Category: socialware-offline

Takeaway Festival 2: DIY Talks

Dana Centre talks

I was asked to talk at the Takeaway fest yesterday. My talk was after a total of 9 different talks, so I knew I was going to have to keep it super short anyway. But as usual everyone ran over and I had less that 6 mins to explain why Hackday was going to be ever so great for the audience of artists and designers. I even created some slides for the purpose. I felt I did a good job in the short amount of time till I put on the video of Becks puppets and no one laughed. I'm hoping it was just tiredness setting in or something…

Something also struck me about the different stages people were at. For example Briony Greenhill was talking about the new site which encourages people to be a little more greener every month. She demoed it and I was amazed at its lack of (if I had a better word I would use it) Web 2.0ness. First of all it seemed to be built totally in Flash and seemed very unaccessible and somewhat unusable (but I was wrong, its using elements of Flash and lots of images with no alts). Then I looked for other web 2.0 type things like the ability to have friends, take elements away, a feed, an api, openid, microformats, etc. Nope nothing. Maybe I'm being over the top and its not fair to just pick on Briony but it strikes me that there was quite a bit of re-engineering instead of building on whats already there. Another silo to get wrapped up in.

Generally there were some very good speakers and good presentations. I specially loved the OScar project, which I've heard of before. I have to be honest and say Swarm of Angels is becoming less and less interesting to me everytime I read about it.

Anyway, I filmed a good selection of talks

and they should be up on Blip.tv in the next few hours, I'll replace the links once they appear.

meta-technorati-tags=takeaway2, festival, diy, talks, conference, design, interaction, art, time, danacentre

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A different type of conference?

Werewolf

From Tom Morris

I've got this great idea for a conference

First, it'd have a session called “Pop Culture and Democracy” which would discuss whether the Internet culture's of remixing popular culture helps in democratic participation and related areas. Just over an hour long. Then I'd have a panel of tech people talking about microformats, spam, Creative Commons and anything else that seems interesting or relevant. After that a short discussion from a researcher talking about the Semantic Web. Next, a half hour session or so on Python programming. Then just under fifty minutes of Cory Doctorow doing all the usual Cory things – copyright, DRM, evil Microsoft etc. A discussion of the role of developers, then an hour on the One Laptop Per Child project. Sound like a cool conference? That's good. It's a list of the podcasts I'm going to listen to. Podcasts are what conferences have become.

Point taken about the podcasts but I would say a BarCamp (unconference) is pretty close to what your getting at. However there is certainly something between a unconference and conference which could be reached. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with d.construct and barcampbrighton in September. Conference+UnConference in one weekend, should be great.

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April in New York

Sarah and Ian

I did spent almost a week in New York with Sarah. We did enjoy our time there but wasn't as impressed as most people are. I guess living in a huge metropolis of a city like London makes all other huge cities feel quite the same. Obviously there were huge differences for example the London underground is so deep compared to the New York Subway. You can always feel when a train is traveling under your feet.

I did go out for dinner and meetup with David Czarnecki and a whole host of other New Yorkers on Friday night.

Dinner with the New Yorkers

Saturday afternoon a work out in Central Park while a bunch of us play Frisbee 2.0

Me after the game

Then headed over to Bre's for a BBQ in his apartment 10 stories up near hells kitchen. Honestly his apartment was very cool and the space was simply amazing.

10 floors up at Brie's

Obviously we did lots more stuff including seeing the Daily Show being recorded (Rachel has the low down on this one), some time at the top of the Rockefella building, a boat tour around manhattan, lots of walking around and believe it or not we actually went to New Jersey. Not out of choice, more a mistake by our shuttle bus who thought we were going to Newark with everyone else. After a verbal fight we headed back into New York to get to JFK before our flight at 8:30am. 

New York New York

Anyway I got about 300 pictures now on Flickr from New York so go check them out. Thanks again to Rachel for putting up with me and Sarah during the week.

meta-technorati-tags=newyork, ny, bigapple, dailyshow, rockafella, buildings, frisbee, dinner

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Oh no… here comes the (so called) geek squad

Geek Squad comes to the UK

Oh yes if you've ever been to Best Buy in America, you can't help but notice the geek squad signs everywhere. Need a hand installing your DSL router, putting in memory, fixing your wireless, going to the toilet, feeding yourself… – Call for the geek squad.

But now there in the UK, yes scream and runaway. Trust me people, there not cheap and there certainly not good news. Thanks Carphone Warehouse for inflicting the pain of black and white beetle cars on our roads, and don't get me started on the actual (so called) geeks.

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Mashup* Identity 2.0

So first up I'm not that impressed with being invited to an event, turning up and not finding my name on the list. Then a slap in the face when I get hit with a bill for 35 pounds. Having no cash, means I'm forced to hand over my business card so they can invoice me. Not impressed!

Down into the BT showcase area and the magic of the not long gone BarCampLondon2. Who do I see? Nat Bat, my co-hoster from BarCampLondon2. Thank god because all I can see otherwise is lots of gray suits.

Tony Fish introduces the evening by ending with the words “how do we make money from this?” Enough said really

The first speaker gives a brief overview of the all the issues to do with identity. But never once talks about people owning their own identity. Richard Baker from BT now, finally he mentions user-centric and multiple identities/personas. He also mentions that fact we need to think about the other mediums in regards to identity. His example of call centres is good. Richard finalise his talk by pointing at the balance between risk, convince, costs. Nice sensible talk. Now Simon Wilison, so the wireless fucks up and simon can't show how it works – nightmare! So on with the show. After explaining the benefits of open ID in the Single sign on, simon talks about identity projection. Projecting your id from one system to another. Thankfully Simon mentions that OpenID isn't the silver bullet, there are caveats like trust. Simon gives a cut down talk from the future of webapps. Fast paced and maybe lost a few people but it was really good. At the end, Simon finally got to demo openID.

Now the Panel. Eger from the government slates openID because its too difficult for most users in the UK. Missing the point of Open ID, which is, its open and decentralized. Most of the questions about Open ID were easy pickings for Simon who rubbed his hands with glee when getting those OpenID 101 questions. There were some good questions banded around at the end but by then the hour long debate had gone on too long for most of us.

So generally Mashup reminds me of the events I use to go to when I first moved to London. There good if your into business but generally only scratch the surface and usually the people want to know how to make money out of the thing under the surface. I'm surprised no one just came out and said where do I make money out of Open ID, maybe because Simons slide on why the enterprise should be using OpenID was too clear?

The event was well run but I felt the most important person there was Simon and besides the internet screw up, he could have had more challenging questions at a geekdinner or something. I have to question the cost of the event too. Its quite a lot for 3x 10min talks and then a hour panel session. Yes there was buffet food and drinks for free but thats 35x 100+ people. Maybe I'm dead wrong but personally I didn't get much out of the evening except a couple of peoples contract details.

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Powerpoint Karaoke, what a wicked night!

Powerpoint Karaoke

Not many people turned up (maybe because of this thing)  for Powerpoint Karaoke but those who did really enjoyed the night of belly aching laughter and ever so odd presentations. I have a few photos which I've uploaded to Flickr but better still I have quite a few videos which I'll be uploading to Blip.tv.

Everyone agreed this is hysterical entertainment and can not wait for the next one. So if your one of the unlucky ones to miss out this time around, look out for the next one in maybe May/June. Its truly geek entertainment by geeks for geeks.

meta-technorati-tags=powerpointkaraoke, karaoke, powerpoint, presentation, ppt, funny, hysterical, geek, geekentertainment

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Hackday officially live – sign up now

hackday in Sunnyville

As previously mentioned on the backstage blog. Hackday.org is now official and you can sign up and grab yourself a ticket now.

The dates are the weekend of the 16th – 17th June at Alexander Palace (yes now it makes sense why I had pictures of the venue on my flickr stream)

Its a partnership between Yahoo! Developer Network and BBC Backstage, which we've been developing for quite sometime. Matthew Cashmore, Tom Coates, Matt McAlister and many others have been involved in this from the start.

As the hackday.org site says, stimulation will be provided in Food, Drinks, Feeds and APIs. Like BarCamp, you are welcome to play werewolf sorry hack or (sleep) through-out the night. Tomski's already offered his shower for Sunday morning. Its going to be a very cool event. No I won't
be doing a live DJ session from stage 1 afterwards but nor will Beck this time around.

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Geekdinners, Werewolf, Delicious and Karaoke

Tom Loosemore plays ppt karakoe

There's changes on the way for geekdinners. Starting with PPT Karaoke

  1. The dinners are not changing, we're still planning on having them but maybe one every 1-2 months. I also won't be the only one hosting them now. I'm seeking keen and genuine volunteers to be involved with geekinners and its other events.
  2. We're going to put on a werewolf night every other month. Its such great fun and we always get a good turn out, so rather that doing adhoc, we're going to try putting them on regularly. If every other month is too little, we'll bump it up to every month.
  3. New geek games. Werewolf as we play it came back from O'reilly's FooCamp with Simon Willison and a couple others. They posed it at BarCampLondon, and its now become a stable diet for evening geek events and UK Barcamps. But there is more games out there which we could try, hence the next point.
  4. A Powerpoint Karaoke session happened at Etech 07 and Heatherscent was talking about how well it went down at BarCampLA3. So first time in the UK we're going to try it out and if it goes well, who knows it might become a regular night. Its gone down well other places too.
  5. Not forgetting the talent we have here in the UK, we're also going to play Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha, maybe along side PPT Karaoke. It was created and built for BarCampLondon and went down a storm in BarCampLondon2. I have got to link to the video of Meri Williams, Tom Coates and the rest playing this…
  6. We're planning to do more short notice dinners (yes real dinners) for when people are over but we can't get a venue in the short period of time we sometimes have. Like the dinner we had for Howard Rheingold. .

So in short we're getting more organized and more regular. But expect even more…

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London XSL user group

Its been a long time coming but finally there is a London XSL user group starting. Its thankfully not run or setup by myself, instead Nic Ferrier and Otu Ekanem have taken it upon themselves to foster this user group.

We met at the Prince Regents Pub yesterday and there seemed to be agreement that a group meeting every month to discuss things happening in the XSL space outside of actual code was a good idea. No one wants to discuss the memory differences between using xsl:for-each in Xalan vs Saxon, so the group will centre around improving the image of XSL and helping people get into XSL in the first place.

It was reassuring to hear Thompson and BT were having the same issues hiring good XSL people as we are in the BBC. The fact is that most computer science university courses don't teach XSL and if they do its placed next to odd languages like Pascal (god I hope they don't still teach that) and Lisp for a couple of day.

Another interesting fact came out of the night, 2 out of the 6 of us came to XSL through a design background. Anyway expect to see more about the group at xslug.org

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Support ORG and Party

Party starts Wednesday 11th April from 6pm at Bar Kick. Straight from the ORG party site

A chance for ORG supporters to meet each other, chat to volunteers and staff and celebrate how far we’ve all come since ORG started. There’ll be 'public domain' DJs, remixed visuals and free culture goodie bags, as well as a special guest speaker to be announced.

Beneath all this revelry lies a hidden motive. We need you to bring a friend, colleague or family member who doesn't yet support ORG, but who you think would like to, if they knew more about our work. 

The party starts at 6pm on Wednesday 11 April at Bar Kick, E1, and lasts until 11pm. See you there!

I'll certainly be there and who knows might be a regular ORG supporter.

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