GoodGNUs

To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event.

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.

Talks at #smcLiv were given by Mike Nolan, on coping with social media overload, and Jon Bloor, on Publish & (Don’t) be damned. Social Media & the Law. Mike is certainly tapping a rich vein, given the number of information channels we’re all hooked into, and talk around the tables afterwards ranged from GTD through #inboxZero to using the good old-fashioned telephone to cut down on e-mail.

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.

Thanks to Michael Sparks, on the GeekUp list, I was recently reminded of this wonderful XKCD cartoon.

Not only did it make me smile, but it reminded me that “now” is always a good time to stop in an argument on an e-mail list, thus freeing up no end of useful time :-)

It's behind you - robot fun at #bcMan2

This weekend saw the 2nd BarCamp Manchester - an unconference that carries on through the night. Like all unconferences, attendance implies participation, and therefore giving a talk. I gave three.

The first, on permaculture, sustainability, & forest gardens, was quite poorly attended - not something one worries about in general at barcamps, as there’s so much going on it’s impossible to be everywhere. However it did lead to some discussions late into the night on the disconnect between the techie community and those working for a more sustainable future (something we tried to address with #SmallSteps, & will return to in the future). Sorry, NO SLIDES, but plenty of info online.

My session with Paul Robinson of Vagueware on collaboration, co-working & virtual boards, entitled Profitable Collaboration for Freelancers, brought together freelancers eager to learn more about co-working, and to build better businesses through smart collaboration rather than taking on more employees. This is something the local tech sector really gets, but those paid by the government to support small businesses don’t seem to understand at all. It also made me realise I should probably get round to joining Fly-the-Coop.

Saturday night’s revels (which didn’t stop at all during the 6 hours I slept) meant Sunday morning started fairly quietly, but still brought a number of people to my third session, on organisation “for those who are really bad at it”. In this I count myself, which is why I have developed systems to allow for that, as well as adopting GTD. Conversations between two of the participants on this were still going on when I left the event an hour later.

Again, no slides, but this poster is more than tangentially related. Also, you can:
buy David Allen’s GTD book [affiliate Amazon link].

"Sleep is ones & zeroes"

Far better than running sessions is going to others’ talks, and hearing about things about which people are really passionate and knowledgable. Also the talks which lead to great discussions, leading you to new areas of familiar topics. Even better, the conversations in the bars & corridors, as BarCamp brings together 200 great people with so much to say.

There’s far to much to list the highlights, so I’ll just mention the very first session I went to on Saturday morning: the Surrealist writing exercise. This involved writing nouns (techie & abstract) & their meanings, then swapping them round with often startling results.

“

End of the first day: catching up on micro-blogging [CC by-nc-sa image from yajamesu

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As more of my GTD-based system displaces my natural chaotic style, and leaves me relaxed & more on top of work, I’ve been trying to distill this sytem into a workshop for people busy with social action, and contributing to the commons, yet not as effective as they could be with the right system of organisation.

Buzzword bingo

One problem with taking systems traditionally favoured by vice-presidents of multinational companies is that activists are very wary of anything that smacks of management bull***t. In a directly-delivered workshop humour can be used to work past this, to the useful elements of systems like GTD. For example, buzzword bingo can be played, giving prizes to the first one to collect all the management-speak.

But when I attempted to turn the course into a poster, I found myself feeling very apologetic about the whole thing, and pushing the humour too strongly.

In the FOSS spirit of release early, release often, I attach the poster here - looking for useful criticism. E.g.:

• Does it get its message across?
• Does the humour (inc. crappy graphics) kill it?
• Is it meaningless - i.e. it really needs the workshop to explain it, and a poster isn’t an appropriate format?

Earlier today I spoke to Andy Dearden about my contributions to the forthcoming PRADSA (Practical Design for Social Action) event, New Understandings, New Communities, New Practices, on 16 March, at NAVCA in London.

Little GTD

I’m doing a poster (if I can get one out on time), but it was the workshop that needed discussion, as I have two I’m developing that I wanted to try out. Option one is a workshop idea that I’ve had brewing for a while: “Keeping the Activist active: Organisation for hopeless procrastinators, and people who can’t see their desks”. This stems from my re-discovered passion for all things GTD and zero inbox, as well as the de-cluttering ideas that feature so prominently in Tim Ferriss’ works.

The idea is how to declutter your mind, and concentrate on Getting Things Done using various simple techniques. Specific tools are mentioned, but these will be personal preferences for most people, so the emphasis is on techniques and where to go for more information and help with such ways of working.

Keeping active?

The need for such a workshop? I’ve noted that I’m not the only activist who suffers from perennial procrastination, accumulating to-do piles, and information overload. I’ve been working hard on dealing with this over recent months and:

1. Want to share what I’ve learned
2. Want to gain from others’ productivity tips that may be shared in workshops

Meanwhile I note the continuing rise of GTD on mostly word-of-mouth, and take that as some confirmation that it really works for a lot of people.

And what works enables us to segué seemlessly to the other option, based on my forthcoming Social Cafe, Small Steps to Sustainability, at FACT’s Climate for Change exhibition. This uses the 20:20 format - 20 slides each given 15 or 20 seconds of commentary to introduce a topic without boring to distraction on areas of no interest to the audience. Leeds GeekUp often features two or three 20:20s, and recently O’Reilly’s first Ignite to be held in England was held in Leeds with 18 such talks.

Social Café

I sugested to FACT a “Small Steps to Sustainability” exhibition, highlighting 11 areas linking technology and environmentalism, over the 11 weeks of their Climate for Change exhibition, in an “11:20″ format, and highlighting one area in each week to showcase with other activists. They took the idea and ran with it until it became an after-work Social Café with beer at 6pm on what I non-alliteratively refer to as Sustainability Wednesdays. If you’re in Liverpool come along - more on this nearer the time.

Meanwhile, PRADSA: A workshop slot at New Understandings, New Communities, New Practices, suggested an opportunity to rehearse this workshop and, ideal for PRADSA’s aims, to discuss the 20:20 format, and other technology-driven trends in presentations.

Will talk for beer

So, two workshops in progress, one of which will be developed and delivered throughout spring. The question: does anyone want to book one of them for any third sector events? We also have the ever-eager Speak to a Geek panel looking for opportunities to help at such events, with answers to a volley of IT, web & social media enquiries. Call us ;-)