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:
Thanks to Ian for filming the whole night - see the other talks at http://cubicgarden.blip.tv/
Last week, I found myself writing (to a very tight deadline) an article on the Arduino board - and how it has led to a new sort of participation in Open Source, bringing more people from a range of backgrounds to playful & creative fun with technology.
The article will appear next month in Linux User magazine #84 [to be published 18 Feb 2010]. In the meanwhile here are links to some of the really cool projects that I found in the course of knocking out the article.
http://www.earthshinedesign.co.uk/
http://www.tinker.it/en/Projects/TinkerKit
robot kits that were integrated with arduinos at Howduino:
http://kre8.com/
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware
http://arduinofun.com/files/byoa.pdf
http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino [a technical article]
Of course, you can Google for Arduino, Freeduino, Howduino, & Hackspaces. :-)
HOWDUINO: http://www.howduino.com/
http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/
The complete beginner’s guide to the Arduino
LilyPad - Arduino in wearable form
The LilyPad: http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/
Leah’s Lilypad Lecture: http://www.smm.org/ltc/node/175
The bike vest: http://www.mykle.com/msl/?p=10 & http://speedvest.com/
Cake Orchestra & mark II & see the video
Theremin as a Capacitive Sensing Device
Theremin controlling xylophone - AKA ThereXylomin
The amazing Weasley Clock
Arduino, Stepper Motors, Weasley magic
James Devine’s Arduino Laser Projector
Camera remote:
http://www.fizzpop.org.uk/blog/nikon-dslr-ir-remote-project/
http://benosteen.tumblr.com/post/253208029/ir-control-for-a-nikon-d60-updated
http://www.bigmike.it/ircontrol/index.html
Vivarium temperature monitor
The Flock Clock & others….
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arduino/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Flock-Clock/
hallowe’en is a popular excuse for Arduino family projects in the USA.
But here, and for Ben Tappin, it was an 80s party
http://www.thingiverse.com/oomlout
All sorts of links:
http://howduino.pbworks.com/PossibleProjects3
http://howduino.pbworks.com/Project-DisplaySharing
http://www.instructables.com/tag/?q=arduino
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=DIYbio
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=growduino
Asa Calow, Cyberspice, James Devine, Hwa Young Jung, Lady Ada, John McKerrell, Nick O’Leary, Pindec, Ben Tappin, Aisha Yusuf, everyone on the various UK hackspace mailing lists who helped, & special thanks to Adrian McEwen.
Some great links from Wolfgang to CopyLeft hardware appeared in response on the LU&D site’s article. See also http://www.goodgnus.org/2010/04/open-hardware-copyleft/
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
"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
There’s been a lot of coverage of the death of local papers, but does this have to be the end of local reporting? Recently hyperlocal blogs have arisen everywhere from villages to inner-city postcodes to plug the gaps in local coverage.
Sticky notes on the white board describe the session you'd like. Similar sessions are grouped together & given a room & timeslot. Unconference sorted :-)
These aren’t just replacements for local freesheets, but use social media (blogs, & micro-blogs like Twitter) to harness the power of community reporting. Refrigerators dumped on the pavement, dog mess, lack of facilities, secret council decisions - all are aired in public & councils are having to take action. Not all councils are happy about this grassroots-driven transparency, & many are not giving hyperlocal blogs the same access as print journalists.
Against this background comes Talk About Local, an Unconference held last Saturday in Stoke-on-Trent that brought together 88 community bloggers & other hyperlocal activists.
An unconference is built on coffee-break networking
In informal sessions participants shared lessons learned - such as using short interviews & live cameras to get blog posts from those who had much to say but, often thanks to our lamentable education system, were unable to articulate it at the keyboard.
One thread I noted was how online activity drove more meeting & co-operation in the real world, and many successful projects combined these with drop-in centres giving access to computers and training in social media.
I attended not with my community training hat on, but as someone looking at launching a local site this autumn, & went away inspired, and carrying several pages of tips, contacts, & practical suggestions. Best thing about the event? The wonderful diversity of people there - not self-identified social media gurus, but people dedicated to improving their communities by linking up local people and giving them a platform.
Thanks to Will, Nicky, Clare & Mike for organising such a serendipitous event - despite the hiccough with the vegan food, and the train problems, I got so much from the day that I’m still digesting my notes. Watch out for more activity from Talk About Local. If you missed the event but want to get involved, join the mailing list.
Want to see some of these great community blogs? They’re linked from the social bookmarks of the ‘tal09 event (which saves me the invidious task of choosing which to single out). Videos are listed on this YouTube playlist.
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].
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.
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.
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.
This week has been one of those rushed weeks, lots of little things, and very little project work advanced significantly. Nothing to write about, in fact. But last week I attended four events, and had several interesting meetings. I’m never going to get around to reviewing all of them properly so here’s a brief summary:
PRActical Design for Social Action: PraDSA’s final event I’ve already mentioned. Please go to the website to read up a little on this project. I introduced the 20:20 concept - 20 slides each put up for 20 seconds. A powerful tool for presenting ideas in bite-sized chunks to audiences of mixed levels of interest in the topic.
It’s a popular format in geek circles - often used at GeekUp meetings, and there were 18 given at O’Reilly’s Ignite-UK North in Leeds a few weeks ago. nevertheless it has yet to gain much traction in academia.
A bonus of the day was, in the company of Andy Dearden, getting to go out for a beer and a meal with Doug Schuler, the author of the inspiring Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution
Design Patterns for Civic Empowerment, at the London Knowledge Lab
Part of the Planet (Pattern Language for Networking) effort, and linked to the previous day’s PraDSA event. Using storytelling we had a chance to work through a problem, then use patterns from Doug Schuler’s above-mentioned book
At lunchtime I gave an impromptu tutorial on Twitter, other social media, and how to link it up, to Ann from the TUC. Some very interesting people there, including Sabine McNeill of the Forum for Stable Currencies.
The first of my Small Steps to Sustainability events. 20 people talking about their experience of Open Knowledge / Open Access / Open Source & Free Software. The art gallery location produced an art gallery crowd, which gave great examples of peer-to-peer mentoring, but we must think about how to get a wider community through the door for the other events.
Manchester, and DEP’s Social Enterprise network event at Innospace (and an unfortunate clash with IT innovations in the Community in Shrewsbury - which would have been a great chance to catch up with contacts from the MOST Project’s Shropshire donations). An interesting group of social entrepreneurs, all with an interest in education, working through creative collaboration exercises and having opinions sought for the NWDA’s North West Regional Strategy
Next a quick meeting to discuss practicalities behind efforts to produce Free Software for Credit Unions. A growing field, badly served by current offerings.
Not much time for work, except on rail journeys, meaning the next week was a constant round of catching up. Time to think about out-sourcing something, perhaps?
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