Barcamp. London. Seven.

This past weekend saw a first for IBM South Bank as it played host to Barcamp London 7, the seventh time a the Barcamp unconference had been held in London (I know this, because I asked @thehodge why it was called Barcamp London 7, and he said it was because it was the seventh one… cunning!). South Bank is not often used for events at the weekend, and certainly not for events of 200 excited techies, creative types and those wanting to run their own talks on subjects as diverse as Failure, the TV series Lost, CSS design, niche bands you should be listening to, a photography project involving a rubber duck, life drawing, and Enterprise Software Patterns.

The IBM side of the event organisation was largely the effort of Zoe Slattery, although a host of us volunteered to help support the external organisers, and several IBM folks attended. Attendance at a Barcamp is free and the event is supported and funded by sponsors. It was great to mingle and chat with people I’d met at similar events, friends, and others I was connecting with for the first time.

The way that a Barcamp is organised is that there is no set agenda – attendees turn up and volunteer to speak for 20 minutes on a topic of their choice (and these topics can be very diverse). We used something like 12 or 13 rooms and I believe we had nearly 200 available session slots spanning the 2 day period from 10am on Saturday through until 5pm on the Sunday. By the end of Saturday almost the entire session “grid” was filled. It is a Barcamp tradition that first timers are expected to give at least one session… in the end, I gave two.

There’s an event on Slideshare where the decks for those that used slides are being collected, but there was a huge range of different topics and styles (including my own favourite, Ben Fletcher’s Fingerspelling lesson, which had us learning the alphabet in British Sign Language at increasingly higher speeds!)

The overnight stay went well – there were a few party games and many, many discussions on Saturday evening. A good time had by all, judging from the tweets and photos.

The staff at South Bank were exceptional, working the weekend and remaining in great spirits, helped by the sunny dispositions of the Barcamp attendees. All in all it was a great success, and I hope that we’ll be able to get involved in more of these kinds of events!

Zoe and Ben also have some nice write-ups, and the Flickr group of photos is filling out nicely. Thanks to Adewale Oshineye for this cool photo of me!

SOMESSO summary

The nice folks from AudioBoo caught me for a quick interview after my presentation yesterday and you can hear the short summary of what I talked about on their site, or by playing the embedded audio here.

I was also interviewed on camera by Daniel and Eduardo Vidal (hope you feel better soon, Eduardo!)… and my whole presentation was recorded as well, so those should appear over the next couple of weeks.

Oddly I seemed to spend a lot of time discussing Poken after the talk! I guess my use of Poken as a prop at the start of the presentation raised a lot of interest. My mention of Home Camp and sustainability also generated some additional conversations. I also detected a lot of interest as to how IBM had achieved the cultural changes required to adapt to a social web (answer: I’d argue that openness has been in our corporate DNA for some time now), and also in how we put together our Social Computing Guidelines. Again, I would draw attention to one paragraph in the guidelines which I think sums up the approach and background:

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet—at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

I thought the SOMESSO London event was just superb. A series of short (15-20 minute) presentations from some smart people who I was quite frankly honoured to be on the same bill as; and I really didn’t think that there was anything superfluous, it was just great content and information. The Emirates Stadium was a great venue, too… once I’d found my way into the conference centre in the morning, avoiding the queue of contestants lining up for X-Factor auditions! If my camera battery had lasted I would have posted a lot more to Flickr, but I’m afraid there are only a few shots up there.

Thanks to Arjen Strijker, Mary Harrington, Susan Kish and others for putting the day together. On the basis of yesterday’s conference, I highly recommend future events in the series, and would also encourage you to get involved in the SOMESSO community if you are at all interested in social media in the enterprise. I’m really looking forward to following up all of the new connections I made yesterday.

Finally, some links to some of the books I referenced in my talk or during the backchannel conversation:

• The Future of Management
• Grown Up Digital
• Me The Media
• The Whuffie Factor

IMPACT – work, play, product announcements

I’m not going to run down all of the announcements that came out during the first day of IMPACT yesterday – you can take a look at Sandy Carter’s video summary for some of the key ones, like Smart Work, and the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance (it’s very purple – and I want one!). There is a slew of cool new stuff being announced and coming out over the coming year.

Sitting in the keynote yesterday morning I was feeling as though several of the worlds that I live in / things I’m interested in were really coming together. It’s an exciting time. For example, we had:

• connections between Service Oriented Architecture and IBM’s Smarter Planet vision;
• more talk about green IT, which connects with my interest in energy monitoring and Home Camp;
• 3D visualisations, virtual worlds and “serious games” with the INNOV8 Business Process Management simulator;
• throughout the conference, social media at the fore, with YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and blogs all being used to connect and collaborate.

As an “SOA event” it’s easy for me to see it as all to do with IBM’s WebSphere brand of software alone, since that’s what I’ve work been working on for almost a decade now. The truth is that IMPACT spans everything that IBM does, particularly in software. We are talking collaboration and social software (Lotus); monitoring and intelligent management (Tivoli); modelling and productive development (Rational); and sophisticated data analytics (Information Management). It’s a real showcase for the broad reach and range of IBM’s software portfolio.

Highlight of the day for me was absolutely nothing to do with IBM software – it was the opportunity to hear Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester speak on the Future of the Social Web. Jeremiah clearly understands this stuff in all the many facets that have been expressed by other people I follow, like Don Tapscott – I did recommend his book already, right…? I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely

Oh, and the play part? Billy Crystal was the compere for the morning session and kept us amused despite the early start – and there were plenty of opportunities to catch up with friends and Twitter connections at the networking sessions. I call that a win. Oh, and wait a second, I almost forgot – we had a tweetup yesterday, with a couple more scheduled later in the week. Looking forward to them.

I’ll try to post another IMPACT-related update later in the week. Photos are on Flickr, and there is a very active ongoing discussion in the #ibmimpact hashtag on Twitter.

SOMESSO trailer

I’m impressed with the trailer for the London SOMESSO conference that I’m speaking at next month:

If you missed today’s discounted tickets, I have a discount code for you – XYSO09CANDYP – sign up online via http://www.somesso.com and insert the code where it says “Click here to enter a promotional code”. Oh, and if you’re a blogger, you might even be able to get a free ticket.

Home Camp mark 2

The second Home Camp event takes place in London tomorrow. I won’t repeat all of the details here, as they are covered over on the Home Camp blog.

We have some wonderful sponsors – CurrentCost, Greenmonk, Onzo, Pachube, and ReactionGrid, with support from theattick who are going to be streaming the event for us as well.

There are some nice pre-event writeups on the Greenmonk and Redmonk blogs.

It’s a shame that due to unforeseen circumstances I’m no longer able to attend, but I’m looking forward to following remotely if I can, and otherwise catching all the content tagged ‘homecamp’ on Flickr, blogs, and Twitter.

The event is open to anyone, so if you are interested in home hacking automation and energy efficiency, you will definitely want to get involved.

Next speaking engagement – SOMESSO London

Thanks to Luis Suarez who made some key introductions, I’ve been asked to speak at the SOMESSO social media conference in London on May 15th. I’m in some lofty company with guys I hugely respect like Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield and Lee Bryant also on the bill (incidentally, Lee and I both spoke at the Corporate Blogging Summit in London in 2007 as well). Should be a good event.

Thoughts on Thames Valley Social Media Cafe

I’ve long been interested by the Twitterings and blog posts about the Social Media Cafe / Tuttle in London, but since I’m so rarely in London these days I haven’t yet had the opportunity to get along to one of these gatherings. When I read that Neville Hobson, Drew Benvie and Benjamin Ellis were proposing to have a similar gathering for the Thames Valley region in Reading, I was was one of the first to put my name on the wiki.

The event was held at Workhouse Coffee in Reading, which as it turns out it pleasantly close to Reading West station, so I caught a train up on Friday morning and wandered along. Despite the fact that I took both a camera and a camcorder, I entirely failed to take any footage, so I’ll have to refer readers to Drew and Neville’s photos from the event. Workhouse Coffee is a wonderful place – the owner has a great deal of knowledge and the beans are freshly ground in perfect measure to create just the cup you’ve asked for. I noticed on the blackboard that they have a MySpace page… and apparently they are also now on Twitter – read Drew’s blog entry for the details! If you want something strong, I recommend the Java, incidentally.

What about the content? Well I wanted to go to meet people, and I had no preconceptions as to what the event entailed. As it turned out, Steve Lamb (@ActionLamb) and Drew (@drewb) are folks that I’d met briefly in the past, and I’ve been following Neville (@jangles) for longer than I care to remember, or so it seems in the modern world where the Internet randomly compresses or extends time in my mind. Everyone else counted as a new acquaintance – it seemed as though we gathered an interesting mix of tech and business perspectives, PR and journalists.

I’m not going to recount every discussion, but just to give a flavour of the variety, there were about 15 of us and in a 90 minute period I had conversations with most people, taking in topics such as: Government 2.0; Agile development, large corporation software development practices, and componentisation; coffee (!); podcasting; Blue Fusion; using social media with a marketing focus; how best to combine social media tools for a seamless customer experience; why it’s still important not to have a Flash-only website; Online DNA; Grown Up Digital; Home Camp; how to use social bookmarking; the slow death of print media and how bloggers might save local journalism; rebranding; flexibility at work; and Twitter (phew!).

A whole bunch of new contacts and, I hope, some interesting new side projects have been generated as a result of the discussions. Based on the meetup I’m delighted to have met (as well as those I’ve already mentioned) @warrilowpr @adrianmoss @nickydavis @ravinar @mattbrady @johnmcg and @saqibs.

I hope to be a regular(-ish) attendee at these, but it’s going to be dependent on schedules. I highly recommend the mixture of people and opportunity to share new ideas – do come along in future if it sounds interesting. Thanks again to Neville, Drew, Benjamin, and our unsuspecting hosts at the coffee shop!

Other write-ups from Adrian, Catherine, Drew, John, Matt and Neville.

Blue Fusion, the 2009 edition

One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).

This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).

So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.

There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.

Things I learned

1. Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
2. If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
3. Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).

A now, some notes just for my team…

Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:

• my home power monitoring
• my Twittering weather station
• IBM Smarter Planet
• Andy Stanford-Clark’s automated house
• Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).

And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008 – kickoff

I made it to the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, following some interesting travel situations and timezone jumps… I’ll almost certainly blog about last week’s diving trip once I’ve had time to get back from the Expo and sort through the photos!

This is a good opportunity for me to meet up with some fellow IBMers who I’ve not yet met in person, although I’ve come to know them well through our internal and external social networks – social software FTW! – and of course it’s also a great chance to meet new folks and extend my network. It’s my first time in Berlin (positive impression so far) and I think my first time in Germany for about 10 years.

If you met me yesterday I was probably somewhat zonked by the travel – but I spent the afternoon in Leisa Reichelt’s usability workshop (very relevant to me given my new role at work) and the keynote sessions. The keynotes were interesting but it was fairly hard to do anything approaching livestreaming or liveblogging as the wireless network wasn’t playing ball… and my Eye-Fi card didn’t seem to want to connect through the conference wifi (ah! just got that working!) and I can’t VPN out to the corporate intranet either, so there’s something screwy going on. Good coverage on Adam’s blog.

More to come, I should think. Hopefully I’ll call in to give a report on Dogear Nation on Friday too. Photos from the event are going into my set on Flickr.

Oh, and as an aside, the new Brightkite app for the iPhone is lovely – should be really useful for conferences like this.

From the FT.com newsroom

This is not quite live from the FT.com newsroom – I’m writing this a day later, but I did upload some photos during the trip.

Yesterday I attended a “bloggers event” at the The Financial Times, arranged by Ben and Drew from Hotwire PR. My friend and (now former) colleague Roo Reynolds had been to the previous one of these, so I was curious to find out what the FT would have to say to a second group of bloggers. Others in attendance were Alan Patrick, Adam Tinworth, Joanna Geary, Patrick Smith and Dominique Jackson; the FT.com team included James Montgomery (editor), Stacy-Marie Ishmael (Alphaville), Kate Mackenzie (Interactive Web Editor), Tim Bradshaw (Digital Media Editor) and Tom Glover (Deputy Director of Communications).

It does seem as though we covered similar ground to the last set of visitors. I say that without wanting to be unkind to our hosts… in all honesty I’ve not been an FT reader, so it was obviously worthwhile learning about the basics of the FT.com business model; and clearly we hadn’t heard the information before, so it was all useful background. James Montgomery kicked things off by talking a bit about the model that the FT.com is driving – trying to find a balance between subscription and free content. After that, the discussion widened out to cover a variety of topics, from their expansion into video, the reader and commenter demographics, the FT Alphaville site, microblogging and other social media, and some of the future technology plans.

The business model itself is a little different. Rather than an all-or-nothing free vs. subscription approach, anyone can read 5 articles on the FT.com site without any need to sign up. This makes the site search engine and blog link-friendly, and enables casual viewers a degree of access. After that you have to register, and can read up to 30 articles per month; beyond that, you should be subscribing, as the likelihood is that you are more seriously interested in the content. James sees the key plays here as the content, brand, expertise and accuracy of The Financial Times, and also pointed out that this model produced a certain quality of audience too. It would appear to be working – I note that the previous bloggers who visited were given a number of c. 450,000 registrations since October, and yesterday the number quoted was in the region of 600,000, so clearly there is some growth happening.

I’d never visited a newsroom before, so it was interesting to observe the setup. It’s big, and the team is obviously also distributed around the world, which resonated with me given that my employer is also a global organisation with people needing to collaborate across timezones.

Back to the social media stuff. The underlying technology is WordPress, although they are currently using two separate platforms for the main site and for Alphaville. Right now that means that the core search indexes are separate, but this will change in the future.

We talked a little about the expansion into video content, with around 150 items now being generated per month “we don’t want the website to be just an online newspaper”. This has produced some new challenges editorially as new skills are needed. I noted that the video production team in the newsroom somewhat unsurprisingly appeared to be using Macs

The discussion and feedback aspects of the site were covered at some length. I’ve observed that many journalists tend to view blogs as a means to post, but not to converse (the BBC blogs being a frequent example where a journo will post an entry, but not respond to reader comments). The FT are keen to find ways to engage “the wisdom of smart crowds” but there are challenges in their market where readers often have the inside scoop on a story and are therefore unable to comment. It was interesting and pleasing to hear that the journalists are generally aware of the need to respond. It was a surprise that it is not necessary to register to comment on the main FT.com site (although Alphaville does require registration) and the community is generally self-policing, with only very lightweight moderation required.

I’ve been taking a particular interest in microblogging lately. It’s surely a sign of the times that the first thing that we bloggers did was to exchange Twitter IDs… Joanna proceeded to Twitter from the event far more quickly and in more detail than I managed (this is probably a comment on the iPhone too… I just couldn’t type as fast or accurately enough to keep up). A couple of interesting angles came out. Firstly, the FT.com lists a set of Twitter feeds on their website, and I’m not aware of other newspapers doing this – quite progressive, but at the same time somewhat dependent on the success / stability of Twitter itself. We also talked about whether people reply to the feeds or whether anyone monitors the interwebs for references to the FT – obviously this would be a major undertaking, and the view was that people tend to view media feeds on Twitter as a way to consume the news, rather than to communicate with the newspaper. I also wondered whether the team had found microblogging to be a useful way of communicating internally… given the privacy constraints that they might be expected to operate under… several of us opined that a solution like Yammer was “never going to work” for internal communications, and the FT team currently exchange a lot of email and use Skype rather than having an internal social software platform.

I had my iPhone with me but the lack of free wireless meant that I was mostly taking notes with pen and paper… (tenuous photo tie-in!). I’m curious as to the mobile strategy. On visiting the main FT.com site before going for the event yesterday, I couldn’t see a way of getting a view optimised for my iPhone, although I’m told that there is a mobile version. Alphaville does have some automatic optimisation for mobile, and I’m told that there is a (Java?) mobile application for some phones too… I guess as platforms like Android emerge, there may be more interest in developing this side of things (I note that Bloomberg makes an iPhone app available for free… but would the FT do the same?).  I guess the choice of video technology will become interesting here, too, since not all mobile devices can show Flash, WMV or whatever.

An interesting afternoon, and it was lovely to be invited. Delighted to meet the other bloggers, too. I’ll be following the evolution of FT.com to see where it all goes next.

Coverage from others:

• A day at the FT (Patrick Smith at The Wire): some well-captured quotes from the key FT folks in this piece.
• The Financial Times they are a’Changing (Alan Patrick at Broadstuff): good thoughts about the dynamics of the value chain they apply to media in this space.

Robots video

I previously blogged about our visit to a primary school in Maidenhead last week. The local paper took a video which can now be viewed online.

Mindstorms

A break from the norm today – a small group of IBMers went to an infant school in Berkshire to play around with robots!

I’ve written before about my enjoyment of working with schools and helping children to learn about technology. I do make an effort to get involved in these kind of opportunities when possible. I’m a regular helper at IBM’s annual Blue Fusion event in the Hursley lab, but this one was a little different. For one thing it was much smaller… just four of us. We were out on the school site, rather than having the children come to us. Finally, it was a significantly different age group to the ones I’m more used to dealing with – these youngsters were only 6 years old, and I’ve only ever worked with teenagers in the past.

The day was really successful. We were armed with several boxes of LEGO Mindstorms robot kits. We kicked off by talking about ASIMO and how robots work, the fact that they need bodies and brains and so on. After that the children worked in groups of 3 or 4 to build a basic wheeled robot base, making it as funky as possible with tubes and anything else they wanted to add, and then we did some simple programming. It was the first time I’d used the Mindstorms system and I have to say it’s absolutely superb – easy to use and with a lot of potential to do far more advanced stuff too.

A hectic day and challenging to keep children of this age group on track, but I was very excited to see the range of their imaginations and how they were able to work together. I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did – one child asked me “do you like working with computers?” and it made me realise that one of the things I do love about my job is the human side of it, as well as having the occasional opportunity to get out there and introduce technology to youngsters.