ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.
Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan
There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.
As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points.
(It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)
I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software.
WordCampUK has been a bit short on corridor time, but has made up for it with socials, and lunch-time meetings: today in particular when most of the 3rd sector people got together for a not-for-profits meetup. As promised, below are the details of everyone at that lunch, so that WordPress people working in the voluntary sector can find each other:
If you’re doing something with WordPress in the not-for-profit sector, please feel free to put your name and link into the comments. I’ve no idea if anything useful will come out of this, along the lines of Plone’s NGO group, or Drupal’s various specialist groups - I just offer this set of links up with a vague hope ;-)
Update
There’s now a mailing list for anyone helping the sector using WordPress - sign up and say hello, everyone welcome.
I’ll be giving a potted 45min version of the Social Media & the Accessible Web introductory course at the next Green Drinks meeting. 6pm, Thurs 8 July at The Loggerheads pub, Shrewsbury. Also featuring Judy Coleridge, Editor of Shrewsbury Green Guide.
Feel free to come along - Green Drinks is also a great networking event. Meet people from environmental businesses, campaigns and social enterprises from across the region.
Those of us volunteering to staff the MFS Stall had a great time - not just enjoying the vegan food and drink of the Fair, and catching up with old friends from Manchester’s numerous environmental groups in attendance, but from several hours of talking to the general public about software freedom.
While MFS membership is heavy in Unix admins and programmers, the group is about the philosophy of software freedom, not playing with technology - thus we all enjoyed engaging with the public on why freedom matters in software. Passers by ranged from committed Ubuntu users to those without a computer at home, yet nearly all were responsive to the principle of software built on values of community, education, and sharing knowledge.
Freedom in the 3rd Sector
Indeed, it continues to remain a puzzle why so many in the charity sector actively campaign against Free Software solutions, and promote the sector’s continued reliance on an unsustainable model of dependence on a few tax-subsidised, private companies.
These are issues I hope to tease out a little in my talk on Free Software in the UK Voluntary Sector, and why you should care, at MFS’s 20th April meeting. I’d welcome people with a wide range of views to come along and debate the issue afterwards.
To the UKUUG’s Large Scale System Administrators’ conference today where I was the rather strange choice of last minute speaker. Having spent 18 hours at the keyboard yesterday I wasn’t best prepared, but speaking on The Third Sector and Free Software shouldn’t have been too much of a challenge to me.
Indeed, despite the talk being more of a ramble at times, I think I managed to distill 4 key messages for the assembled Unix crowd:
There’s a real lack of IT knowledge in many VCS groups resulting in too many having no IT strategy. Please get involved with a local group at a governance level and help to make up this deficit.
Of all the resources lacking, training is holding back most groups. Please give a little time for effective training.
Many groups are tied into niche proprietary applications. Please help to code web-enabled, Free Software replacements.
I’m involved in lots of projects with great potential but not enough man power - please speak to me about collaborating on them.
I think I may also have mentioned what a great business model the Social Enterprise is rather too many times. :-)
If you were at the talk and want to get in touch about any of the projects, please e-mail me, or find me on Twitter.
What can I say? Speaking twice, on two different topics, in a week where I had major deadlines on three other projects is an unfounded faith in my time and project management skills bordering on wreckless! :^)
Somehow I survived, delivering a talk on the Monday session at Manchester’s Madlab, on the madness of Fractional Reserve Banking (though not having time to more than mention the alternatives), and on the Thursday, in Liverpool, on City of Abundance: Hacking the urban landscape for food.
Although not all of the talk videos seem to have uploaded correctly. As always with these events, there were a number of great talks - so I’m not singling out any!
It’s Good to Talk
Chief outcome? To be reminded what a great format the 20:20 or pecha kucha is. Distill a subject about which you’re passionate about to 20 slides, and talk for just 15 or 20 seconds on each. Not just a vehicle suited to the attention-deficient, but a challenge to the audience.
After all, it’s easy to switch off in a 40 minute talk and remember nothing afterwards, but five minutes done just right will push key points into your brain and leave you thinking about the subject days afterwards.
Could be a great marketing tool - sponsor a conference, and only demand five minutes’ attention in return. Just make sure that you follow up with a page of links and info somewhere memorable online, or take-away printed materials, for those hooked by your passion.
I’ll write up Ignite week more fully after the Liverpool event on Thursday night, but as Ian Forrester has put up a video of my talk on Re-Inventing Money at Monday’s Manchester event I’m embedding it below:
I’m travelling back from the Connecting 2.0 Communities event held this afternoon and evening at Madlab, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. An MDDA-sponsored event to give technical and social media advice to community groups. I was arm-twisted into giving a short talk, so rapidly prepared an item on Social Media tactics and strategy culled from our 3hour course.
Firefighting IT problems? Get some IT strategy in your Org!
However the first speaker, Matt Haworth, did such a great job on exactly the same subject, with the wonderful local example of Manchester’s Lesbian & Gay Foundation’s viral response to US hate adverts, that I mentally ripped up my improvised speech, and settled on the least interesting topic under the sun: IT Strategy. IT Happens, I told the unfortunate audience, it drops from the sky as meteorites of randomly-funded PCs, and volunteer-coded websites, and leaves organisations busy fighting fires as IT fails to do what it should, instead of concentrating on delivering the front-line services for which they have so much enthusiasm.
So, what’s to be done? Organisations with chronic IT problems tend to be those which don’t just lack an IT strategy, but often don’t really realise how essential it is to any modern organisation. These groups usually lack IT expertise not just in staff and volunteers, which is understandable, but in their boards of governance, too. In an age when hardware and software is effectively free, IT funding should first go into bringing in outside help to assess an organisation, and help to draught its strategy; something that would pay for itself in a very short time.
Back in my M6-IT days (and before that at BVSC’s MOST project) we ran courses on IT strategy for decision makers in Voluntary Sector groups. In both cases we relied on carrot and stick from partner organisations to bring in attendees who most needed the courses. What can be done? I’d love to hear ideas for reaching groups (other than springing them on an unsuspecting audience like today ;), otherwise third sector groups will continue to fight fires, instead of using IT to grow and support their organisations.
Just back from Feeding Manchester #3, an attempt to co-ordinate everyone in the business of sustainable food production in the city, and keep the city council and its ambitious plans for local food on track. Although I do a bit of sustainable and community IT in Hulme, and social media training in the Northern Quarter and elsewhere, I was really there on behalf of Congleton Sustainability Group and of Sandbach Re-Imagined, to see what could be learnt.
And while yes, there was a lot to be learnt (which you’re probably best finding - as it appears over the next few days - on the Kindling Trust website), and I was able to offer some points (despite my rural perspective ;) - the best thing I heard today has to be comments from Lydia of Sustainable Levenshulme Underground Gardeners, that many of these local efforts to tidy up one’s patch and grow food there for the community are oppositional, and “kind of naughty”, and the fun can go when the authorities are involved, as it’s no longer “fun and a bit deviant”.
If you’re based in Manchester, and concerned with local food, you might like to join in before Feeding Manchester #4 in the summer but, wherever you are, stay naughty, and happy St Valentine’s Day ;-)
Somewhere between Liverpool. Manchester, and Birmingham, pottering around in a convertible Morris Minor, is a man with a re-cycled laptop, and an endless supply of enthusiasm for Free Software, Sustainable IT, and the good things that can happen in the 3rd Sector when IT Strategy and social media hit an organisation.
