BarCampLeeds
I am at BarCampLeeds today and, if the battery holds out, will be liveblogging the event!
11.00: TV 3.0 by Mark Sailes. Interesting idea: tagging TV and film with meta-data and time stamps to allow, for example, Star Wars geeks to find and watch all the light sabre fights without the excuse for dialogue that pads that bits that people really want to see. But a big debate about how to get the meta-data up there: IM chats, voice recognition of fans chatting on the phone? Many seemed to favour logging phone chats, but I am not sure this will work as people will need to stay on topic the whole time. A big stumbling block could be legal issues: what if each time a particular actor appears they are tagged as a child abuser following, say, a contested tabloid story? Or, if people watching news or documentaries repeatedly label a government minister as a liar? Without heavy moderation it could be a money spinner for the libel lawyers I guess!
11.50: Giving Web a Voice by Georgia Brown. An interesting demo of a tool that can be embedded into social networking sites (demos of linkedin, myspace and second life) to allow people to chat to their friends using their existing VOIP accounts. The Second Life demo was particularly cool: they plan to link up with some bars in Second Life and allow people to start chats in special area of the bars themselves. (More at: www.phonefromhere.com) One potential issue is the question of how far their target demographic (younger people) is interested in voice chat rather than text chat; the explosion in text message volumes seems to have been in part driven by a preference for texting over calling.
Another issue raised by Georgia’s talk for me is that of the BarCamp format. At 10.00am the agenda for the unconference was drawn up with people using post-it notes to place short titles of their talks on a white board, but there is no additional context for each talk (usually not even a name for the presenter). As a social scientist, the title of this talk - ‘Giving Web A Voice’ - conjured up all sorts of images about the democratic governance of the web, but for the techies it was obvious it was about VOIP! On the way out of the session another problem with scheduling emerged: people are moving the post-it notes and some (good natured) arguments are breaking out about scheduling!
After lunch: Paul Robinson on why futurology is rubbish. No confusion with this title! A provocative talk that suggested a lot of social science that looks towards the future is a waste of time - ouch! I agreed with much of what he said about the impact of unpredictable factors on the future (with a nod to chaos theory and complexity theory), but his overall conclusion that there is no point looking to the future I couldn’t agree with… I asked him if past action was no guide to the future how he could know whether to put trousers on before leaving the house… He also raised the old chestnut about Thomas Watson, the head of IBM in its early days, predicting a world market of only five computers as a classic example of a failed prediction. However, it seems more likely that this was a case of failed historical research: there is no convincing evidence Watson ever said this and, having read Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust I can’t imagine an operator as cold and ruthless as Watson dismissing ANY opportunity for IBM to sell a new product.
A live link up with BarCampOttowa followed, but technical hitches took hold and a voice only Skype chat was all that could be achieved in the end. A nice idea, but…
15.10 Intelligent human-computer interfaces and their possibilities by Reinhold Behringer. A lot crammed into this talk (too much really), but some really interesting stuff including computer driven cars and computers playing music with (and, crucially, being able to keep up with) a human orchestra.
16.30 - Valerie De Leonibus, Regeneration, Tech and the North. A very interesting session that covered a wide range of topics, not least during a lively discussion that went way over the alloted time such was the interest! Issues covered include how to get IP from universities exploited more effectively, how funding for tech industries focuses too much on infrastructure rather than human capital (especially how much harder it is to get some support for investing in labour compared to investing in bricks and mortar), how to make sure the benefits for the wider community can be ensured and what the north might do differently. The movement of high tech talent from Milan to Turin (and the switch of investment from motoring to new ventures there) was one particularly interesting example I hadn’t come across before. Lots of talk about Richard Florida’s work on tech, talent, toleration and place. Also a fair bit of discussion about the importance of events such as BarCamp in aiding the north’s creative economy.
6.20 - Gung Ho Start Up by Guy Fraser of Adaptavist. This was a great talk! He took us through the story of how he and Dan Hardiker (job title: ‘Miracle Worker’) accidentally established a hugely successful start up (Adaptavist) by not planning for the future, not writing business plans and not following the normal rules of the game. They are evidently hugely talented guys and this is clearly a large part of the explanation for their success, but by only planning at most six months into the future and listening closely to their clients about their needs they are able to roll with the latest developments at adapt quickly to change.
7.00 Wrap-Up and After Party. i-Phones and i-Pods were up for grabs in the wrap up prize draw and, amazingly, my name came out of the hat… but for a copy of Photoshop rather than one of the coveted i-Phones… at the risk of sounding a total brat, cool as Photoshop is I am tempted to see if I can swap this for an i-Phone somewhere! A couple of people BarCamp had i-Phones and they look as good as the hype suggests… Following the wrap-up, the after party got off to a shaky start, with Asda failing to deliver the beer on time. However, Rockstar Games put a generous tab behind the bar of a local pub and it is safe to say this did the trick.
Without doubt BarCampLeeds was a successful event and, hopefully, more BarCamps will follow shortly in the North. While at times there was a sense that people were unsure what the nature and tone of the event ought to be, this is inevitable given the movement is in its early days and I am sure more people (myself included) will present next time having seen what a BarCamp looks like in practice. More to the point, BarCampLeeds pulled together a tremendous number of people in a very short time, all of whom signed up to the idea of participant lead event that shares ideas and knowledge on an opensource basis. In a field where commercial events are typically pitched at crazy price levels that was great to see and the energy and vision of the organisers was phenomenal. The low entry costs also resulted in a really interesting mix of people in terms of organisational and disciplinary backgrounds, though I reckon a few more of the social scientists working on the sociology of the internet (including some colleagues at York Uni!) would add nicely to the overall mix … which has me thinking whether a BarCampYork might be a possibility at some point in the near future…
