A Consuming Experience

Are you going to be poised at your computer at 11 am on Thursday 24 April?

If so, please do me a favour - sign me up for BarCampLondon4, and I'll not only be eternally grateful but I'll also buy you a dim sum or other lunch, tea & cakes, or drinks, as you prefer. (My name you know, my email you'll know from my sidebar.) The downside - it'll have to be with me. But I think you already knew that...

Is this against the rules? I don't know, but what I do know is that for popular BarCamps like this one, it's virtually impossible to get a place unless you're ready at the right nanosecond at a computer with a decent speed connection (or can write a script to do the sign up for you, of course). If you work and are in a meeting at that time, tough luck.

It's even worse if the sign up slots are scheduled, as GCap Media (who are organising this BarCamp) have done, for exactly the same time on exactly the same day of the week. I was in a conference call for the first wave. For the second wave I tried using my Nokia N95 but with T-Mobile's web n crawl, I only got in just short of 11.02 am and it said that the tickets were all gone. In less than 2 minutes.

At least for BarCampLondon3 the sign ups waves were scheduled for different times of the day, on different days of the week (including weekends as I recall). So I think I managed to sign up for that during a midnight wave.

The way things are going, I haven't much hope that I'll be able to sign up this Thursday, especially as I'll only be able to try signing up via a slow mobile phone connection again.

BarCamp sign up systems - is there another way?

As you can tell, I don't think the sign up system used for London BarCamps is very fair. What would be fairer is - something else.

What do I suggest? A longer sign up period rather than a few waves. Say, an opening and closing time and date - precise time/date for both - ranging over a period of about a month.

Announce those times well in advance, all over the place.

People indicate their interest during the sign up month (or week, or fortnight, if the organisers prefer - as long as there's plenty of advance notice so people know when the period will be).

After the sign up period closes, do a random selection or ballot out of those who've given their details during the sign up period (I'm sure an electronic random "pick the names out of a hat" can be done; someone can whip up software to do that surely, if it's not already been produced).

That would be the fairest way to choose attendees, I think. Or at least vary the times and days for the sign up waves.

And for the next BarCamp with the same theme in the same place, get the system to weight the draw a little in favour of those who missed out in the last draw - so that the more times you were unlucky and missed out in a row, the higher the weighting in your favour.

That's my thoughts anyway. Otherwise, the only people who'll attend are those who can be poised at their computers at exactly the right time - maybe the organisers want to only let in people who are that keen, but real life just isn't like that, I'm keen but my work has to take priority.

So, what do you think would be the fairest way to allocate places for popular BarCamps? Or a fairer way than now, at least?

And would you be willing to take up the Improbulus dim sum challenge?

Labels: BarCamp, selection

For convenience here's a list of the videos I shot at BarCampLondon3 back in November 2007 - well, better late than never!

And yes, there were circling laptops... (No prizes for guessing which one's mine. Review of it to follow, but I really wouldn't recommend buying one because of the unusually bad customer service, in case anyone can read the brand name - which I refuse to give free publicity to further here!)

The list of videos, in no particular order:

1. The future of BarCamp? - discussion led by Ryan Alexander, Ian Forrester and others
   
2. Technology & our rights, aka "You did WHAT with my bits??" - by Glyn Wintle of Open Rights Group
   
3. Open social networks & Noserub - by Dirk Olbertz of Noserub
   
4. Use Yahoo! Pipes to build your lifestream - by Cristiano Betta
   
5. Self-publishing via Lyx & Lulu - by Victoria Lamburn
   
6. Data portability - by Ian Forrester (a co-founder of DataPortability)
   
7. From Web 2.0 to Mobile 2.0 - the transition - discussion
   
8. DIY user research - by Leisa Reichelt
   
9. Website psychology - by Gavin Bell who works for Nature
   
10. Learning jQuery in 30 minutes - by Simon Willison
    
11. Monetizing the long tail - voluntary economies - by Reinier Zwitserloot of Tipit.to
    
12. Mobile data - what's "fair use"? - by Sam Machin, who works for a mobile network operator but spoke in a personal capacity.
    

Labels: BarCamp, social geek, videos

My final video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007... a thought-provoking discussion on how the organisation of BarCamps might evolve or develop, to ensure the longevity of the concept in the future.

Led by Ryan Alexander, Ian Forrester and others.

Click To Play

Labels: BarCamp, future, video

The video below from BarCampLondon3 back in November 2007 is, at its broadest, about technology and your rights, with e.g. a fascinating story (on e-voting) which brings home just how scarily little government and others in power appear to understand technology or the internet, and yet they're making laws affecting our digital rights, they're trying to use technology in ways it shouldn't be used - despite the serious implications for security, privacy and democracy.

The session was led by Glyn Wintle of the (mainly UK) organisation Openrightsgroup.org (given my views e.g. my Copyfighter posts, it won't surprise you to know that I'm an ORG member, and indeed I joined when it was first formed).

More on the electronic voting example, where the ORG were e-voting election observers last year. It seemed the SNP had won no seats. On challenging the result, fortunately just before it was officially declared, it was found that votes for the SNP hadn't been counted - probably because the results had been entered onto an Excel spreadsheet, and the person responsible hadn't scrolled across horizontally enough to see all the parties' votes! See page 51-52 of the ORG's May 2007 Election Report (executive summary), which I'm surprised hasn't received more publicity.

Incidentally, on e-voting, it's interesting that as Bob Wyman reported German hacker group, the Chaos Computer Club, in January 2008 went to the courts to try to stop the use of electronic voting machines. They'd previously submitted an expert opinion to the German courts reporting serious defects in the voting computers. Why governments insist on ignoring technology experts, I don't know. Maybe because they don't really understand technology themselves, but won't believe that they don't. Which is where this post began...

Click To Play

Labels: BarCamp, digital rights, technology, video

This video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is of a talk by Dirk Olbertz of noserub.com, an open source decentralised social networking protocol.

Have a look at the video below to find out more about Noserub.

Click To Play

There's been a lot of buzz about Google's OpenSocial (which MySpace are participating in), which was announced in November 2007, and about data portability - which all need to be considered together, in my view. It's too early perhaps to say how Noserub will fit into all this.

OpenSocial has certainly been developing apace (e.g. social gadgets) which isn't surprising with Google behind it. For those interested, the Open Social announcement video is below (more OpenSocial videos etc).



Open Social was announced at Google's CampFire One:


Although Open Social lets developers write an application once which can then be used on all supporting social networking sites, so it saves coders and programmers time and increases the potential marketability and adoption of their service, it does depend on sites to support it. That's why I'm much more excited about the possibilities of broader, more general open standards with data portability, which Google, Facebook and Plaxo have recently signed up to in joining the DataPortability workgroup.

Labels: BarCamp, open social networks, video

As you'd expect from the title, this video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is a quick practical run through by Cristiano Betta of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to build your "lifestream" - no, that's not "lifestream" in the sense of a cult religion, before you run away! (In fact Cristiano beat me to it in finding the video I'd uploaded before I'd had a chance to blog it).

Yahoo! Pipes lets non-programmers build mashups relatively easy, by drag & drop etc, of content from different web sources, as long as the source has a feed whether Atom, RSS or other XML (see my introduction to feeds - Pipes are obviously another great way of making use of feeds).

The official description of Pipes: "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant."

In this case, Cristiano grabbed feeds from blogs where he's a contributor, then filtered out the other posts to leave only his posts, then combined his posts with his feeds from other web services like Flickr, Delicious, Twitter and Upcoming - so he could display a single combo webpage with all his sources: his "lifestream".

Cristiano's blog also has his guide in step by step text format. It does need a few extra steps but I shall leave the Javascripting to experts like Kirk! I've been meaning to have a play with Pipes since it first came out, but it's one of my get a round tuit things...

Click To Play

Labels: BarCamp, feeds, video, Yahoo Pipes

This video of a BarCampLondon3 presentation in November 2007 may be of interest to writers, journalists and aspiring writers.

It's a guide to the art of self-publishing - how to publish and distribute your own (hard copy) book, or indeed thesis or dissertation, DIY, using various tools and services such as the open source Lyx word processor, GIMP for cover / illustrations, and self-publishing website Lulu. It's by Victoria Lamburn, who's published quite a few fiction books of her own.

There's a detailed overview of Lyx and its advantages - it's LaTex-based WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) and, in her view, produces better typography, control of fonts etc than Word or Writer - in terms of kerning, ligatures etc - basically how to get your book to look professional, presentationally, even if you're not a typesetting expert.

There are tips e.g. on the image you want to use for your cover, the benefits of submitting to Lulu in PDF format, and a short overview of Lulu and its options (such as privacy settings you control, with limited access only to your work; size of the book, etc), tips on submitting to Lulu including the importance of keywords (tags), and the potential of much better profit margins for the author than with conventional publishers. Different distributions are available e.g. through well known online booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or you can choose to exclusively distribute and market it yourself, etc.

Lulu can also be used for distributing music via CDs and videos via DVDs. It does seem to really empower the creative in relation to controlling and setting your terms for distribution, pricing, etc - and seems a relatively economical way to get your work out there, too. To me, services like Lulu are one of the great developments have come out of the rise of the Internet.

Click To Play

Labels: BarCamp, internet, self-publishing, video

This video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is of BarCampLondon organiser extraodinaire Ian Forrester, talking about the the dream and goal of data portability - standardisation of identity and other personal data and its exchange (and controlling its sharing and privacy), notably the laudable Dataportability.org initiative which seems to be increasingly gaining momentum, with lots of the great & the good of the Net already involved, such as Ian himself. To quote from their site:

"Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Mission Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community."

Of course, cautious paranoid that I am, a major point to my mind is total user control of privacy settings - it's my personal data, I'll only want to use a system that lets me control, easily but quite precisely, exactly which people or groups will be able to access exactly which information about me. Which is the opposite of Facebook -I'm now on it but I admit I don't like it and rarely visit, as Facebook make too much of your data too public by default, which is scary, and opting out is too hard. Both are deliberate, I'm convinced. They also they claim to be able to re-use, as much as they like, for whatever they like, it seems to me, all YOUR data that YOU put on their site. Although to be fair Google seem to claim much the same thing and there's a lot less fuss about that.

Anyway, back on track, I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about data portability in future, particularly with increasing convergence of Internet and mobile.

Click To Play

Labels: BarCamp, data portability, internet, video

Another video from BarCampLondon3 held in November 2007, of a lively discussion whose title is self-explanatory, on how the mobile web might develop. Unfortunately I didn't get the name of the main speaker (I think he was German but there was a big contingent from Germany so that won't help narrow it down much!) - if anyone can tell me I'll update this post to add it. No slides were uploaded.