Tag: london

Digital Wellbeing, into the woods…

Into the woods range

Digital Well being have changed there range to match the change of the season. They had a instore bash recently to celebrate the change. It was a good night and I managed to grab a chat with the guy behind USB cell and a guy whos created a maginify table. All good stuff and a great evening had by all. I've added a load of pictures here on flickr.

I went back to the Digital well being shop on Sunday. I have got even more pictures and caught a few more videos. This time Sheila playing with the maginfy table, Alex trying out the wood sound remixer and Alex also explains how the Nabaztag works and why its more that just a toy.

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Enterprising Britian : the debate?

Raising the currency of ideas

Well first up, it wasn't a debate, it was a very long series of lectures. And to be fair lectures which were pretty much saying the same thing but not offering any real ways forward. There were some highlights to the day. Talking to Doug Richard was interesting and he had some thoughts about what backstage could be doing with Library House. Kevin Steele chief executive of Enterprise Insight, also put out a call to all community groups around London to get in touch with them, as they have money to fund your community. This event kicks off Enterprise week which has been running for about 4 years now, and there are many events happening around the country this week.

Anyway like the mashup day, I pretty much filmed every I could and have uploaded the results on to Blip.tv.

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What next for London geekdinners?

Geek girl

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

Smooth water

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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Statistics and hints for Werewolf

Werewolf at BarCamp

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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Opera Backstage London

Opera Backstage meet up was interesting. The opera crew did a reasonable job with lots of free drinks but limited food. The talks were not great but they did show off a new feature for Opera 10, page zooming. It looked good but the rest of the talks were somewhat shakey except Jeremy Keith. Jeremy although his laptop died on stage raised the roof with a great speech about browsers and the web. In my usual fashion I captured Jeremy in action and uploaded it. I don't know who's idea it was to make Fluffybunny the photographer. With a load of guys with free drinks inside of them she was being hit on left, right and centre. Who would have thought she was 24, i swear she was younger like maybe 18. I guess I'm finally getting old and the young are looking really really young.

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BarCampLondon in .Net magazine

.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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Who says the Social scene in London is nothing compared to San Fran?

Socialising at the geekdinner with Dave Shea

What the heck is going on? Next week is insane! There are tons of events going on in London next week. I'll outline the crazyness…

Now imagine if Momo Monday, Girl geekdinner and Pub Standards were all added to the mix! Someone needs to sort this all out. Its too insane that all these events are happening the same week.

So getting serious for a while now. To be fair everything is ending up on Upcoming which is a good thing. I was using Eventful for quite sometime but since most of the events are ending up on upcoming, i'm not going to fight it. So things are getting a little more origanised here but the problem is that the actual event holders are not looking at upcoming first let alone posting them. Then add the extra pain in the butt that you need to sign in to register yourself with an event, not everyone likes that. So actually things are not that rosey. I thought the Jigsaw wiki might be a good idea but it seems few people use it for events. Then I thought Techcrunch UK might bring some calm to the crazyness but nope, its not happened.

I've filled you all in on the context but this conversation has gone on a little longer in the TechCrunch comments on the same subject. The suggestion of using a google calendar by D4rr3ll sounds good but I'm not sure it solves the problem of sign up but it will certainly help with clashes. As he said a XSL would mean anyone could see it on a normal webpage, and yes using the API event.add or event new, it would be possible to automaticlly add it to Upcoming and Eventful.

So I've setup a Google account for London Social events which I'll email around to people who run events in London. The Calendar is here – http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=londonsocialevents@googlemail.com. You can subscribe to the RSS here and Ical here.

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The Digital well being store

Digital well being

I just got back from the Digital Well Being store in Fulham. I saw so many good things, I'm not even going to try and talk about them here. Instead you can see a load of pictures here on Flickr. But the most interesting thing about Digital well being is the whole concept of digital products being out and available to use and play with. Its not sterile like the apple store and certainly nothing like the dodgy pc world setups. The only stores which comes close is Ikea and Habitat. Anyway to only way to experience the store is to get your ass down there before they move somewhere else and change it around. You can also keep a track of whats going on with the blog they have setup, which needs to be updated.

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My leaving do at Souk Medina

Coffee gift tips

So I'm having a leaving do tomorrow night (29th Sept 2006). Its going to be at Souk Medina which is near Seven dials in Covert Garden. I have a space booked from 7pm, and expect to be there for most of the night. So feel free to come down and say hi or wave me off to my new position at backstage.bbc.co.uk. The lady holding the coffee tips will not be there, she had a leaving do there last year so it should be good fun. Hope to see you all there…

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Dinner Tonight with Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold

If your in London today and would love to meet up for Dinner with Howard Rheingold of the SmartMobs and Virtual Community fame

This is very last minute and we are going to have a meal rather than the usual geekdinner. So expect to pay for a meal and drinks. The venue is undecided and will be decided on at some point during the evening. But I expect it will be near Victoria or Kensington.

Howard Rheingold is one of the world's foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and on-line host for The Well. The author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, and Tools for Thought, he lives in Mill Valley, California.

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The US on the UK Grime Scene

I would never have thought I would be linking to a BBC blog but this short piece from some American show (which was uploaded to YouTube) is a interesting look at the UK Grime scene. Oh did I mention Mistajam now has a BBC Blog? I'm aware of the grime scene but stay well clear because I'm not the biggest fan of this type of music. But I do respect where this is coming from, even if its lost its way a little. There is a really good point made about the true differences of UK and US hiphop culture. People don't have 23 inch rims on there cars and wear diamonds simply because they can't afford it and they would be robbed. Yep, I'm certainly hearing that. I wouldn't even pull my ipaq on the train ride into peckham sometimes.

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