geeks

Yesterday I went to the inaugural Refresh Oxford hack day in the Incuna offices. It was great.

The local initiative is part of "Refreshing Cities," an attempt to provide vitality to local creative and technical culture, especially in the field of "new media," which one day we'll probably just call "media." As I've spent the last four years organizing the Oxford Geek Nights to do this very thing within the geek-social space, I can only applaud the idea.

The start of the hack day saw dozens of people present: a decent spread of designers, developers, UX/accessibility experts and similar webby folks. It was useful to begin immediately after another first, the inaugural European jQuery conference, also in Oxford; the conference brought a lot of both attention and attendees to the event. Although, the large amount of booze available at the conference means that a lot of people didn't turn up till considerably later; if indeed at all. 

For the first hour or so, we were all free to propose projects to everyone else. The idea was that these should be ideas that could either: be begun and brought to a fun if not necessarily successful conclusion in a day; or that were more long-term, already underway, but needed a day's worth of work from a few people to yield real returns. While we did a bit of horse-trading, we also ate pastries and drank tea and coffee.

Henry, Suzie and I formed a team of frontender, builder and programmer respectively for our own project and came up with a plan for development. Lunch turned up as we started work, and then... well, the next seven hours or so are frankly a bit of a blur. A fun, exciting blur; but a blur nonetheless, as we dipped down below the surface of our project and hammered away at it. By the end of it we had a cute little application with a server and a Chrome browser extension that even I was surprised actually worked (despite Henry's attempts to break it just before we were ready to show it to other people.)

We all finished with pizza, a demo, and then beer. Other demos included:

• an in-browser horizontal-scrolling game with cats
• work on making the first volume OED searchable through OCR
• a prettifying Django views inspector 
• and an attempt to script kinetic typography

In short, a pretty varied bunch of really neat one-day efforts from everyone. And we also got to meet other like-minded local geeks and find out what other people were up to in the city and its environs. This coincides completely with the whole reason I run the OGNs: geeks are paradoxically both shy and social animals; so encourage them to meet up with each other once in a while, overcome that initial barrier of shyness, and magic happens.

The all-important social aspect aside, it's astonishing what magic people did come up with, given only a day to work on it. Incuna were a really welcoming bunch and made everyone feel at home, and gave us just the right amount of herding: thanks to their foresight, most of the projects we worked on are now available via the Refresh Oxford github account, if you're interested in looking at some of our code. It ain't pretty; but if Rome wasn't built in a day, then these projects were. In your face, Rome.

Last week, Oxford Geek Nights received some brilliant news: OGN19 was going to be sponsored by both the Nokia Ovi Store and Data.gov.uk, HM Government. Organization was well under way, so I popped out for a couple of days to see my family (and to go to my granddad's 90th birthday celebrations. Ninety.)

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, top tech magazine Wired had recommended OGN19 on their diary for next week. This perfect storm has happened before, when .NET magazine mentioned OGN4. As I recall, that was one of our best-attended geek nights, despite being in November. I managed to actually be around for that earlier mention, but this one has taken me a bit by surprise.

All in all, OGN19 is shaping up to be a really great event already: as already mentioned we've got some smashing keynote talks planned from Leila Johnston, David Caruana and Florian Müller. Since then we've also booked four cracking microslots, on open-source mobile portals, "internet plumbing", controlling an industrial robot with Twitter, and the battle of J2EE vs Python for web development. And then the funding news arrived. Now that the Nokia Ovi Store are funding a drink per geek, we're almost certain to have a great evening.

So maybe it's no wonder that someone submitted OGN19 to the Wired UK diary. But it was a pleasant surprise nonetheless. I just hope the rather discerning Oxford geeks have all put it in their own diaries too: Wednesday 1 December. Otherwise it'll just be me and Wired UK, drinking a hundred and forty pints. Merry Christmas!

The next Oxford Geek Night is on Wednesday 21 July, in less than two weeks' time. I for one am really looking forward to it.

We managed out of sheer luck and cheek to bagsy a fantastic speaker for OGN18, the ever-Interesting Russell Davies. Russell was the organizer of the 2007 and 2008 Interesting conferences, and is involved in lots of fantastic projects, including Speechification and Newspaper Club. He's also a writer for Wired, a speaker at many conferences including Lift 2010, and what one might frivolously call a futorologist or pundit. He's going to talk about his experiences turning internets into print, and what he's learned from doing it as part of projects like the Newspaper Club.

Along with our keynote speaker we've got half a dozen of the absolute best of local microslot volunteers. There's talks on topics as far ranging as "designing backwards", linked data, graphing 19th-century social networks, genomics, CSS and Rotacoo's Spotify #fridaymix tape. A few new faces and a few established (and deservedly so) local faces. As always we'll be putting video up on the site afterwards, so there'll be a permanent record of our high-quality speakers.

Finally, we hope to have space for the Pitches - our sixty-second open mic slots that anyone can volunteer for, even on the night - and a book raffle. All told it should be a great excuse to saunter over to the Jericho Tavern in the July sun / sudden downpour (delete as applicable.) Hope to see all the other Oxford geeks there.

After a slightly longer break between Oxford Geek Nights to make room for Christmas and the rest, I'm pleased to announce the sixteenth Oxford Geek Night will be on Wednesday 17 February, 2010. That's next year! Well, in just under two months' time.

Keynote speakers are confirmed: OGN16 sees the return of microslotter Andrew Katz, lawyer at Moorcrofts Corporate Law and open-source specialist; he'll be joined by Chris Thorpe, founder of Jaggeree. We hope to have more details about the talks soon.

We've already got some microslots lined up for OGN16, but if you're interested in doing a microslot then submit your suggestion here. Microslots are five minutes long and the OGN crowd is very welcoming to anyone who can stand up and talk for that long!

Right. Now that's all finalized, I'm off to have a celebratory sherry and listen to some Christmas songs.

It might be a bank holiday for you, but I'm currently putting the final touches to Oxford Geek Night 12, which is this Wednesday. I need to make sure all the speakers have confirmed (most definitely have); get their draft talks onto a pendrive; print out posters and plan timetables; and retrieve and test all our tech and cables; so that the second projector will work fine, and we've got a laptop for everyone to run their talks on: that sort of thing.

Most importantly, from your point of view, I need to sort out equipment for our improved PA setup (following your feedback, very gratefully received, on earlier OGNs). I also need to find and pack the dozen great books donated by Apress, to be given out to randomly selected attendees in our book raffle. We're also looking into drinks sponsorship, and we might have more news on that by Wednesday. And we also still need volunteers for the Pitch, our sixty-second open-mic slots where you can say absolutely anything you want, as long as it's not obscene or about COBOL.... Well, it depends on how obscene.

Come to OGN12, then. There'll be talks and chat and ideas and fun and geeks and nerds and technology and webs and everything you expect from a Geek Night. And if the worst comes to the worst, then you at least have around a one-in-ten chance of leaving with a book worth up to thirty-five pounds, which is not to be sniffed at.