limit and 3 Twitter tweets or SMS messages
  • 500 is a little bigger
  • 1000 is bigger than that
  • Unlimited
  • Other

So personally I think 300 is enough. 300 will hold a very long URI with room for query string values. Also having it about the size of two text messages seems about right. If you stick to ANSI only characters you usually get about 306 characters to text with (160+160 with overhead) on most phones. Unicode drops it down to 280 characters which still seems fairly close to 300. I’m also thinking 300 characters keeps things micro readable still.

The idea of a more structured microblogging with URIs as metadata in interesting but I think metadata should be inline and in plain view. Its one of the neat things about Microblogging, which would be a shame to remove. Also got to say anything more complex than the current microblogging setup would maybe cause too many problems with backwards compatible. Literate results are good, if you want metadata use blogging instead.

Its Ladies night

The Big Bang Theory

Always interesting to read Miss Geeky’s thoughts on woman in technology. She’s been thinking about a Ladies night at a Comic Store in Nova Scotia. Generally she says in the post, I wish we didn’t need things like Ladies Night to make it *not* intimidating for woman. But its the examples which I find really interesting…

Since moving to London, I’ve visited the Forbidden Planet tons of times. I love the place, it’s filled with wonderful geeky delights, and if I could I’d buy everything that caught my eye. And yet… almost every single time I go there by myself I get hit on. Okay, I kind of get that (geek store, geeky girl, chances of possible perfect match increases). But half of the time they open with something along the lines of whether I ”needed help in finding a present” or something else that completely neglects the fact that I might be there for myself. The thing is it almost always happens when I’m browsing the comics. If I’m at any other part of the store (like the fantasy/scifi books section or the manga section) that type of stuff doesn’t happen. It’s as if most geeks have accepted that girls are into geeky things, like fantasy and manga, but comics… then it’s suddenly “you don’t belong here”.

Seriously, guys? Why assume straightaway that a girl doesn’t belong there? I thought that by now it should be obvious for guy geeks that the geek girl does exist, but it’s moments like I’ve described above that some guys are completely oblivious to that fact. And it’s those guys that are making it difficult for new geeky girls to feel comfortable with being a geek and going to places like comic stores. I know there are tons of guys out there who do understand and don’t make stupid remarks like those above to girls, but it’s that small oblivious group that do that mess it up for everyone.

Its always the subtle stuff which does the damage I find. I’m not pointing fingers but I wonder if media like the Big Bang Theory and IT Crowd are doing much to counter this problem?

Apple, you can’t stop the signal

There’s are two winners from yesterday’s coverage of the ipad.

live.twit.tv and live.gdgt.com. Between the two of them, you could hear and see what was going on live on stage but also get a real feel for the presentation details with the whole host of screenshots from live.gdgt.com. Credit is due to these guys for making this all happen, shame on Apple for not just streaming the whole event. You can’t stop the signal…

Going to Fosdem 2010

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

I’m booked to go to my first Fosdem. Got the train from Manchester to Brussels return for 140 pounds but the hotel (Hotel Centrale) was quite a bit more but right next to the main station and Parc de Bruxelles. Never been to Brussels before, so on either side of Fosdem, I’ve decided to take some time off and have a wonder around the city.

The Fosdem conference seems to be shaping up into a good event too. Here’s a few of the talks I’ll be checking out.

I do wish there was some guys from XBMC and the Apache Cocoon project coming along, but hey I’m sure between the Mozilia, XMPP, OpenOffice and Ubuntu guys there will be lots of fun.

Converting posts from Blojsom/WordPress to Moveabletype

I had to write this because for weeks now I’ve been trying to convert blog entries between different blogging services.

The first one was converting Blojsom to WordPress, but this wasn’t too bad because both work around the RSS 2.0 format. Getting the comments, tags, metadata out and into the rss 2.0 feed was a real pain and I’m convinced I dropped a load of trackbacks and pingbacks in the process. This is another reason why I started using Disqus for all my comments.

The harder task was moving blog entries from WordPress to MoveableType. Yes I expect most of you are wondering why I would move from a far superior system to something which most people left in the dirt ages ago. Well unfortunately we still use MT on the bbc.co.uk/blogs platform and that means as backstage moves to the official blog platform, some mug had to find a way to down convert to MT 4.1 which only imports/exports in this crazy text only format.

So after lots of looking around, I finally found a XSL which I modified to do the job from a stripped down WordPress WXR file (RSS2.0 with lots of WP namespaces stuff). Its important that you strip down the WXR file as it might not be valid XML, so no XSL transform is going to work. I also took a bit of time to write a XSL to remove most of the namespaces elements or convert them into a more valid RSS 2.0 element. You can do the same with lots of finds and replaces, so I won’t post the simple XSL.

Hopefully this will save others a lot of time in the future, if your faced with the same problem.

Nows a good time to signup to a la.conica?

Fail Whale

Twitter is down and people are somewhat freaking out. This is a really good time to install a microblogging application which supports not only twitter an maybe facebook like the popular tweetdeck. But instead go for one which supports one of the la.conica servers. Identi.ca is the most popular of the lot but support for the open microblogging service is a good idea. If Twitter does go down for long periods, its maybe time to consider switching over.

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