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London Geek Dinner with Citizen Agency

I was reading the London Girl GeekDinner 10 roundup by Sarah Blow and thought how simlar our nights sounded.

Wednesday night was a mad night. I was late again, because I had to scoot from Kensington to Clerkenwell in rush hour traffic. I forgot my camera batteries and charger, so had to scoot back from Victoria. I also completely forgot about the stickers and pens earlier in the day. So when I finally got to the bear bar, I had to go to Sarahs work place in Holborn and get a load of stickers. I was honestly very suprised how quickly people got from High street Kensington to Farringdon. By the time I got back, it was filling up nicely.

Tara and Chris had arrived and were enjoying chatting to people. After making an announcement on the PA system and sorting out stickers (big thanks to Sarah Forrester and Sheila for going around and collecting money instead of me by myself). Before you know it the food came out and like Sarah Blow we need to make it clear that a dinner isn't really a dinner. More a finger buffet. Quoting from Sarah Blow,

As you have probably gathered to do a proper sit down meal for 80 people at £15.00 per head which is about the minimum you could do it for in London would come to around £1500 plus wine… there aren't all that many companies that would be willing to do that which is why we try to keep the cost down to something sensible to make it accessible to companies and people. That way everyone benefits from it. Apologies to those people who thought that they were going to get a complete full blown meal for nothing! We really can't afford to do that! I'll remember to put up the proviso on the details about the event regarding food etc.

The reason beind the name London Girl Geek Dinners was all because it started off as sit down meals and people paid their own way for dinner, but as the events have got larger it's virtually impossible to do that without mammoth organisation!

I think the problem we had this time around was that we had lots of new people from the Future of webapps. So a lot of people expected a full meal or something for 5 pounds! Like Sarah said, not in London you don't. On the other hand some people commented to Sarah (my wife) that if they knew it was like this aka pub meetup with social geeks. They would have come ages ago. So yes, some about information about geekdinners is certainly needed, along with some eventwax intergreation?

Once we got to actual talk which agreed was later that expected due to myself trying to sort out the food. Tara was great, I did record it (part 1 and 2) using my Sanyo (Kosso recorded it with his own special equipment) but its so dark and I really should find a open/free video editor to clean it up a little. Although, we did have a full Dj rig complete with Microphone, the levels were messed up and it came out a little distorted. What didn't help was the chatter in the background from people who didnt realise they should be quiet while Tara and Chris talked. Sarah once again was very good at telling people to be quiet but in the end as the questions started, we were really fighting to hear Tara. Its a shame because Taras talk was very interesting specially in the light of the whole Mike Arrington outburst earlier in the day. I also wanted to ask Chris and Tara if they would ever move to Europe? But it wasn't to be.

The rest of the night flew by and I was actually very impressed with the new venue. I'm sure Geekdinners will be back there again. Yes the toilets could be better and we could do with some more chairs or sofas but with a capacity of 120+ its not bad at all. They serve all types of beer and even let us stay quite late without pushing us out the door. Its not wheelchair accessible I'm sorry to say Sarah Blow, otherwise I would have recommended it. Once your upstairs its all flat, so with some help you could carry someone upstairs first.

Huge thanks to Chris Messina and Tara Hunt for talking and making the night ever-so enjoyable. I'm also very pleased to have met you guys and I look forward to spending some more time with you guys in San Francisco in early April.

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Conference 1.0 vs Conference 2.0?

During the Future of Webapps, quite a few people said to me how weird it was being at a conference where you had to sit and listen. They prefered the idea of BarCamp, where you could move around and directly effect a presentation with a question or idea. So in short they were comparing conferences with unconferences. One of the people, Raj Anand who came up to me promised to blog it and suggested they send me a link. Well Raj did – BarCampLondon2 V/S FowaLondon07?

I want to point out some of the things which were missed in the verses comparison.

The likes of Kevin Rose, Michael Arrington, etc. Are not going to fly half the way around the world for a BarCamp. This is good or bad depending on what your after.
BarCamp's are run by the community, if things don't quite work out. The community is much more forgiving. While a conference where people are paying, the audience are much less forgiving.

Putting on a conference is very expensive and requires a lot of time and effort. Setting up a BarCamp requires a lot of time but its possible for a gorup or small community to club together to make it happen.
Networking at BarCamp is easier because of the overnight plus the people who tend to go are very motovated. The same is not true of conferences because you have so many people and the barrier for entry is down to money.
A lot of people can not afford (timewise) to take a weekend off for BarCamp. While conferences can be justified during the working week. Also very few companies will send there employees to a BarCamp.
The comparison on links is a little unfair because BarCamps are all over the world, however the Flickr and slideshare comparisons are interesting.
I know BarCampLondon2 made it into the Technorati Top 10 tags, Flickr's top tags and a few other places. But I'm sure FOWAlondon2007 did too.
Do not under estimate the amount of work required on your behalf, to go to BarCamp. Participtation is needed at a lot of levels, while at a conference you can pretty much turn and just listen all day.
BarCamps are not great about following up, so theres no official recordings or all the presentations in one place. This can be arranged but not certain like a conference.
Believe it or not, the two can co-exist. FOWA and BarCampLondon2 were very close together and with events like Geekdinner. Its possible to make a great week for a city like London. I mean, where else would you have rather have been last week?

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BarCampLondon2 is over…

BarCampLondon2 could not have gone much better. It was a great experience and dare It, better that the first one. Thanks to everyone who turned up and made it an unforgettable event. I've had a total of 3 hours sleep over the weekend, so my brain is crying out for bed. But who could know Werewolf could be so intense….

~~lots more to come… but in the meantime,~~ I'm uploading video to blip.tv, pictures to flickr and my slides to slideshare. All using the BarCampLondon2 tag.

So my account of BarCampLondon2 should be pretty consistent with most others. It was a bloody good event. The venue supplied by BT was nothing short of amazing. We had the showcase arena which includes autoriumum fit for CEOs including 180+ investers. Thseat wewcomfortablele enough for me to actually sleep hours unlikeke the Yahoo offices last year, we only had a couple of so called rooms. Instead we spaces with either a 60 inch plasma screen or projectors with over 100 inch screens. Most of them seateabout 4040people, so with 3 spaces upstairs, one in the middle and 3 downstairs. There was more that enough room. But at the same time, it never felt like there was no one around. Talking of which 70+ people stayed over night, how do I know? Because I went around about 5am and counted. This is over double what we had last time and according to Chris Messina better that the last San Francisco BarCamp. Quite a few people didn't go to sleep over night, they opted to stay uthrough thehenight. In total we had about 170 people, but i did notice some new people during the day, so I would say we weren't that far off 200. I also think the people who really wanted to present did get a chance, also this time around no one had more that one session.

This time around we also had wireless connectivity, this time via BT Openzone passes. We (the organizers) were honestly worried about 24 hour passes. BT offered a lot of Openzone passes but each one cost its full price of 10 pounds. So obviously BT wanted to keep the costs down. Hence we didn't throw them out the crowd. We worried there wouldn't be enough for everyone during the whole of BarCamp. So come Sunday morning we would have a 100 people asking for new passes at the same time. We tried to setup ut itwasn't to be. In the end it all worked out and out worst fears didn't happen.

Talking about Organizers, Nat and Jason were a pleasure to work with. Some people might remember me asking for a co-organizer to work with a while ago. A lot of people were interested but in the end I choose Jason because he was super excited to be involved and lived pretty close. Nat although living in Oxford was also very excited and offered to do what she could remotely like print out signs, etc. Both of them were enthuastic and were willing to spend a lot of time on BarCampLondon2. I had maother offersersbut some were less excited and some had already done a BarCamp in another country. I really wanted to give new people a chance to get a feel for BarCamp and who knows might happen in the future. So big thanks to Nat and Jason once again, couldn't have done it without you guys.

So in more details behind the decisions of BarCampLondon2.

Eventwax, was recommended to me by Nat. I setup an account (wishes it had OpenID support) and liked what I saw. So I used it and gave the account details to Nat and Jason too. Our first problem came with the firsign upnup period of 1.5hrs. I allocated 100 tickets and they all went in 1.5 hours. Now that was fucking amazing but the message which you got when you then tried to sign up wasn't very useful. So much so, that our friends who don't speEnglishish as there first language didn't quite get the odd messageabout tickets and went ahead and booked their airplane/train tickets. So in that case I would send out a invite or clue them into went the next wave of tickets would be. Some could say thats unfair but its tricky if that person has already bought there tickets. I had a lot of complaints about the words tickets aattendeesees. I would love for the Eventwax guys to build in the ability to change the wording through out the site on a event by event bases. Tabilityity to also say this event is free and costs nothingwould be useful. I didn't try out the promo code stuff but that certainly looks useful for guest tickets in the future, would certainly beat sending out invites. The different levels of tickets was damm useful, because I could do the wave thing with tickets. So after the first 100, I started putting out tickets on the wiki and a few email lists. The same is true of the 3rd wave. Eventwax allows you decide in advance when tickets go live and stop. Date is great but time would also be very useful, as midnight isn'tvery useful for most people. Cancellation are a pain to deal with eventwax (although thank you to everyone who did email us), it would be great to have an aggregator ticket which looks how many spaces are actually left and offers them up as a ticket. On the last wave of tickets I had to keep cacluating the difference and changing the tickets for the last wave. That was a pain. Looking back I shouldn't have left the last wave of tickets till 2 days before the event but I really wanted to reuse all tcanceledledtickets. In the end we ended up with about 20% not used.

One last thing about the ticket thing, I wish I'd never mentioned IDs and checking. That caused a shit storm which I thought might actually shadow the event. My reasoning behind it was because yes I did hear about people selling tickets and getting multiple tickets under different names. There might have been some truth to it all but in the end we still had the 20% drop off.

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My thoughts on the 4 event clash on the 21st Feb

Yes I've seen it too.

Now I can shout and rave about how crazy it is having 4 london events on the same night (i did this before), but I'm also one of the guilty event organizers. So I should try and set the record a little straight, because people do seem to think we don't talk to each other.

Me and Sarah Blow from the girl geekdinner's did speak to see if we could avoid clashing on the same day. Now to be fair Sarah had the day first and I was planning the geekdinner for Monday 19th March (I have emails to citizen agency to prove it) but due to the Future of Webapps conference I needed to change the day.

Conferences like Fowa and @Media do have a odd relationship with the smaller events in London. On one hand small events like Geekdinners could be seen as nicking the best speakers from the conference holders, who to be fair have paid for the speakers to be in town that week. It could also be seen as taking people away from the main conference. This is something a lot more real, when you run a BarCamp next to a large conference. On the other hand (the hand I prefer) the smaller events can increase the amount of
people from out of town who come who go to a conference. For example I just booked flights to San Diego for Etech 2007 and left a good 2 days around the start and end to make way for smaller events. I see Etech as the main reason for going but the smaller events where I can actually talk with people and share ideas. If your a conference organizer, this is a bonus because you can keep both eyes on the conference and rely on a trusted small event organizer to do the social event for you. Even better is when the
conference and small event have some kind of cross linking. This was true of the @media social and now the fowa conference. So the point I'm getting at is, I respect the work which goes into fowa and they are happy to recommend geekdinner for the social event. You could say they are sponsoring the event, but I see more like supporting the event.

So with that support, it makes a lot of sense to have the social event on the last day of the conference (21st Feb).

Some would say, hey why don't you merge or partner for the 21st? Well this is difficult because of a number of reasons

Girl Geekdinners and WikiWed have rules, which I would never want to break
There just different kind of events. There's just different vibes and crowds
Girl Geekdinner has sponsorship and we have different support. It wouldn't be fair on the sponsors to mess them around
WikiWed is trying to get off the ground again, it would be unfair to try and partner on there first event for ages
Difference in payment, Geekdinners costs, Girl geekdinners is sponsored. WikiWed I'm unsure about. It couldn't work without screwing someone
Large venues costs a lot of money and time. Enough said really

So we're all in agreement that clashes like this will happen (much that I wanted to go to both Girl Geekdinners and WikiWed).

So the question is how do we try and stop this happening in the future?

Well last time I did propose a Google Calendar. Sarah Blow has been great using the calendar, I've not been so good. Others who I've invited have been simply rubbish. But I'm starting to wonder if a google calendar is the right way to deal with this problem? See the one place everyone uses now is Upcoming.org. I preferred Eventful.com but Upcoming is what everyone uses in London. So your at least guaranteed that event organizers will place there events up there. Maybe my biggest problem with upcoming is the lack
of a actually calendar. It was always hard to see what was on a certain day and if it was relevant enough to worry about.
Now I'm using Outlook 2007, this isn't such a problem but I'm only subscribed to the my events and my friends events. This keeps most of the crap out of my calendar but its not perfect. I'm still relying on one of my friends adding a event which I'm not aware of. Lucky I have a lot of friends on Upcoming so I can get a real idea of whats going on. But others are not so lucky,

Groups on Upcoming.org are reasonable and maybe one way forward. Although right now there not very used. But back to the main point, the fact upcoming is event driven not date driven (you can't click on a calendar anywhere and you can't navigate by dates) is a big problem when trying to pick dates for a small or large event.

So I'm now done.

Does anyone have something I've forgotten or is simply a unsolvable problem?

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Geekdinner with Tara Hunt and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency – Wed 21st Feb

Geekdinners are back for 2007, this time with Tara Hunt and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency.

More details can be found on Geekdinner.co.uk and signup using eventwax.

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Having a nightmare day and its only 9:20am

It started at 6:20am when I woke up in a panic. I had not actually received the confirmation number for my train tickets to Birmingham today. Why was I going to Birmingham? Well back tracking a bit, I had heard about the citizen journalism conference a while ago but couldn't really justify paying for it and taking the time off. However, on Tuesday 23rd I got a email in my spam box from Paul Bradshaw. The start went exactly like this…

I am writing to invite you to the 'Citizen Journalism' conference this Friday, 26th January 2007. This one day event in Birmingham's Custard Factory will provide an important opportunity for those who work in the news industry, academics and citizen journalists to create a network of those working within the field, and discuss the issues involved. As one of the country's foremost bloggers we would be honoured if you would like to attend this event as a non-paying guest.

Ok so I'm thinking they must have the wrong guy. Cubicgarden.com doesn't even make the top 10000 in Technorati (but to be fair I've had problems with Technorati for a while now). Although I did make it into the Top 500 feedster bloggers in late 2005. But honestly I don't see how the thoughts and ideas of dyslexic, designer/developer can be of that much interest. Saying all
that, I got to say its quite good to think of myself as a Z level celeb in the blogosphere. Anyway you look at it, I'm still glowing after reading that email and thought I'd better make a effort go along.

And this is where things started to go wrong. On Wednesday I booked the tickets for the train on the BBC's internal train service (supplied by the trainline for business) and I waited a bit for the confirmation email but was so busy I forgot about it and ended up going home without checking again. But I noticed there were a couple of unread items on my phone which is automatically synced with Outlook. So I just assumed those emails could have been the conformation number. Boy was I wrong. It turned out to be
two emails about the future of webapps which is now sold out (whole different story).

On Thursday I was out of the office and busy during the night at the Rights will make you rich and Boagworld meetup, so didn't get a chance to do anything due to having to get up really early the next day. Anyway, so today I logged on to my email remotely from home and checked my email for anything from the trainline. Of course there was nothing. So I attempted to book another ticket from London Euston to Birmingham and back again. The system was having none of it. I tried for like 20mins, even tried booking
single tickets but it just wasn't going to be. Tried phoning our BBC Trainiline helpdesk and the trainline directly but all I got was call back at 8am. Well I would if I didn't have to catch a train at 8:10am. So in the end I logged out and had to signup with the plain consumer facing Trainline website myself and fork it all out on my own credit card. Luckly it worked but I couldn't book tickets for the morning because you can't buy tickets 2hrs before the train leaves. So by the time all this happened and I
quickly jumped in the shower, it was 7:30am and I still had to unlock the scooter and go to euston.

I was already up against it and the traffic along commercial road was stupid and not going anywhere soon. But I did manage to get to Kings Cross at 8:10am which meant I missed the train but could get the next one ok. By the time I found where I could park my scooter (right out side the station actually) it was 8:30 and after getting my ticket (38 pounds for a single to Birmingham) I thought I'd quickly grab some food from Marks and Spencers because I hadn't eaten well yesterday and didn't have any breakfast.
Well you can guess what happened when I got to the platform. Yep wave goodbye to the train. They had cancelled the train at 8:43 and told everyone going that way to get on the earlier 8:40. I think its at that point I thought things couldn't get much worst and I thought well I got to at least write a blog entry about this day I'm having.

Well in the last sting of the tail, my ticket I bought was a super saver which is not valid for travel before 9:45am. The next train (which I'm currently sitting on) was at 9:10am but I didn't know about the super saver till 9:05am. So I ended up having to pay extra money to make up the fair difference (a extra 25 pounds). And to finally to top off everything my power socket is dodgy so it sometimes cuts out plus there is zero wireless! Not even a costly one. I haven't hooked up phones for dial up access yet
with my new laptop and I can't remember the long modem query string for Orange let alone O2.

Anyway, I'm sure the conference will be good and I got molly's birthday bender tonight so i'm sure this morning won't set the tone for the rest of the day.

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Friday 19th Jan, One night with Ferry Corsten. You up for it?

January 14, 2007 10

—

6am

— Ferry Corsten 4 hour set— at The Gallery at Turnmills, Clerkenwell, London

Four hour set from Mr Corsten, supported by Abel Ramos and Gavyn Mytchell

One of the top Dj's in the industry hits London next Friday. In my attempt to get back into clubbing before I get really too old physically to do it all, I'm going.

My only regret is that I'll have no one to share the night with. Most of my friends are into weird music (only learned who the police were a while ago) and won't be interested in going out till 6am. Unless I might be wrong? If your reading this and thinking yeah sounds like a good night then leave a comment or drop me a email. As mentioned on the podcast we just did, I only drink lots of Redbull so I'm legally allowed to drive my scooter home afterwards, which means theres a chance I could drop you home if your
on the way to Woolwich. I also found a nice discount on the ticket price.

Because so many people of the Ferry Corsten forum are going to see Ferry in Turnmills we wanted to do something special! So we can offer a special entrance for just £10. To get your ticked you have to go to THIS special link.
Please put : FINGERS in the Promo code box. Go through the rest of the options and then on the next page it will offer you the £10 ticket.

The last time I went seriously clubbing was in 2005 over in Berlin. My friend Carl was going to come out too, but his girlfriend was ill. So I decided to go alone. Now to be fair I had a flipping wicked night but there were some odd things to get use to in Berlin like getting money back for your glasses at the bar (actually makes a lot of sense). I must have shed like a ton of sweat that night because there were so many good tunes played by the likes of Paul Van Dyk and Tiesto.

The way I currently stay in touch with what's going on in the Trance and Progressive scene is via the member only Bit Torrent site Trance Traffic. Armin Van Buuren's A state of trance show is simply awesome and is a must if your into your trance and progressive music. Without it I wouldn't be currently listening to the classic Intuition
(Martin Roth Classic Style Mix)

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