barcamp – Page 3 – Cubicgarden.com…

Conferences and Festivals you should be aware of

Get those laptops out its conference season?

So there are a stupid amount of conferences and festivals in the UK this half of 2008. Usually conference season is not till the 3rd quarter but someone forgot to mention this to us brits. This is a quick run down and expect more details on certain events as and when they come up. I've stopped at June for now but theres more to come.

BarCampScotland/
Found this out via Gareth's blog about interesting events:
Febuary 1st–
2nd,
at the Concourse of the Appleton Tower at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland

The Social media forum
I'm actually talking at this one. So yes its slightly shameless self promotion but also a interesting conference about the changes in the media. The slant will be towards the gemany press, but I'll be explaining why the germany media industry should be engaging their participtors now.:
Febuary 11th–
12th,
at the Side Hotel, Hamburg, Germany.

Semantic Camp 2008
Lots of talk about this one, first barcamp style event in London since BarCampLondon3. First one run by someone else besides myself. Good luck Tom, I'm sure it will be a great success. Shame I can't it as it clashes with Suw and Kevins Wedding. BBC Backstage is sponsoring this event, as its just the kind of thing we believe in.:
Febuary 16th–
17th,
at the Department of Computing, Imperial College, South Kensington, London.

The Guardian's Changing Media Summit
I'm actually talking at this one (only briefly and then a panel). So yes its slightly shameless self promotion again but also a interesting conference about the changes in the media.:
March 12th,
at the Victoria Plaza Hotel, Victoria, London.

Over the Air
BBC Mobile with BBC Backstage unveil 48 hours of mobile and wireless hacking. There will be more details about this event in the near future. But right now, you want to store this date in your diary because its a Friday and Saturday with yes sleep-over. So this is a chance to really experiment and try out things you've only dreamed about. Even if you've never taken a phone apart, fear not there will be tons of tutorials by leading mobile developers and providers to lead you on your way.:
April 4th–
5th,
at the TBA) Central London

Abilitynet's Web2.0 Accessibility conference
A new conference, which I happen to be talking at again. This time with people like Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith. The whole conference will centre around web accessibility in a web 2.0 world. Sounds familiar maybe? Well there was backstage podcast around the same theme recently. Should be a good conference to cover some of the things forgotten about recently. .:
April 25th,
at City University, London.

Futuresonic 2008
I have never been to futuresonic but I hear lots of good things about it. I'm hoping to be talking there with the guys behind the Radio Labs. It also seems to be growing into the UK's answer to SXSW maybe?:
May 1st–
4th,
at the Manchester.

Xtech 2008
This time in Dublin instead of Paris or Amsterdam but still a great conference for those involved in the cutting edge of the net. Right after Futuresonic, so I expect quite a few people to catch a flight from Manchester to Dublin on the 5th May.:
May 6th–
9th,
at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Dublin, Ireland.

Thinking Digital
New type of conference, think TED or PopTech but for the UK and your on the right track. I'm involved in this one and backstage is sponsoring the event. Actually codeworks is a BBC innovation labs partner in the north east. The line up is simply amazing and very diverse, just the kind of conference the UK really needs. .:
May 21st–
23rd,
at the Sage, Gateshead.

Thinking Digital Geekdinner
A geekdinner to celebrate the thinking digital conference, just a short walk across the bridge from the sage in Gateshead. Food provided by BBC Backstage. Still looking for a drinks sponsor if your interested? .:
May 23rd,
at the Picher and Piano, Newcastle

BarCampNewcastle
BarCampNewcastle, at long last but looks to be a good one following a great conference. Certainly a good reason to stay in Newcastle even longer.:
May 24th–
25th,
at the (TBA), Newcastle or Gateshead.

Mashed
The big event of the summer for BBC backstage. Mashed is 1 day of conference and 2 days of open development and fun. Unlike last year, this one is all BBC with a open inviatation for others to join us. Its going to be huge again and unforgetable for everyone who signs up.:
June,
at the (TBA), London

Technorati Tags: events, conferences, barcamp, festivals

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Backstage in Edinburgh for TV Un-festival, 25th August

Following on from Hackday we've been planning something a little different at Backstage. This time we're getting involved in the Edinburgh TV festival and putting together a special event right out of the BarCamp book.

This year the MGEITF (Media Guardian International TV Festival) has spawned its own fringe event, the TV Un-Festival. This day-long event which takes place on Saturday 25 August will centre around the clash of the well established TV world and the constantly accelerating Internet world using the unusual un-conference format, where the cost of entry is participation.

The highlights from the TV Un-Festival will be presented at this special event, giving everyone a chance to speculate on the future of TV, online entertainment and cross platform narratives.

This year the TV Un-Festivial hosted by Backstage.bbc.co.uk and guided along by the fabulous Suw Charman, aims to explorer the clash with in a series of free formed sessions similar to BarCamp known as unconference style. Everyone will be able to participate by using one of the free 30 minute slots which will be available.

So between the lines, this event will take the essence of barcamp and un-conferences and put it in area which is usually about formal sessions and structure, the Edinburgh TV Festival. We're not using the same venue because that would be far too frantic. But we're not far from the other venue and people who come to the un-festival will have access to the festival on Saturday night and Sunday all day for free. Hows that for a great deal? The ticket for this years festival is over 400 pounds but the TV festival recognise they need more diversity in their audience and have put their money where their mouth's have been. This also easily covers the price of going to Edinburgh and checking into a hotel, which I know if bloody hard at this very moment. I also wish I'd told people a lot earlier but we need to get the correct sign off from everyone involved

So who will be there? is what I keep being asked. Well we have a list of names on the site but generally we have a selection of established names like the BBC, BT, etc. Then we have some more internet based startups like Blip.TV, Joost, etc. I then invited a load of dark net people like Ian Clarke who wrote Freenet and is currently working on Thoof. On a slight tangent we have the Hon brothers who work for Mind Candy and built Perplexcity. My thinking is that Cross platform narrative runs right through this un-festival and that's why I'm interested in getting the ARG people and Video game people also in the same room with more traditional online video people. Last but not least I'm really keen to get Videobloggers and TV hackers together in the same space too but this looks to difficult due to the total lack of cross over between each area. So anyway you can see its going to be a very diverse event.

If your interested and I really think you should be, Signup now and we'll see you in Edinburgh.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

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?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

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.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Final logos for BarCampLondon2

I have finally finished the logos for BarCampLondon2. It took a combination of Inkscape and Gimpshop (which crashed a lot – reminder to actually install it).

Here is the source files if you want to play with them. I've released them under a creative commons licence, which even Dave will agree with.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

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

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

BarCampLondon – overview from others

So moving forward from my last post which I didn't quite finish. I've been keeping a close eye on what people have been saying in blog posts and I've seen hardly any negativity to the event.

Aral Balkan has a nice review of all the presentations he attended. He ends with…

BarCampLondon was a blast! Over the course of a weekend, I got to meet some amazing people, catch up with friends, learn some great stuff (including a new game called Werewolf) and get inspired.

No thank you Aral, I'm still not a fan of Flash, but I agree my view point of Flash exist in the Flash 4 and 5 era. I look forward to seeing if Adobe will take the biggest step and open source the Flash Player. I still think its not going to happen but we shall see.

During my time at BarCampLondon and the geekdinner the night before, I rubbed sholders with quite a few people but Nicole Simon sticks in my mind. She blogged and read a lot too. Her last post on BarCampLondon has a list of things which shes picked up on.

Looking over the reports of the last days of Barcamp, I notice some things popping up more than usual

the usual topic of lack of women on such events

the amount of user interface designers and flashers

I am not a werewolf or I want to jot down a list of things to actually read out at the beginning of such events to have a consistent knowledge of the rules

and last but not least: marketers are not evil and programmers are not gods

Good points but it doesn't stop there.

Developper focus is something which was – for my taste – a bit too much. For example driven by Ben Metcalfe who “disturbed” the talking crowd to force them to do mash pits – when most of the people just where waiting to play Werewolf.

It may be a good idea to call it DevBarcamp if you really want this to be programmer centric but if you don't say so, people will show up for more than just the programmer centric topics.

In this regard I would like to ask if those flash people actually counted for programming or not? *gd&r*

To be fair, it was on the schedule and yes we did kind of force mashup-pit on everyone but we felt if we didn't people might just hang around and get boarded till the dinner came. Then we might have people asking why we were not doing something about it. I think the point I'm getting at, is that we were not trying to force mashpit upon people, just suggesting things people could do. Werewolf was on the list too.
Nicole moves on the lack of women.

Again, of course, there were only few women although I found there where quite a lot. Until I started counting from memory – naa, not that many. We had a longer discussion about this and especially Ian was very keen how to make this work for women.

Without falling for the “let's get women in here just for the sake of it”. To which I agree totally. We can start passing on those messages to our networks and it may even be a cool idea to add to such a Barcamp description a bit more information for example about the camping part. (This Barcamp started out with having a boys / girls room but ended up with having a snorrer / non snorring separation.)

But in general I think we someday have to draw the line. I refuse to run after women all the time just to get them to such meetings if they dont also at least voice their opinions on why they did not come or where not feeling like coming. You cant complain about the cake but eat it too.

Yep I decided it was best to have the snorrers like myself in the main room away from everyone else. Nicole is right, I'm very keen to have more women involved in BarCampLondon, and maybe next time I will work a lot harder on making the event a lot more accessable to women, but not at the expense of others. BarCamp requires a certain amount of get up and go, a certain amount of passion. I know there are a lot of women with this passion but might have been put off by the over geekness of the event in past? And I think thats the point which Nicole quotes from Sarah Blow. Women don't want to be treated as special cases, just show them what there missing. Which is why flickr pictures really help in this case.

James Aylett covers a quite a few sessions including the missing presentation which I recorded but gave up to Paul Hammond.

Paul Hammond's half-presentation, half-discussion called Foo, Bar, Baz, on where future London unconferences and similar events might go, based in part on the strengths of FOOcamp that BarCamp might not be able to mimic easily. I didn't come away with a clear idea of what the future might hold, but I'm convinced that the UK has more than enough smart people to be exciting, even if most of us aren't going to make millions out of start-ups; we'll leave that to Silicon Valley. (And hey, their million is smaller than ours, so we'd have to try harder.)

Well put and I'm looking forward to putting that footage up online so others like Sarah Blow can get an insight into what was said and talked about in that 30mins. James also goes into depth on Sofia Kallin's (Ben Metcalfe's wife) rant about the differences between geek culture and mentality. This is a session I recorded and put up on Blip.tv, but I can't seem to find it right now.

Then Sofia Kallin challenged a bunch of people to persuade her that social networking software is a good thing.

The main thought that I came away from this session with was that there's a huge (and probably growing gap) between the top technologists, who are inventing and building all the sites which (to us) seem really cool; and the people who make up 99% of the world, and really don't care that we've used microformats, or that we have a table-free design, and who just want it to work.

There's a element of truth to this but catering to the masses is not always the best idea if you want to think outside the box. I won't go into the alpha geeks, cool merchants, early adopters stuff but there's got to be somewhere for the niche markets.

Other good blogs worth mentioning include the ones here and…

Matthew Pennell talks about his frustration with picking a subject to talk about at BarCampLondon but enjoys the day
Snippero gave away a skateboard to the winner of Werewolf – Nat.
Matt was somewhat inspired by Sheila and my presentation on XSL and Cocoon.
Razor for his good point made about sponsorship of BarCampLondon.

Like I've said many times now, thanks to everyone who helped out in little and big ways. Good luck to my partner in crime Ben Metcalfe whos now state side. Thanks to Murray, whos a true party animal, has world domination plans and a awesome team to back him up. And finally Sarah (my wife) for backing me up and letting me go off for a whole weekend to camp out with my peers and friends. Not many wives would give up there husband for a weekend.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]