oxford

May is suddenly a busy month for geek socialising, with at least three events in my calendar. The monthly Oxford Drupal Users Group (OxDUG) meetup is this Wednesday: I very sneakily volunteered Garrett Coakley to talk about the recent soft launch of the new WDC website. I can't wait to hear about that; also, if time permits then I'm happy to share my recent drush sup exploits with the group.

The Wednesday after (May 8) is Oxford Geek Night #31. Digital artist Seb Lee-Delisle and frontend expert Jake Smith have very kindly agreed to come and speak about their respective projects; they're accompanied as usual by a host of local volunteer "microslot" talks on all manner of subjects. As usual, there'll be time in between the talks to socialise, drink and chat upstairs in the Jericho. And also as usual, I'm organizing it, so I'll definitely be there!

Finally, May 18 sees the return this year of OpenTech, the practically free-to-attend London-based conference on novel approaches to enabling technology, user experience and transparency in democracy. The Government Digital Service and Raspberry Pi project are out in force in this year's schedule, and hearing about those alone is worth the £5 (five pounds!) entry fee. Anyway, when I've gone along in previous years, I've found that pretty much every project discussed has been worth hearing about, with a fascinating depth of social importance and relevance coupled with complex and interesting technologies. And I'm not just saying that because apparently they quoted me on their blog.

Lots on this month, then, but hopefully I'll be able to fit it all in: you should try to as well! And if you do spot me at any of them, please do come and say hi; or tweet me first if you'd rather.

Oxford Geek Night 26 happens in ten days' time. As tends to be the case these days, when I'm not panicking, I'm really looking forward to it.

We've got two fascinating keynotes as always. Simon Whitaker popped over to Reading recently to storm the Geek Nights there, and is back in Oxfordshire to discuss the lessons he learned, when he tried teaching coding to schoolchildren. Also, documentary maker and writer Michael Story will be explaining how the media can lie to us, and why they do it.

We've also got all the other usual stuff: four exciting microslots from fellow Oxford(shire) geeks; and a nearly full roster for our sixty-second, fast-paced open-mic slots in The Pitch. And there's free entry thanks to regular sponsors Torchbox, and a free drink per geek (while stocks last) thanks to OGN26 sponsors Historic Futures.

Stick a week on Thursday in your diary, then. And for more information about OGN26, and regular but infrequent updates afterwards, you should subscribe to the newsgroup or follow @oxfordgeeks on Twitter.

(Sorry for only going on about OGNs these days. With two site launches in the past two months, I've not had a chance since the last one to blog about anything much here: although I'm writing a few things elsewhere that might get a big reveal later!)

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.

Wednesday 15 June is but six days away now, so if you're in Oxford you should make sure you have Oxford Geek Night 22 in your diary for that evening. Not only are my employers Torchbox sponsoring as always to make sure it's free entry, but Historic Futures are putting some money behind the bar, enough for a free drink for every geek. Doors open at the Jericho Tavern from 7.30pm, so get there early to make sure you nab a pint or similar before the thirsty geeks work their way through it all.

Even as I speak, our two keynoters are girding their loins and exercising their generic-brand presentational software for the benefit of Oxford's finest geeks. Louise Crow will mark the very welcome return of mySociety to the Jericho's stage by talking about their forthcoming project Fix My Transport. Next up will be Tyler Tate, UX lead and designer, who wants us to look at how people learn, and apply that knowledge to improving usability for everyone.

We've also got four excellent microslots to look forwards to, volunteered by four plucky Oxford(shire) geeks. They're a mixed bag of subjects as always, and we'll also have the even more mixed bag of The Pitch, our sixty-second open-mic slots. Anyone can use these to announce or advertise whatever they want for a minute. There are also still a few spare Pitch slots left, so if you've got something you want to get off your chest, email ogn@torchbox.com to reserve one.

Right. Only six days to go and I haven't even printed posters yet. Or done any of a dozen other things I need to get done before then. What am I even doing, still writing this stuff? I've got work to do. Now clear off and I'll see you on Wednesday at OGN22.

In two weeks' time it's Oxford Geek Night #21. Twenty-one, eh? Sooner or later we'll have to stop numbering them. We'll just have to refer in retrospect to "OGN: the classics collection", or "OGN: the difficult progressive-tech years".

You should be at OGN21. You should be at every OGN, but you should definitely be at OGN21. We've got two design-themed keynotes: Clearleft's Paul Lloyd talking about "styleguides for the web"; and Thoughtworks' Eewei Chen and Nicholas Bailey trying their hand at live rapid prototyping. There's also four volunteer "microslots", covering a typically usual broad selection of topics and technologies. 

Not only that, though, but OGN21, like every other, is presented by Torchbox: so entry is free! And not only that, but Historic Futures have sponsored a free drink for every geek, while stocks last. So free entry, and a free drink. How can you not be at the Jericho Tavern on April 13? You won't get a better offer than that anywhere else on a Wednesday evening in Oxfordshire!

(Disclaimer: better offers in Oxfordshire might well be available on the night, but geekier? I doubt it.)

It's already been over two months since the last Oxford Geek Night. Because everyone was away for holidays and then for the conference season, and if you also add a dash of minor illness into the mixture, we've been holding off organising the next OGN until we were ready to get back into the swing of it.

Now, the wait is over. Oxford Geek Nights #19 will be on Wednesday, 1 December 2010. Put it in your diaries now! (We're also planning OGN20 for some time in late January or early February 2011: exact date to be confirmed soon.)

Because we've had chance to catch our breath, two major things have happened. The first is that we've already got two brilliant keynote talks confirmed for OGN19. Leila Johnston, self-styled punk broadcaster, co-presenter of the Shift Run Stop podcast and published author, will be talking about Making things fast. We also have David Caruana and Florian Müller from Alfresco to talk about the OASIS standard on making content management systems interoperable. That means an international standard on how CMS-authored sites can talk to each other.

The second major change to Oxford Geek Nights is that Wes West and Jonny Grum are joining me as co-planners and helping to share the burden. That should mean that OGN tech will be more reliable and OGN planning more robust, and each night itself should hang together that little bit more, because we can all pitch in where necessary. Thanks to Wes and Jonny for joining the existing team of Nick Burch (wifi), Neal Todd (video) and me.

Incidentally, as always: we need microslot volunteers! Do you think you could speak to a roomful of geeks for five minutes on some topic close to your heart? If so, submit your microslot proposal at http://bit.ly/ogn-microslot . See? We've even got a new dedicated microslot URL. We're so technically advanced these days that we're practically robots from the future.

Incidentally, we'd like to thank everyone who submitted feedback recently: we got an unprecedented response, with dozens and dozens of intelligent responses. Just what you'd expect from Oxford's smart, engaged geek crowd. But because of time pressures we've not yet been able to plough through all of that data; so we've decided to prioritize planning OGN19, but hope to incorporate some of your thoughts into the OGNs soon.

OGN19, then. December 1. Leave your chocolate advent calendars at home and come along to the Jericho Tavern.

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.

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.

Oxford Geek Night 17 is happening, and it's happening on Wednesday. That's this Wednesday. So this week I've been running round the office like a headless chicken, and Lawrence has been helping to pick up the pieces. We've got posters printed off, and a Pitch sheet drawn up as well. That's what we record the entries for The Pitch, our sixty-second open mic slots. We've still got a few spaces on that so you could tweet me on @jpstacey if you're interested.

I'm really looking forward to our keynote talks on open-source licensing and user testing from Andrew Katz and Rebecca Gill, but we'll also have a short announcement to make about the speaker for OGN18, scheduled for three months' time on July 21st. We've got a great keynoter lined up for then but my lips are sealed until this Wednesday (note: lips not actually sealed.)

Along with Lawrence, Nick and Neal will be helping on the night of OGN17 with the tech and video, as usual. Together we'll be like the four headless chickens of the apocalypse, so it promises to be quite a night.

There's been a change in the speakers for Oxford Geek Night 16 on Wednesday 17 February. We're really happy that Chris Thorpe will still be giving his keynote talk, about how social media is all about the social and not about the media. Alongside Chris' talk will be a keynote from Oxford's very own Garrett Coakley, who will be talking about how to run a successful online community.

Garrett's well placed to give this talk, having been an administrator of evolt.org and instrumental in the now very successful Oxford Flickr group, which has recently exhibited in central Oxford. He's also fresh from discussing these very issues at the Leeds GeekUp in 20/20 form, so it should be pretty exciting. If not, then I know where he lives.

Brillskills. OGN16 is shaping up to be pretty darn fine, though I do say so myself. Be there, or don't, fool.