social

Tomorrow is Oxford Geek Night 31 and you should be there. As I recently mentioned on the oxford-geek-nights mailing list (and why aren't you on that mailing list? and why aren't you following the @oxfordgeeks Twitter account?) we've had a recent speaker switcheroo; but that's good, because we've managed to fit in another microslot, and a very timely one at that, about an upcoming academic conference that's looking for paper submissions.

I've given up these days on repeatedly and enthusiastically exhorting my website visitors to come along to Oxford Geek Nights: that's what the mailing list is for. After all, most people who read these blogposts are aware that, even though I have to go through the process of organizing them (always a bit like watching laws or sausages being made) I still think they're objectively well worth attending: arguably the best tech night out you can have in the county, if not in the counties beyond. And all that comes down to having such brilliant speakers: the invited keynotes, you expect to be quality; but definitely the local volunteer microslot talks are a heck of a cut above a lot of other events.

So, come along tomorrow, if you like; you'd be a fool not to, but that's your own business.

Yesterday was a great OxDUG meeting as usual. Mike Harris took us on a tour round the Drupal Commerce suite of modules, and even though I've had some slight experience of it when helping out with donations work on the CLIC Sargent build that Johan led, I still found it really useful to see an alternative (and arguably more shop-like and fully featured) installation of it. I followed this with a quick presentation of drush site-upgrade, including a sort-of live demo: I merely had the upgrade command running in the background while I talked about my recent site upgrade exploits.

But the punchiest presentation was organizer Finn from Agile Collective giving a quick runthrough the internationalization additions they've made to the build of the REScoop website. Again, we've used Drupal's core i18n options (largely in D6), but really only in a two-language context; regardless, it was inspiring to see these being augmented, with the localization client, menu translations and entity translation. i18n and l10n can often be pain points in a site build, so it's really nice to find out ways of making them less problematic in future.

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.

When I'm planning an Oxford Geek Night, there's often a pressure to get drinks sponsorship: from the venue, from attendees and even from speakers. The first serious long-term drinks sponsors ended up so popular, that many events after they'd stopped sponsoring us, people were still asking me if they were going to provide a bar tab at the next one.

But a regular OGN attendee recently pulled me up on a brief burst of "BEER!" rhetoric by suggesting that, especially for someone teetotal, stressing free alcohol all the time could be alienating. He wasn't asking for a dry venue; he was just pointing out that, if you don't drink alcohol, then an event which stresses free drink (essentially alcoholic, given the venue is a pub, and the tab is at the upstairs bar where they don't do e.g. coffee) might just seem weird, and not something that was meant for you to attend.

There's a long, ranty but in many ways quite reasonable article about how free alcohol is bending the industry's social events out of shape. Certainly when you assemble all of the free-beer boasting in one place, it starts to look like web event marketing is run by someone with a serious problem.

It's fair to say in response, of course, that the culture of drinking in the UK is more accepted and indulged in to larger amounts, than in the USA; Europeans simply do drink more. And that part of the psychological damage of heavy drinking arises from social ostracization, in the same way as the tendency to drink in the first place comes from social acceptance. Moreover, while one should always listen to minority groups, because their more vocal members help to show when something more important is going wrong, then at the same time I've had more comments that any sponsorship is corporatizing the event, than I've had comments that we're stressing the drinking angle too much. Is that - thin end of the wedge aside - a reason to turn down all sponsorship?

I certainly don't want the image of OGNs to go from "Friend of Oxford Geeks" to "Fun Bobby". But my personal feeling - admittedly, as someone who does drink alcohol, at least occasionally - is that, as long as we stress the "sponsorship" in "drinks sponsorship", and avoid simply bellowing "BEER," then we at least tone down the alcoholic nature of it.

But I wonder what other people think. Leave a comment, or contact me on Twitter, if you've an opinion.

(By the way: we haven't had such sponsorship in ages, which arguably makes my worries moot. And do you know what? Every OGN is a dry OGN for me: having to ferry equipment around means I can never conscience having an alcoholic drink. It's not a lifestyle choice, though, which I imagine makes a difference.)

Once again, I presented and helped organize a great Oxford Geek Night last Wednesday. The keynote talks were amazing, and both about trains. Trains, APIs and laser scanning: how good is that?

I did a microslot talk, as well as trying to hold the night together. It was on how you can turn Kindles into literacy, for those who might get a Kindle this Christmas and are feeling charitably inclined on St Stephen's Day. You can download slides and listen to the audio already, which is great.

If I don't blog beforehand - and it's unlikely that I will, let's be honest - have a great Christmas, won't you?

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...?

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.

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?