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.

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.)

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.

Reviews of the Liverpool event are at:

http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/liverpool/ignite_liverpool.html

http://bulletinthemessenger.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/ignite-liverpool-2010/

http://www.ldpcreative.co.uk/2010/03/ignite-liverpool-is-showcase-f.html

Ian Forrester’s recording of the Manchester event is up at:

http://cubicgarden.blip.tv/

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.

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

In my recent enterprises & projects I’ve tried to spread the work around as widely as possible - bringing in fellow freelancers to help with training, coding, illustration, and all sorts of technical bits & bobs. Sometimes this has been quite successful for all involved. Occasionally things haven’t worked as planned, but lessons are learned and I’ve never failed to gain something from sharing work.

Now I find myself stretched very thinly on a number of projects, mostly at an early stage, with none of the resources I had at M6-IT cic - so I find I would ideally like a shed load of people to work with. The catch? There’s no wage or fee attached to any of these projects. Previously I’ve always paid other freelancers well - up to £1000 a day. This time there’s nothing in the pot, though a number of projects look like they will bring in steady revenue to be shared. Read on for details under the individual projects, as I post details over the next few days…

[...edit...or months; more coming soon (early Spring?)...]

P2P Board

But first, an alternative. Dave Thackeray, at http://wordandmouth.com/2009/09/ultimate-business-advice-free/, suggests setting up a “virtual board” to troubleshoot & share ideas with your peers. Put simply, you find some fellow (social) entrepreneurs, and meet up every month or so to kick round the problems that are bothering you. In a group of 6, 8 or 10, someone is bound to come up with a solution that hadn’t ocurred to you.

It’s certainly something I’d love to try. I’ve been doing this informally to some extent I guess at #OpenCoffee events, co-working sessions, and many other places - but a reliably regular version with a good set of people sounds very appealing. Practically speaking, Manchester looks the best bet - but if anyone’s planning this in any other town I regularly get to [North West England, N Wales, W Mids], then please count me in :-)

Wonderful to be spending a bit more time at horticulture and permaculture again - both with looking at the IT systems for Gaia University and, more practically, getting back into a bit of Edible Landscaping work. Yesterday I gave a talk on Edible Landscaping at Soutport Flower Show. It’s adapted from the 3 hour Edible Landscaping course I ran at HDRA in the mid-90s, and as I feel much useful content is omitted to makethe talk, I’m putting links to useful sites and books below (and in the comments) over the next few days.

The talk will also run today at 2.30pm (come along at 1pm to hear David Bellamy!), and tomorrow at 11.30am.

Books

Plants for a Future: Edible and Useful Plants for a Healthier World

Creative Vegetable Gardening Joy Larkcom

Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant-lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today. by Chris Carlsson

Websites

Heritage Seed Library - old & endangered varieties of vegetable seed

Plants for a Future - practical experiences with 7000 different useful & edible plants growing in the UK

During the final weeks of FACT’s Climate for Change exhibition, our Small Steps to Sustainability workshops have moved from Gallery 1 (as an after-hours social café “combining beer, conversation, and the jagged interface between technology, networks, and ’saving the world’”), to the[FACT]blog (no beer there, I’m afraid).

This means that I’ll be posting there with the final topics, but also summing up previous workshops’ discussions. Please contact me if you want to remind me of something we covered, or that I said that I’d follow up.

Posts will be appearing under C4C Featured Blogs on the[FACT]blog,or you can get directly to them by author, or by the SmallSteps tag.

Info is gradually being updated on the GoodGNUs #SmallSteps page, too. As to the next steps, there’s something in the pipeline, but it’s a fair way off being announced yet. Why not subscribe to the GoodGNUs’ feed to keep updated?

Wednesday April 22, 2009 from 7:00pm - 8:30pm

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology)
88 Wood Street
Liverpool, England L1 4D Get Directions

A start to getting together a crowd to open a NW Hackspace in Liverpool:

Starting Weds 22 April, a fortnightly meet-up at 7pm at FACT. We may try
and meet in their media lab at some time, but we’ll start with the bar.

Adrian McEwan will bring along Bubblino (as seen on BBC ;) to the first
meeting. Format will be informal discussion after a short intro on
hackspaces.

Creative learning

One reason for choosing this coming Wednesday is that it follows
straight on from the Small Steps to Sustainability meeting on Creative
Learning - something that very much includes having fun in a
hackerspace. I hope that some people will find themselves staying on
from Small Steps for the Hackspace Meeting (or coming early to the HS
meeting, to take part in Small Steps).

Note that Birmingham hackspace combine regular pub meetings with
occasional weekend hackdays. Help us find a venue and we’ll be doing the
same.

Upcoming - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2422946/
Webpage - http://nwhackspace.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/liverpool-meeting/

Below is the text of an e-mail I’m sending to various groups with which I’m involved. Please feel free to copy & re-post, Dig/Reddit/social bookmark, Tweet it, link to it at http://www.goodgnus.org/2009/04/more-hackspace/ or just talk about it to anyone who might be interested in joining in the hackspace fun :-)

Hackspace - a place for hacking. Playful invention with hardware, from Arduino to 3D printers. As one of the hackspaces puts it: “We’re looking to create a hackerspace where anyone interested in technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate.”

There are hackspaces all over the world [1], and now the UK. A new group [2] is trying to set up hackspaces in London [3] & Birmingham [4].

Why not the North West you ask? Well, I asked anyway ;) - so now we have a NW group - come and join the mailing list [5].

Where?

Members of Liverpool LUG have expressed an interest, and want to tie it in with planned workshops & the local arduino community. In Manchester the local coworking group are interested in sharing the space. In Stockport we’re looking at a storey of a nice mill building [6], and hoping to find a community of people to join in. In Bangor there’s a social enterprise start-up that would integrate very well with the space.

Join in

If you’re in N Wales or NW England, and interested in creative, fun (or profitable) things to do with computers, or would like to link such things with social action, perhaps, join the list. These things will only work with *people* - I’m committing a little time to help get these off the ground, but it’ll only work if we all muck in.

What next?

If you just want to follow what’s happening follow us on Twitter [7], sign up & lurk on the Google Group, or wait until we set up an [announce] mailing list.

[1] http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces
[2] http://www.hackspace.org.uk
[3] http://london.hackspace.org.uk/
[4] http://groups.google.com/group/birmingham-hack-space
[5] http://groups.google.com/group/NW-hack-space
[6] http://twitter.com/broadstonemill
[7] http://twitter.com/hsNW

Some of you may be aware of efforts to produce a hackspace in London & Birmingham. A place for creative experiment with technology. Fun for its own sake, which might also lead to all sorts of great artworks, products, and collaborations.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces lists hackspaces all over the world.

Recent talk on the Liverpool LUG mailing list, about finding somewhere to hold a netbook day for GNU/Linux newbies prompted me to think beyond a single event to what the city (& Manchester) is missing - a permanent hackspace.

Mentioning it on the LUG list, then at Manchester OpenCoffee, produced some interest, so I’ve put up a list at http://groups.google.com/group/NW-hack-space/ - please sign up and make yourself known if you’re interested.

Beyond the simple joy of hardware hacking, there’s the possibility of linking it up with some sort of co-working space, possibly sharing one floor of a building. It depends, of course, on who gets involved, and what people put in, as much as what people want to take out of it.

For example, I’d be keen to look at Sheffield’s Access Space, with its Social Agenda of helping people to help themselves with IT knowledge.