social

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.)

There's now a slightly belated report of Oxford Geek Night #10, on the Google Open Source Blog. Gosh, it sounds like it was jolly good. It's almost making me look forward to organizing the next one...!

The tenth Oxford Geek Night was our most popular yet. We stopped counting at 150 drinks vouchers, and people still kept coming. I think this is the first OGN where at one point it was actually impossible to get from the stage to the bar and back, which might have improved the quality of the talks, but I couldn't possibly comment.

Actually, the speakers were fantastic, and the local-volunteer microslots probably the strongest set I've ever heard. It would be impolitic to single anyone out, not to mention a fool's errand because I'd gladly listen to any one of them speak again. We'll be putting videos up on the OGN website in the next few days, so if you want to find out who was best then you can judge for yourself.

Thanks everyone as always: Torchbox, Google and Pearson Education for sponsoring; Nick and Neal for helping out with the tech on the night; and to all of Oxford's incredibly enthusiastic geeks, for making the floorboards creak at the Jericho Tavern.

With any luck I'll be talking to Danny and Lou on BBC Oxford tomorrow at half noon, about the phenomenon that is Oxford Geek Nights. It's all rather good timing in one sense, given that OGN10 is happening tomorrow evening, but terrible timing in another sense, given that I have to get ready for OGN10 happening tomorrow evening.

All of this is subject to change, of course. Producer Mark Watson (not that Mark Watson) has been very obliging in me messing him around with times and locations, agreeing to the phone interview and other shenanigans, but live radio being what it is, and Mark's well of patience being surely only as deep and as full as the next man's....

Still, I'm looking forward to it. When I'm not panicking that they'll ask me something incriminating. All right, I confess! I had two of the free drinks at OGN8!

It's the tenth Oxford Geek Night in two weeks! Who would have thought nearly two years ago that Natalie's brainchild would ever make it to the grand old age of ten? And the OGNs are striding purposefully towards their teens with two great keynote speakers.

First up will be Elliot Jay Stocks, designer and writer for .net. He'll be taking a look at the state of typography on the web, exploring the issues surrounding font embedding, the arguments about progressive enhancement, and the problematic question of text replacement, and asking: far have we (or not) come in recent years and where on earth is web typography heading?

We also have Sylwia Presley of 1000heads discussing the notion of Twitter ethics: how individuals and organizations can and should appreciate the mores and morals of social media. She'll be focussing on Twitter as one of the more popular social-media venues, but it will be interesting generally to see how outsiders can best chart and explore these online social landscapes.

Along with that, we've got a stack of great microslots on all manner of subjects, including a recognized British Standard for accessibility, scaling web applications, dynamic-demand power technologies, and website design which utilizes transparencies. And, of course, our usual sponsorship from Torchbox and Google make it a free event (along with the seemingly indestructible Moo cards).

Hope to see you all there: put Wednesday 21 January in your diaries!

A summary of OGN9, originally on the Google Open Source Blog:

On Wednesday 22 October, over a hundred geeks attended the ninth Oxford Geek Night, upstairs at the Jericho Tavern. After the musical theme of the previous OGN, this one had a distinct flavour of online publishing.

Jeremy Ruston of BT Osmosoft demonstrated TiddlyWiki (an open-source wiki application that works offline) and revealed its offshoot Project Cecily, a prototype ZUI (Zooming User Interface). Adrian Hon of Six to Start then explained the ideas and tech behind We Tell Stories, a complex Django-based site of interactive fiction, built for publishers Penguin UK.

Continuing the Django-ish theme, Rami Chowdhury discussed WSGI—the server/application web standard—in one of the more technical microslot talks (five minutes each, from local volunteers). In another, David Sheldon took us through the steps required to hack a CurrentCost electricity meter, to get at the regular XML packets it emits from a serial port.

In the microslot sessions we also covered moving your business mail to Google Mail, protection—or otherwise—against socially engineered virus vectors, and how to use an interlocking stack of Python, Ruby on Rails and Java to crawl the web for comparisons of mobile-phone tariffs. We also had a short talk from the Oxfordshire branch of the British Computing Society about their forthcoming IT-industry events.

As usual, the evening was rounded off by a book raffle, this time courtesy of Pearson Education. Many of the night’s talks—especially the keynotes and the microslot on antivirus protection—had generated heated debate among the geeks in the room, and this carried on for some time after proceedings had officially finished.

The Oxford Geek Nights are free events, thanks to Torchbox and the Google open-source team. But even the generosity of our sponsors couldn’t prevent the upstairs bar staff from tapping their watches, as we all headed downstairs into the main room of the pub to continue arguing.

The planning for OGN9 is almost complete. The keynotes are sorted, the book raffle books have arrived---but we now have a vacancy in our volunteer microslots. Help.

As far as the keynotes are concerned, Jeremy Ruston of BT Osmosoft will be talking about the magic self-replicating offline/online publishing system TiddlyWiki, an open-source Javascript project. Adrian Hon of Six to Start will then be discussing Penguin's recent online story/mashup experiment, We Tell Stories. Together they constitue a sort of online-publishing-themed OGN, but after the exhaustion that followed the musically themed OGN8 I'm not going to push it....

But, yeah, we're a microslotter down. Interested in performing to your peers? Want to share ideas with an audience, but scared they might intimidate you? Well, the OGN crowd is as amiable as they get, with a cheery and (to some extent) indulgent atmosphere. Submit a proposal for a microslot talk and we'll stick you on the bill!

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.

Django continues to gather momentum towards its imminent 1.0 release. The 1.0 beta 1 is out; the developer documentation has been refactored; it already places nicely with Python's powerful debugging and logging tools; indeed, all is proceeding according to the roadmap, more or less. James Turnbull will be speaking about Django 1.0 at the eighth Oxford Geek Night this Wednesday, and it looks like he's got plenty of triumphs to bulletpoint for us.

An Oxford Django sprint had been mooted for this weekend. I didn't hear much more about it, but to be honest I had the great opportunity to actually have my own sprint---against 1.0b1---in work this week, working on a fast-turnaround project. I definitely felt performance improvements, especially when running unit tests. It was also lovely to work on my first internationalized/localized site and to find that it was just a question of dropping in certain bits of middleware to make it work across six languages. We didn't have any translations in place, but I clicked on "Polszczyzna" expecting bugger-all to happen and then suddenly realised that the English-language link read "Anglieski." It's characteristic of Python's (and Django's) refreshingly plastic and just-works behaviour. Magic.

We did encounter one bug, involving model inheritance. I struggled for a while with registering with the project trac to report it. It's my first mediocre experience with Django: I waited a day or so for the arrival of an account-confirmation email, but eventually gave up without adding what would have admittedly been a me-too to an existing bug report. But then, email finally in my inbox, I chased it up just now, to find that it's been fixed. Today.

Probably much like Django itself, the project's interface with the user/consumer requires some past experience with its foibles, but the actual endeavour itself is fast, well-factored and puts most closed-source equivalents to shame.

Without trying particularly hard, I seem to have turned OGN8 into Online Music OGN. All right, I did book Ben Walker, geek troubadour to do a turn prior to the speakers. But it was by chance that we've got two music-tech industry gurus in to present our keynote talks.

Rhodri Marsden, who will cringe when I call him a guru, writes the Cyberclinic for the Independent, plays keyboards in Scritti Politti, and has long and varied experience with the music industry: he'll be discussing how recorded media alone will no longer support an up-and-coming band. And Ian Hogarth, who is CEO and co-founder of Songkick, will explain how recordings can channel users into , where arguably the real money is these days.

If you want to be successful in the modern music industry, and you've read Steve Albini's essay on the subject, then you could do worse than sticking round for the post-keynote questions and answers slot, where we'll invite these gurus---sorry again, Rhodri---to take questions from the floor. No asking either of them to buy your album, though.

After the Q&A session, we'll move into more traditional OGN variety fare, with talks about online payment, the open web, cloud computing and the long-awaited release of Django 1.0. If I can get it together, we should also have a book raffle. And thanks to Torchbox and Google for their sponsorship, entrance is still FREE. How can you bear to stay at home?