GoodGNUs

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:

Not-for-Profit people working with WordPress

Name/Twitter or Web Link & region or country:

Richard Weltman, NW

Chris Middleton, Notts

Jason King, London & NW

Steve Graham, S/SW

Linda Parkinson-Hardman, SW

Chris Witham, Yorks/Derbys

Daniel Koskinen, Finland

Kristina Krause, Seattle & Kent, UK

Chris Booth, Scotland

Jag Gill, Sheffield

Alex Stuart, Scotland

Chris Murray, Sheffield

Andrew Laughland, Bucks

Richard Smedley, NW

Added in from comments & tweets…

John Adams, Glasgow

Steve Taylor, London

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.

At recent events, when I meet new people, we naturally ask each other “What do you do?”. I’m failing quite badly at summarising my activities, so thought I’d briefly list current projects here, for reference:

1. Gaia University - IT strategy, project management, & SysAdmin, in a programme to gradually upgrade every online aspect of this international sustainability university over the next few years.
2. Social Media & the Accessible Web - the Profitable Conversations courses highlighted on the courses page. Got off to a good start last year, now lining up a number of courses around the North West for the Spring.
3. Hackspace North West - 10 months ago I started bringing people together whom I thought would be interested in getting spaces off the ground. I have done very little on this as fortunately it turned out there were plenty of people also wanting local hackspaces, and they’ve gone on to work towards getting them going. Latest steps in Shropshire & Staffordshire.
4. Credit Unions - Free Software solutions
   Should have been going a long time ago, but a key personnel hiccough has delayed things. Now we’re on the move again, and I’ll be posting announcements on the project here very soon.
5. Other financial software & local currencies…
   Next step is looking for partners to take the core of the Credit Union software, and adapt it for 3rd Sector book-keeping needs. This is something VCOs have been crying out for.
   We’re also talking to those involved with Complementary Currencies in a number of countries - something just beginning to gain ground in the UK after a brief flurry of LETS in the 80s.
6. Cloud Computing for the 3rd Sector.
   Voluntary Groups can’t host sensitive data in the USA, and don’t want to be advertised at by Google. Hoping to work with Fossbox on this, and looking for a sponsor to host the 1U server I have that was donated to the project by Blue Fountain.
7. Permaculture
   I studied for my Permaculture Designers’ Certificate in 1993-94, while also studying for the Royal Botanic Gardens’ diploma at Kew. It was the wrong time, and once back home in Montgomeryshire there was little or no work. Now I find a resurgent interest in sustainable design, and am following recent speaking engagements with more practical work.
8. IT Recycling
   M6-IT cic had a great success here, with Richard Rothwell’s Supported Family Computing project reaching dozens of families with recycled hardware, Free Software, family training, and local support, as well as broadband for people previously blacklisted by the ‘phone companies.
   Search for partners to replicate this has been unsuccessful, but it’s been a privilege to lead workshops on community recycling with ArcSpace in Hulme, Manchester, with an interesting and enthusiastic crowd of local activists.
9. Web
   Preparing new sites for local sustainability groups, campaigns, and VCOs: some Wordpress, blog-based, mostly Drupal CMS. I miss Plone, but it’s unsuitable for the quick and low-resourced sites I’m doing now.
   When a few more get finished I’ll put up some portfolio pages.
10. Blogging?
    I’m developing a horicultural/ethnobotany blog I started designing some time ago, and a *nix introductory blog for NetBook users. Once I can get a 30 hour day I’ll push these through to publication. :^)
11. Journalism - Linux User & Developer magazine recently commissioned me for a few articles. The first of these, on Arduino boards and open hardware hacking, hit the shelves a few days ago.
12. In Transition - the two towns nearest to our village are both in possession of new groups moving towards Transition Town Status. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some very interesting people, and get a chance to begin to investigate local food and power solutions.
    It’s certainly easier to work totally locally, than try to bring people together at a distance as I did at FACT’s Small Steps to Sustainability workshops. More soon here, and on Twitter.

Hope that helps fill a gap until I renew my calls-for-collaboration posts, too. As to Networking events, maybe I should print this list on a postcard?

This morning saw the re-launch of Manchester Open Coffee, now pencilled in for the final Thursday of every month, in the café at Urbis.
After some confusion with a b2b event for Co-op Finance sharing the same space (grey men in grey suits), we all had a topic to break the ice.

The Urbis WLAN was down, so everyone concentrated on networking. No bad thing.

The coffee crowd

I met a really great crowd, including Zulf Choudhary, doing things with social banking that parallel my next project (more on this at a later date); Hwa Young Jung & Dave Mee of TANDOT; Ian Moss of Fly-the-Coop; & Asa Calow of ensembli. Ended up staying long after the official finish.
Talk ranged from Ruby internals & the Seaside web framework, through cloud computing, to Low Carbon Computing, and my attempts to bring a hackspace to the North West (more on that in tomorrow’s post).
Lots of other interesting people - sorry not to mention you all by name. Well done to everyone behind this - Manchester obviously needed #OpenCoffee back.

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:

Monday 16 March 2009

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

Tuesday 17 March 2009

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 to apply design patterns for social action. Some pictures here.

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.

Wednesday 18 March 2009

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.

Thursday 19 March 2009

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?

Yet another blog on the Interweb pipes? Is there a need?

Who knows - I gave up blogging (though it wasn’t called that, then) about a decade ago, but found myself micro-blogging rather a lot about work these last few weeks:

http://identi.ca/richardsmedley

http://twitter.com/RichardSmedley

…and found the need to add in more. More on the Social Enterprise scene in the North West (and N Wales, and the Midlands). More on Free Software developments, and the software we’re writing. More on websites, as I seem to be moving from the back-end (oiling the servers, and tweaking code) to the front-end, and far too much on Social Networks.

So, another business blog. Why not?

Anyway, off to find a good WP theme to customise, then write some thoughts on last week’s Speak To A Geek event.