oxfordgeeknight

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!)

The 25th Oxford Geek Night is happening on Wednesday 29 February in the upstairs room at the (hopefully) newly refurbished Jericho Tavern. Despite a Christmas lull all round, we've finally got two ace keynotes organized:

• How to make rowing sexy: a web video case study, by Tom Wilkinson, Online Media Producer at the University of Oxford
• Getting geeks singing with Javascript, by Matthew Westcott, Senior Developer at Torchbox

They both broadly fit under the theme of "online video," so if you're at all interested in stretching your browser's capabilities in that area, or just want to see experts getting down with some interesting visual and internet technologies, you should definitely come along to OGN25.

If you want any more reasons to turn up, then: entrance is free (thanks to my employers and long-running sponsors Torchbox); and there's a free drink for every geek (thanks to OGN25 sponsors Historic Futures). We also hope to have a mystery raffle later on in the evening, if we can swing it; for more information about OGN25, and regular but infrequent updates afterwards, you should subscribe to the newsgroup or follow @oxfordgeeks on Twitter.

Meanwhile, I should start getting things organized. Now, where did I leave that microphone...?

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.)

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.

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.

OGN15 is in a bit over a week's time, on Wednesday 25 November. It promises to be a great evening as usual, with varied keynote and microslot talks and the usual Oxford(shire) geek chat and networking.

Interestingly, we've ended up with common threads through the two quite different keynote talks. Fintan Galvin, who's talking about the semantic web and its effect on marketing strategies on the web we're more at home with, will be explaining how the former will change the way we think about such priorities as SEO with regard to the latter; along the way he'll be mentioning Drupal, which is an ideal solution to a whole host of web content problems. Meanwhile, Jeni Tennison will talk about a new initiative in open UK government, data.gov.uk, which is currently in closed beta and uses a complex stack of technologies including... Drupal and RDF! RDF takes centre stage in the forthcoming Drupal 7 release, so more by luck than judgment our common topic is a pretty hot one.

Of course there's microslots and the Pitch too---contact me if you want to volunteer for the sixty-second open-mic Pitch, as we've still got some spare slots---and we've got sponsorship to make sure the whole evening is not just free as in beer, but free as in... other beverages that are available. The Guardian Open Platform are sponsoring drinks again, and Apress have promised us some books for the book raffle. Torchbox is as usual very kindly sponsoring my time, venue costs and infrastructure for the night. Thanks to all our sponsors for their generosity.

Almost everything is in place, which means I might get away with a few days off before the night, but I promise to turn up on the 25th fit and rested. Assuming I'm not still stranded in Birmingham New Street. But then how likely is that, really?