Innovation in Software

Towards the end I was tired, hot and wanted to go home, however we came through and BarCamp was great. I wrote a general overview over at the MEN blog. I thought here I’d just re-iterate my thanks, and give you a heads up about the photos on flickr and the Google Group where we can keep the conversations going.

I slept for a good while yesterday and even today feel fatigued like never before. Which makes it all the odder that we’re already planning the second event, and for this year. I’ll let you know when the pieces are in place…

It’s only just dawning on me now that tomorrow over 100 people are going to be turning up at the Manchester Evening News headquarters and engaging in an event that has virtually no planning involved in it whatsoever.

There is no schedule, no idea of how many people want to talk, nor any indication of whether everybody who has signed up has really just conducted an elaborate hoax and I’ll be sat there all on my own all day long.

I’m currently experiencing slight nerves and fatigue, because you have no idea how much work it takes to organise an event without any real planning.

Everything is about guess work and executive decisions. How much food do we actually need? What if we end up with too much? How do we give the prizes away? What are the logistics of moving people in and out of the building? Given the nature of the event until this week I kept the answers as nothing more than sketches and figured I’d work it out “closer to the day”.

This week then has been about forming a clear picture of what is going to be involved and how to manage it all. It looks as though tomorrow is going to be a great day now, but it’s all still “are we really going to try and do this?”

I’m going to really enjoy Sunday morning, regardless.

This week also saw the birth of the Google Group (which in turn produced a plan for some of us to meet tonight at the Bull’s Head near Piccadilly around 7pm), and as expected a few people had to drop-out. Alas, the waiting list went for a burden mid-week, so I’m having to re-open registrations. As I write this there are 2 tickets left over at the signup page. There may be other tickets available over the course of today, but at 5pm the list is locked and if your name isn’t down, you’re not coming in.

I also want to give a big thanks in advance to two groups of people without whose help and understanding I wouldn’t have managed to get this done this week.

First, Adaptavist who hired me to produce a back-end accounts system which is now a fortnight over-due and running. They’ve been more forgiving and understanding than a humble contractor deserves, and I’m now looking forward to wrapping up this work today that has been delayed by constant BarCamp interruption. They’re sponsoring the after-party about half of us are going to as well because they’re that cool, and I owe them a big, big thanks.

Secondly, Liquid Bronze, who have been cheering me on and helping with some of the logistics. Today they’re helping move food around despite this also being the day they move office. Quite frankly, they deserve thanks for that alone, but Andy Threlfall being a friend who knows me too well has done the sensible thing of provoking me into sitting down and thinking about precise details that I would normally wing.

If things go to plan and tomorrow everything slots into place like it looks as though it will, it’s in no small part thanks to these guys.

I should have learned by now: January is a rubbish month for most things.

Not least because it follows a time of high spirits, but the bleakness of watching people fail their resolutions, struggle with credit card bills and deal with a slow business cycle would normally make it bad enough. Watching the pound lose face in the markets, people whine about a credit crunch and for several businesses I deal with to baton down the hatches just made it all the more depressing for this young entrepreneur.

Regardless of how bleak it was in other ways, January has been a great month for events in Manchester, and I thought it might be nice to give people a quick overview of what has been going on. In other words: Sorry I’ve been so quiet, here’s something to make up for it.

One highlight for me this month was the fact BarCamp Manchester was announced and booked out in less than a week. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to get the final few pieces of the jigsaw together, but I’m confident it’s going to be a great event. If not, well, I’ll probably insist it had nothing to do with me!

Another highlight was the new format Co-working day and OpenCoffee that was a bit of an experiment that seemed to work really well for the co-workers. We need to get the OpenCoffee attendance up, but other than it worked well. In fact, the idea is so tempting that Leeds are going to be experimenting with the format in March. I’ll be opening up registration for the next Manchester one on Monday morning (planned to happen on the 26th February, space strictly limited), so keep your eyes peeled if you want in on it.

At the last Co-working day incidentally, it was decided to form a co-operative with a view to taking on a space permanently. Watch this space.

Also this month I managed to sit down and have a coffee face-to-face with Craig Smith who is the man behind O’Reilly GMT and I’ve agreed to start putting more content up there of a more generic European tech nature – at the moment it feels like a cross between an events listing blog and the occasional PR run. I’m working up story ideas at the moment, but if any of you have ideas on how you would like to see it develop, let me know.

The Northern geek scene has been developing in other ways as well. In the last month we’ve seen Manoj step up his events with the re-launch of the NW Startup 2.0 site. Always the man of ambition, he’s going for three regular events each tailored to an audience that four years ago probably didn’t exist in Manchester. I’ll be going to as many of them as time affords, keen to meet up with people who don’t make it to the more geeky events.

And of course those lovely Yorkshire types have been stretching out ahead of us North Westerners with the launch of NorthPack. Since the death of afeeda I’ve missed having a single place to track the whole of the local scene’s blogosphere. Good work lads.

Also, there appears to have been a miscommunication about my anatomy in the last month, as I got an invite to the very first Manchester Geek Girls Dinner being run by Valerie de Leonibus. It sounds like a hoot, so I hope it builds into a regular event like many others have around the UK and abroad.

All good stuff.

February and March are already looking like busy months, and with all that plus my own business to sort out it looks like the whole of 2008 is going to be filled with inspiration, communication and ideas. How on earth can we fail? :-)

It’s only been a week since I announced the opening of registration for BarCamp Manchester taking place on 1st March. As I write this, out of the 100 slots available, just 6 remain at the signup page.

UPDATE: We’re now full. No more tickets available!

I might, inspired by this ticket on eBay for TED 2008 auction mine off! :-)

This shows how strong a community we have in the area now. If we had organised a BarCamp here 4-5 years ago, it would have struggled to get to the same number of participants.

It was always a slight risk to announce this before every last piece of the jigsaw was in place, but we now have momentum enough to want to make it a big success. Thanks to all of you have are coming along already, and if you want to come along and haven’t grabbed a ticket already I suggest you do so quickly.

Over the last year or two, there have been many plans to hatch a BarCamp in our own dear city of Manchester. For some time the NWDC meetings revolved around trying to find a venue that would be a good fit, we could afford and that would meet our original requirements of two nights with the whole of the night spent on-site.

Late last year, Andrew Disley of GeekUp and I had a chat about being more realistic. We cut the scope down to one day, I went and talked to people about sponsoring the biggest cost of the day – food and drink – on the assumption we’d somehow find a free venue. We could use MDDA if we had to, even though it would be a little cramped.

Somehow I ended up being in the position of half-announcing it and saying to people “look, keep your diaries clear around here”. The moment I did that, it was like an entire community sprang into life and offers of help and sponsorship started landing in my inbox. Within just a couple of weeks a venue we hadn’t even thought of approaching came to us, met with John Keys of MDDA and myself, and confirmed they wanted in.

The space at the headquarters of the Manchester Evenings News is almost a perfect fit for what we need in terms of capacity and layout, and MEN Media are really excited about meeting a group of people on their doorstep who are full of ideas. Match made in heaven. Well, if not heaven, made in Manchester which is near enough. :-)

And so it was on Friday night I was able to throw an e-mail out to various local mailing lists and say “hey, just to let you know – BarCamp Manchester is ON!”.

We broke the eventwax signup page straight away, and now nearly half of the 100 tickets available have gone in less than 48 hours.

It looks like it’s going to be a great event and I expect by the end of next week we’ll be out of spare tickets so if you want to come, sign up now.

I’m at BarCamp Leeds right now. I just gave my talk on futurology (quite well received), and a build of vagueware.com is being used to vote on talks to determine best talk of the day (the speaker of the best talk wins an iPhone).

A nice moment was when somebody stopped me when they noticed my name badge and spoke to me about Vagueware. It’s great meeting people who are enthusiastic. Alas, he wasn’t wearing his name badge so I can’t name check him, but it was a great moment for me to meet somebody who had seen vagueware, seen the potential and really liked it.

I’m now enthused to spend more time on the code in the next week.

I’m planning on attending BarCamp Leeds this coming Saturday. I’m in the process of developing a talk and I have drafts on the following subjects:

• Futurology: why it’s so rubbish at predicting the future
• Creative and Innovative Thinking: How to come up with 100 sticky ideas before lunch
• Wikinomics (the book): A detailed synopsis

I can’t decide which to develop further. Whichever one I do will eventually be recorded as an online presentation and put up online somewhere I expect, so the question is:

Which one do you think I should do? Which one would you like to hear on Saturday (if you’re going to BarCamp) or in the coming weeks online?

Answers in the comments please…

UPDATE – with the verbal stuff coming via the back channel, it’s worked out broadly a tie. I’m going to make my mind up on the day, but all of them will eventually get recorded and put online