The audience - aware, ready to learn - I hope so, these are my O'Reilly colleagues Helen, Caitlin, Sharon
The view from the sound booth
Arthur, the Sound Guy
Ignite London 2 was a roaring success. From Cory Doctorow's polemic about the BBC introducing DRM to High Definition at the start to Tom Scott's SciFi story Mob at the end, there wasn't a dull moment the entire evening. The speakers were knowledgeable, interesting, funny, thought-provoking, eloquent, accomplished. The audience were generous, patient, aware, ready to laugh, ready to learn. The Luminaire was a great size, with a good PA, a bedsheet that stood in very nicely for a projection screen and a mirrorball over the stage (that I got to switch on). The Luminaire's staff were friendly, positive, open, helpful, very capable and they really wanted the night to be a success. All in all, a fine night.
I spent the evening in the sound booth by the bar with Arthur, the Luminaire's in-house sound engineer. My job was to sync the slides on the TV screens with those on the stage. Ostensibly, that should have been as simple as pressing Play as the first slide appeared, but for some reason 15 seconds on my MacBook Pro was slightly longer than 15 seconds on Dan's Mac Book Pro, so toward the end of each presentation, they were out of kilter by a couple of seconds. Ah well, something was bound to go wrong on that night, and that little glitch was as bad as it got, so we got away lightly. It would have been an impossible task if Paul Downey from Osmosoft hadn't been there with a video connector to bring together the laptop and the tellies - thanks, Paul.
With my O'Reilly head on, I particularly enjoyed seeing a couple of the presentations. Andy 'Bob' Brockhurst did a fine talk on the Maker/Hacker Revolution. Bob will be Yahoo!'s emissary to Maker Faire (as I type, a week a way, Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th March 2010). And NK Guy did a fine talk on flash photography - NK (or Neil as he's also known) is about to become a Rocky Nook author, Rocky Nook being a client publisher of O'Reilly's. His book, Mastering Canon EOS Flash Photography, is out this month.
From a personal point of view, as a teenage heavy metal fan, I loved Keith Kahn-Harris' presentation about being a Metal Jew. And Newspaper Club is a company I'm keen to champion, so Russell Davies' talk was a treat to hear. But there really were too many fine presentations to list individually. Top marks to everyone!
My co-organiser, Richard Johnson, has worked like a madman to edit the first of the videos for public consumption in quick time. Here's the first one, the first person on the bill and one of our two special guests for the night, Cory Doctorow:
There were also lots of enquiries about the O'Reilly User Group Programme, which is heartening. Among the many conversations we had, Lorna Mitchell told us about the 4th Dutch PHP Conference from June 10th to the 12th and Jeremy Coates let us know about the 3rd PHP North West lined up for Autumn.
I'm very excited about Global Ignite Week next week. Amy, Dan, Richard, Andy and I are in the thick of our last minute arrangements for Ignite London, and I know Dan Roddy and his team working on Ignite Bristol and Clare Scantlebury and her team at Ignite Cardiff are busy making sure their events will thrill, bewilder and educate.
For a while it looked like the only UK Ignites were going to be down South, but the North has stepped up with Ignite Manchester and Ignite Liverpool.
For Ignite Liverpool:
Title: Ignite Liverpool
Date: Thursday, 4th March 2010
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
Location: Liverpool Art and Design Academy, Duckinfield Street, Liverpool View Map
And for Ignite Manchester:
Title: Global Ignite Manchester
Date: Monday, 1st March 2010
Time: 18:00 – 21:00
Location: MadLab, 36-40 Edge St, Manchester, M4 1HN View Map
Both events look excellent, and well worth attending.
Ignite London 2 is set to illuminate the Capital on Tuesday 2nd March 2010. It will take place from 7pm at the Luminaire in Kilburn during Global Ignite Week. The Luminaire is a fantastic venue which normally plays host to up-and-coming bands - for one night only, it will be taken over by Ignite, that most Rock and Roll of Geek Get-Togethers. Cory Doctorow and Russell Davies have been announced as Invited Guest Speakers.
There are two other UK Ignites happening that week - the West Country sees its first Ignite with the inaugural Ignite Bristol on the 4th March 2010, while not 50 miles away across the Severn Estuary the now firmly-established Ignite Cardiff will entertain the Geekerati of South Wales on the same night. Both are going to be fantastic events: if you’re in the area, it will be well worth being there!
After speaking at the first Ignite London (of which more later), and
having helped Imran Ali assemble Ignite UK North, I wanted to be more involved this time around. Fortunately, Amy Thibodeau and Dan Zambonini, the powerhouse team behind the first Ignite London, were open to contributors stepping in to help, so over the last few weeks I've been working with Amy and Dan to put together Ignite London 2. Besides myself, Andy Kervell, who MCed last time around, and Richard Johnson, who shot the great video footage of the speakers, have also stepped up into a full Organiser capacity. It's been a very happy partnership, and great fun to be involved.
My major job is assembling the speaker line-up. If you fancy stepping up to the mic, follow the links on http://ignitelondon.net/speak - deadline Tuesday 9th February. We're open to proposals on any vaguely geeky topic, so there's plenty of scope: we're after a mix of funny and serious, social and personal, high and low tech, crafty, webby, environmental, quirky and mainstream. Making us laugh is a good thing, making us think is even better. We're looking to have 15 speakers this time around, with two or three places offered to Invited Guest Speakers, so there are lots of spots to go for. The only thing we say is No Sales Pitches.
The original Ignite London was a superb night. Amy and Dan did a great job of assembling one presentation after another which were thought-provoking and funny. Unfortunately, they also had me! Ben Hammersley, O'Reilly author and deputy editor of Wired UK, opened proceedings with the Sex Lives of the Great Renaissance Artists, a presentation which sent me reeling with shockwaves of panic - if the rest of the presentations were going to be this good, I was in trouble. After that, I barely saw another speaker as I was ensconced in the bar away from the stage desperately polishing up my own meager efforts.
At the very first UK Ignite, in Cardiff, I was a happy attendee. I had driven down from London so I could say I was there, and looking back it was a treat to be able to sit back and watch the show unfurl without feeling I had to contribute. At the Second UK Ignite, in Leeds, I was the compère for the evening - however Imran Ali had done such a fine job putting the line-up together that it needed a minimum of MCing to keep the tempo of the evening flowing.
Speaking was a different matter. When I saw the schedule, I was pleased to note that I was kicking off the last act, that the evening would be well under way before I had to do my bit. However, when it came to the actual event, I'd have loved to have got it over with just so I could have watched my fellow speakers without the dread that I still had to step up on stage. It's not that I'm not used to performing - I've done plenty of gigs and readings and speaking engagements to know what it's all about - but somehow Ignite is different. The audience knows their stuff, I'm representing my company, it's about knowledge, fun, geeky knowledge. Maybe I wasn't fun enough. Maybe I wasn't geeky enough. And then there's the same worry I had before speaking at Interesting back in September - what do I know that other people don't? And the fear is, very little.
At Interesting I fell back on a topic I know pretty well, namely my dad. For the latter half of his working life, he renovated waterwheels, (which he still does in retirement). So I call him up, snaffled a few interesting facts from him and built a turn around it.
At Ignite, I resorted to pop/rock music, which is the one area where I have put in my 10,000 Gladwellian hours. Over the years, I have accrued an idiosyncratic hotch-potch of insights from schlepping from rehearsal to gig to studio in umpteen different bands and hour upon hour of listening to recorded music. It wasn't going to be much, but it would have to do.
O'Reilly had offered Amy and Dan a few books to give away as prizes, so before my spot I got to acclimatise to being on the stage as I doled out an assortment of tech books to the worthy winners. And then Andy announced my talk, my presentation started, and it was over in a flash. I haven't dared go back to the video to see what I looked and sounded like, but the audience were kind enough to clap politely, and I didn't get booed, so in that sense I got away with it, and I can sit typing right now knowing I'm an Ignite alumni, that I looked into the void of 5 empty minutes, stood my ground and came back to tell the tale. Nerve-wracking as it was, I'm glad I've done it, and I wouldn't think twice about doing it again if the opportunity ever presented itself.
Of the speakers I saw, the ones which stick in my head are Nicky Smyth, Toni Basi, Matt Edgar and Chris Thorpe. If I haven't included yours, it's not that I saw it and dismissed it, the chances are I was hiding out of the way learning my lines.
Bletchley Park, the historic site of secret British code breaking activities during WWII and the birthplace of the modern computer, is again in the news thanks to John Graham-Cumming'sbook The Geek Atlas. O’Reilly pledged to give 50p per copy of the book sold in the UK to the Bletchley Park Fund and we are delighted to send our first cheque for £1000.
Unfortunately not everyone has heard of the plight of Bletchley Park. The Bletchley Park Trust is aiming to preserve the core heritage of the site and to build on the work of the wartime pioneers through education and technology innovation. The Trust does not receive on-going operational funding and therefore is dependent on money generated from donations or any additional on-site or off-site activities such as their online shop to enable it to continue its work.
You might have heard of John’s fight to get a national apology for the inhumane treatment of Alan Turing, one of the main Bletchley Park code breakers who cracked the German Enigma machine which helped shorten the war by around two years, saving countless lives. John Graham-Cumming was successful and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.
Last week I went along to see Christian Crumlish speak at Covent Garden Wallacespace. Christian is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces, and he did a fine hour-long talk (plus questions) about how design patterns can be used for building social websites.
My notes, incomplete as they are, read:
Patterns originated in the Architecture Community. Once you discover rules and patterns, they can be used in other situations. Architects missed the benefit of patterns, but Computer Scientists got it. Patterns and wikis have a similar base, as they were originated within the same crowd.
Yahoo!'s Pattern Library, of which Christian is the 3rd Curator, is the sibling to Yahoo! User Interface.
Delicious and Flickr popularised tagging, both were bought by Yahoo! But both have different implementations of tagging.
People take the code and design on top of it. People didn't think they needed the telephone - it took people a while to figure out how it could be used for business. Business is done through it. Blogs are like that - they don't necessarily bring money in, but business is done through them. The network effect of having millions of phones connected escalates their value, just as it does with having many people connected via a website.
People used to phone a place - 'is such-a-person there?' - where now we phone a person, or even a pocket.
Christian offered up with 5 Principles - not set in stone, not without exceptions, but strong guidelines. These principles, were tested at Barcamps etc, and eventually became Designing Social Interfaces:
Pave the Cowpaths Look at the behaviour that is already happening and facilitate that.
Talk Like A Person
Don't do corporate speak etc, your web copy should be conversational to set the tone you want your users to use. These include:
Conversational voice
Self-deprecating Error Messages
Ask Questions
Your vs My ('Your' gives context - someone else is saying 'Your', it is inclusive - with 'My' you're out on your own)
No joking around (sarcasm, in-jokes often don't translate online - your audience might not get the humour)
Play Well With Others
Embrace Open Standards
Allow data outside the bounds of your application
Accept external data within the sphere of your app
Support two-way interoperability
Learn from Games There are things about games which apps can learn. For example, reward participation. Got to give up some control to your users. For example, the designers who build Never Ending Game went on to build Flickr - a game-like culture was transferred.
Respect the Ethical Dimension Every social website has an ethic dimension. Don't spam, don't pester.
Other gems Christian doled out:
Give people a way to be identified
Social Objects - Things people have a common interest in, something to rally around. They keep people involved, they allow the site to grow organically
Give people something to do - eg upload videos - let them be involved
Let the community elevate people and content they value - 3rd party moderation doesn't scale
Enable a bridge to real life events
Anti-patterns! - Things which seem like a good idea at the time but later on shows itself to be bad eg copying a successful website but not understanding what makes it successful
Don't break email - eg NoReply is a bad idea
Overall, this was a great evening (Yahoo! always put on great events) with a capacity audience stacked right to the back of the cafe. I have a few more photos here.
Whenever Josette or one of her Merry Band of Followers (which includes me) runs an O'Reilly bookstall at an exhbition in the UK or Mainland Europe, attending delegates get a chance to win £250 of O'Reilly books, simply by filling in their name. The draw is made Quarterly, so each year there are four lucky winners.
We are proud to announce that the winner for the draw at the end of 2009 is Gustavo Laboreiro from Portugal, who entered at the competition at Codebits in Lisbon.
Christian Crumlish, curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces, is coming to Europe. He has two talks lined up, one in London, one in Berlin, where he will illustrate the principles of social web design with a deep dive into interaction patterns, design principles, and anti-patterns (familiar but broken solutions that seem like a good idea at the time).
A Call for Proposals has gone out for the 2nd UK Maker Faire, which is due to take place in Newcastle on the 13th and 14th March 2010:
Following the outstanding success of the first UK Maker Faire which was attended by over 7000 visitors, we are thrilled to announce Maker Faire 2010! Once again, Maker Faire will be heading to North East England as part of the Newcastle ScienceFest - a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation.
DIY Makers, Progressive Techies, Old-Fashioned and Indie Crafters, Mad Scientists, Quirky Musicians and Myriad Innovators propose your projects here. Deadline for submitting proposals is December 11th and then we will make a selection by January 8th.
Last year was a huge triumph, as this BBC News Report shows. 2010 promises to be even grander and awe-inspiring.
December 7th and 8th 2009 sees XpDay taking place in London:
The Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) are pleased to announce the 9th consecutive London XpDay conference, to be held December 7th and 8th at Church House, Westminster.
Aimed at experienced Agile practitioners, this year's conference provides an interactive mix of scheduled sessions, lightning talks and Open Space. There are three remarkable keynotes: Mark Striebeck (Engineering Manager at Google, responsible for developer testing infrastructure, tools and adoption); Dr. Doron Swade (Engineer, historian, and museum professional, the internationally recognized authority on the life and work of Charles Babbage) and Terry Saunders (Comic storyteller, Edinburgh Fringe stalwart). The conference continues after hours with social events sponsored by Google and Zühlke.
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