geek

We've found the ideal complement to our first keynote for Oxford Geek Night 20 on February 9, 2011. Chris Govias and Andrew Godwin were already booked to talk to everyone present about the recent efforts by /dev/fort to put original NASA transcripts from space missions on the web in a searchable, linkable format. And now, alongside space exploration, we've got... car racing. Alex Powell from Soft Pauer is coming along to talk about their F1 mobile app, which presents real-time track positioning and timing data from the F1 official feeds.

We've already got four microslots booked, including discussions of the evil of pie charts and the joy of transparent swimwear. Before you start thinking about a roomful of geeks all dressed in transparent swimwear, let me distract you by saying that we still need volunteers for The Pitch, our sixty-second open-mic slot where people can pitch any ideas, vacancies, products, local events, meetups, organisations etc. The floor could be yours for up to a minute: email me, jp.stacey on the old GMail, or tweet me (@jpstacey) if you're interested.

On top of all this, Historic Futures have agreed to sponsor drinks: to the tune of one eagerly awaited drink per eagerly awaited geek attendee! They're based locally and they do research into supply-chain traceability. That means helping companies to work out just where all the components of their products come from and how, to improve transparency and good practice across lots of industries. They've also been good eggs in offering everyone at OGN20 a free drink.

Not only that, but we also have the regular sponsorship from Torchbox, meaning entry is still free. So: come along for the fast cars, big rockets and free drinks. How many geek events have that as their strapline, eh?

Since the dawn of time, Oxford Geek Nights have used Amazon S3 for delivering its video files. Videos were tidied and encoded into MP4 files, then uploaded to AWS and made available to everyone. On one level this has worked just fine: the cost of S3 per gigabytes of storage and monthly bandwidth is pretty low, and using Amazon's resource delivery framework makes a lot of sense.

But the user experience has been pretty poor: problems with a friend's machine recently really highlighted this, when codecs first of all refused to install, then ruined audio synching in the browser. The workaround of always remembering to click and download is all very well, but not particularly convenient.

With that in mind Wes West, co-worker at Torchbox and performer of that microslot, recently took it upon himself to set up an Oxford Geek Nights channel on Vimeo. If serving files from S3 makes sense, serving video from Vimeo makes even more sense. Vimeo channels are neat and look great, and their servers can deliver video in HTML5 and at a pretty high quality (although embedding still seems to try to force Flash.) Although Vimeo is free for non-commercial use, we did end up getting a Pro account, given the length of keynoter videos, but it's probably worth it in the long run.

Wes has written a bit more about Vimeo and Oxford Geek Nights on the Torchbox blog, but if you're so inclined then you should probably just sit down and watch perhaps our best keynote so far, by Russell Davies, served up by Vimeo. Welcome to the Oxford Geek Night future, maybe.

Almost certainly no progress on those copious and comprehensive notes about BarCamp Oxford this side of Easter. But it's worth mentioning two offshoots from the weekend's discussions that look set to become big events in their own rights.

Sylwia Presley, Ben Werdmuller, Marcus Povey and others are beginning to organize a Transparency BarCamp, to talk about the ethics of social media and web 2.0, Open Government and individual freedom, and even topics like cyber-activism. Meanwhile another group, including the likes of Matt Thorne and Oleg Lavrovsky, is hoping to try their collective hand at Oxford geek jams, collaborative all-day coding events.

The local geek community---most obvious to me personally at the Oxford geek nights of course, but to others through the Oxford Flickr Group or the Agile Oxtremists---has always been strong and supportive, but in quite a slow-burning way. Suddenly it's like someone's given those flames some air, and the Oxford geek/social scene has warmed up. It feels great.

BarCamp Oxford is happening on April 4-5 this year! Like other BarCamps, this will be a loosely organized "unconference", where every attendee is a participant and the sequence of events is decided by consensus: as the BarCamp site declares, "no spectators, only participants."

I'm really pleased that this has got off the ground. There's funding for a great venue---the Oxford University Club---and hopefully more will be forthcoming. The attendee list is nearly half full, and it was only announced late last week. Stick your name down if you'd like to join in the fun.

The current plan is for Saturday April 4 to start late and sociable, with a meal somewhere in Oxford (yet to be decided). For Saturday night, there's a list of crash space on the wiki page for out-of-towners. Then on Sunday the whole day will be at the University Club. It's a great place for talks, workshops and just general unhurried chat. In the evening there'll probably be a pub trip to round things off. If I can still stand, there will definitely be a pub trip.

(Want to sponsor BarCamp Oxford? If so, then email <info@oss-watch.ac.uk>: the organizers would love to hear from you.)

Last night's Oxford Geek Night was completely mental. As I spent all yesterday going to London and back I'm still recovering from the organizing and the late night.

The musical keynotes and Q&A with Rhodri and Ian went down really well: Rhodri's laconic discussion of a musician's experience of the new web complemented Ian's more in-depth discussion of the way tech might solve the industry's worsening financial problems---even if by the end of the session we still couldn't decide whether or not they were going to solve the very difficulties experienced by musicians like Rhodri.

Having Ben lead them in with the genius of his twelve-second song about 12seconds.tv and of course You're No-one if You're Not on Twitter was also great to watch. Last time Ben played an OGN it was to the few appreciative people at the front who could hear him (such are the vagaries of PA): I think pretty much everyone listened in last night.

All the microslots were brilliant too, of course, but I'm going to quietly elide them right now in favour of getting an early night. We'll be putting videos and slides up soon, and I'll probably point at them then as there are one or two things that really resonated.

In the same way that Ben was surprised by the sudden interest in his Twitter song, we've had a brief mention on Metafilter and a heads-up from Tom on the Yahoo! developer blog. I hope to get writeups together for the Google OS Code Blog and the Torchbox blog after a weekend of barbecues and sleep.

Two or three days ago whenever anyone mentioned the 7th Oxford Geeks Night to me, I winced. By then it was less than two weeks from Wednesday June 25; we only had four microslots out of six; I’d just started filling in existing speakers on the drill; and I was looking at spending a weekend writing a talk on server-side on-the-fly web-to-document creation with OpenOffice.

Now, suddenly, it looks like being the best night so far in 2008. We’re starting with two great keynote speakers: Charlton Barreto of OASIS, W3C and Adobe, talking about the takehomes from Web 2.0; Tom Taylor of Headshift talking about the beauty of pointless mashups (such as his Twitter feeds @lowflyingrocks and @towerbridge).

There’s then a full roster of microslot talks covering a crazy range of technologies. My colleagues Matthew and Tom have answered two of the requests that the Oxford geek community themselves put out, and are doing talks on the new technologies of Comet and Google App Engine respectively; Andrew Godwin will be showing off his beautiful if computationally… trying… graphing code for Last.fm; Drew McLellan continues his simultaneous journeys through good web practice and late-70s/early-80s children’s TV shows; Simon Whitaker does some anyone-can-try-it hacking of the OSX address book; and Duncan Parkes discusses the mySociety application PlanningAlerts.

The evening will finish with a book raffle, courtesy of Friends of Ed. So if you stay for the full three hours then you’re in with a good chance of going home one book richer. Disclaimer: the venue seats 140 people and we won’t have a book for everyone.

If you’ve not stuck it in your diary yet then do so: Wednesday June 25; doors open 7.30, entrance free thanks to Torchbox and Google. I’ll be the one panicking, and hotswapping laptop monitor cables.

My rather cheesy write-up of OGN6 is now available on the Google Open Source blog. I’d like to say it was cut to ribbons and all the worst bits are editorial additions, but I think they put it up verbatim.

Cheers, all: see you at OGN7, June 25th.

The next OGN next Tuesday has developed broad themes without us really trying. Generally it’s best to have a mixture of talks, because of the eclectic mix of interests represented by our audience, but two clear topics have arisen, with some overlap in between.

Gobion Rowlands leads our e-learning procession, with a keynote on “turning hard data into fun.” Red Redemption, Gobion’s company, has recently won an award for its online Flash game about climate change. His keynote neatly segues into microslot (5-minute) talks on e-Learning and technology in archaeology.

Meanwhile, Charlton Barreto will be discussing in his keynote what we can learn from Web 2.0. Charlton has worked with OASIS, W3C and the IEEE on related topics. But his keynote sets the ground for talks about mashups, custom CRM systems, and a possible standard for portable social-network information.

And neatly bridging the two camps of educational outreach and web-2.0 hackery is the Oxford Barcamp microslot. And although I’ll be a bag of nerves on the day, I can’t wait.

In the wake of the most recent geek night, we’ve just added Upcoming entries for Oxford Geek Night #6 and Oxford Geek Night #7. Maybe when we reach some milestone like #10 we can think of better names for the events.

We should have something on the “official” website soon, although that currently takes a bit longer as it’s not exactly powered by a CMS. Unless you count vim as a CMS.

Now that the shine is off my memories of OGN5—not least by a leak of an upcoming post elsewhere on this blog owing to a keyfumble—I can nonetheless look back on a success. From the point of view of all the guests it was one sort of a success: the speakers were wonderfully engaging; contributions from our sponsors (especially Torchbox and Google) oiled the night’s machinery to the point where people barely felt it move under them; and even as I left some huddles of geeks were still chatting. I’d like to think they were still there the next morning, huddled round mugs of coffee and talking about some new usability study.

From my point of view it was a different sort of success: nothing went completely wrong. I managed to be nice to our resolutely amiable and upbeat keynoters, who delivered their respective talks with aplomb; we not only set up our own network but managed to fix both the pub’s wireless and upstairs electrics which were blown by a dodgy washing machine; the PA pumped out sound and people didn’t chat as much during the microslots anyway.

At the time I rated everything that happened in a negative sense—the absence of anything going wrong was the only measure I was happy with—which made it hard to appreciate that frequently I just had to let things become a little bit anarchic. Let’s be honest: nobody notices all but the worst of gaffes, and the sort of control that absolutely guarantees nothing will go wrong is generally tight enough to squeeze the fun out of an event at the same time as the risk.

If I could have the evening again I’d probably have given Daniel more attention in advance, so I’d have known what he’d prepared to discuss Barcamp Oxford. They’ve got some great stuff planned, and it’s a shame that a mismatch of expectations detracted from that. When I’m able to focus better I’ll post to the mailing list and get some stuff out there about Barcamp.

I’m completely exhausted, and have spent the whole day playing catchup as I worked. Nw I just want to sleep, possibly until OGN6. Wake me in the spring, chaps.