Innovation in Software

We’re going to hold another co-working day next Tuesday the 22nd January 2008, and also include OpenCoffee as part of the schedule. This means there will be hardcore around all day, and a few people might show up for an hour to do some networking around 10am.

We’re going to be a little bit more structured this time around, and we also have a few extra spots to get more people in the room.

Ideally, you should come along with something you want to talk about. It could be about wanting to learn some SEO voodoo, share some experience, or you might just have a crazy idea you want to shoot around the room

9am: Start

9am – 10am: Introductions, and ideas for discussion later

10am – 11/12am: OpenCoffee – people turn up to network, meet people, they’re not going to be there for the whole day. Get on with some work if you want to.

Lunch – 4pm: Co-working, we can schedule discussions in this time as well outside of the main work area, and we’re going to try and find a way to feed you (but there’s decent butty shops nearby as well).

There will be free (Fairtrade) coffee and tea available throughout the day. If somebody wants to ‘sponsor’ lunch let me know, but I’ll try and work something out. To be honest, I’m winging this… :-)

Total capacity for the co-working is 20 including me, and you must register here:

http://opencoffee.eventwax.com/january-co-working-day

First come, first served, no exceptions.

If you just want to come along at 10am for an hour or so for the OpenCoffee bit, you can just turn up – no need to book.

I’m almost human again after last week’s ‘grand tour’. I am however a little behind on blog articles. As promised though, some notes from Thursday’s mashup* event:

Sun Microsystems were providing space for this event at their office in Sale. It’s a great venue, but the trip out of central Manchester during rush hour left your correspondent a little frazzled. All trips out of Manchester leave this correspondent frazzled though, and it may have just been the task of crossing 8 lanes of heavy traffic that did it.

We opened with David Terrar from Blognation giving us a run down on where he’s seeing ‘Web 2.0’ technology in the enterprise. He touched on the BBC using blogs and wikis extensively, and discussed Pfizer’s use of the same. A lot of people seem to be trying to lock into consumer-orientated applications because the current success stories – Facebook, Flickr, MySpace – are in that arena. I think David is onto something in that the real money is bringing this style of social technology into the enterprise.

Simon Grice then did a more bi-directional talk on the premise that Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. I piped up and got agreement with Simon on the point that indeed the very first web browsers had “edit” capabilities and at some point, somebody decided it was too anarchic and turned the web into a broadcast medium. We’re now just getting back to where the web should have been more than a decade ago.

I also had to admit to the room that I have hired deviants in the past. Long story, I’ll fill you in some other time…

Simon discussed the disruptive nature of new media, and cited his own recently-launched testcard.tv – a site lawyers working on behalf of media companies will no doubt be particularly interested in.

UPDATE: Checking URLs, I notice that testcard.tv has been put into an “Under maintenance” mode, citing the takedown of a similar service and asking people to head over to their blog – it’s one way to get traffic I suppose. :-)

Next up, was Lee Strafford of Project Sahara. He’s trying to gauge interest on this side of the Pennines in what could be an interesting project. Talking to people after the meeting, the consensus was “wait and see where it goes”, which is unfortunate as it needs people to get involved now for it go anywhere. I’m going to do some talking around over the next few weeks and see what interest there is in getting stuck in at an early stage.

We then skipped the break – Ouch! Don’t do that again! My brain was hurting! – before moving onto case studies of NetVibes, edocr and Meecard. All interesting stuff, but I was already quite familiar with NetVibes and edocr – Meecard was a little food for thought though.

There then followed some discussions, some light networking, some pizza and a few beers before wandering off home.

All in all, this is a more polished and business-focused version of GeekUp. As a format it has a lot of potential, and providing the case studies and speakers can be lined up it could be a regularly anticipated event. Some people complained about the £25 entry fee (a sentiment I broadly agree with), but I know several people want to try and help out on that front.

I also find myself a little disappointed that I’m going to have to wait until February until the next one, so that has to be a reassuring thumbs-up for Manoj and Simon.

I received an invitation to Hack Day in London this weekend. I’ve been mulling it over since I applied, and I’ve made the decision I won’t be making the trip to London. I thought I’d explain here what those reasons are. I’m not suggesting anybody else not go, I just thought I’d like to explain my own reasons: if you’re going, I hope you have a great time and I can’t wait to see what you produce.

1. It’s a marketing event

   I made this comment on a mailing list the other week, and one correspondent expressed surprise at this statement. In his own words it was “just a chance to hang out with other geeks”. I know where he is coming from, but the thing is, it’s not. They are shoving Yahoo! and BBC Backstage APIs down people’s throats in return for free food and drink. They’re entitled to do that, of course. However, their terms and conditions (which have to be signed on entry to the hall) state that you may not in any way be “disparaging towards the event sponsors”. They are very clearly keeping the reigns on the event and it belongs to them. It’s like somebody has told a traditional academic conference organiser about Web 2.0 and they’ve got confused…

   Like it or not, this is going to be more about selling APIs to developers than it is developers being able to do what they want. That’s up to the organisers, but I’m not sure I can handle 2 days in Alexandra Palace just for a marketing gig – no matter how cool a marketing gig it is. If they were running something like BarCamp and wanted to run a side-competition, it’d be a different proposition: it’d be the developer’s event, not the sponsor’s. I don’t begrudge them wanting something for their marketing money, I just don’t want – on careful reflection – to let them think I support their business or services just because I attended.

2. Yahoo!

   People who know me well, know I can be a bit of a political animal at times. The simple truth is Yahoo! are doing things that make me feel sick and as I’ve explained before I don’t think they’re doing much to fix the underlying problems.

   Given that I already have a problem with this being a marketing gig, the fact that I now consider it to be a marketing gig for a company doing as much harm in the World as Yahoo! just compounds my objections to being involved. I’ve boycotted all Yahoo! services for two years now: I would be a hypocrite for taking their beer and pizza and telling the World how swell their APIs are (which, incidentally, compared to Google’s they’re not).

   I did consider doing something a tad naughty: I was going to build an application that took a non-Yahoo! API of historical share prices, and show on the dateline of the graph a mapping of news stories from the BBC Backstage News Search API to see correlation. You’d be able to graphically see if certain news stories had an impact on share price, in other words.

   My demo would have been Yahoo’s share price correlated with stories on dissidents being locked up in Chinese jails.

   I expect it would have been a demonstration of depressing indifference however. I might still spend my weekend doing this project, but doing it from the comfort of home and not under fear of that “disparaging towards the sponsors” clause in the T&Cs (section 9, paragraph “c” if you care).

3. It’s in London

   I suspect I’ll get flamed more for this one than I will any other point. However, I want to let you in on a little secret:

   All the interesting web and digital media stuff going on in the UK right now is in the North.

   Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds: they’ve all got interesting people doing interesting things. I know because I’ve met some of the people involved and I’m constantly impressed by the ideas I see coming out of the Northern Quarter and the SMEs in the North in general.

   You know who is going to be at an event in London? Mostly Londoners. That means large, corporate agency types. That’s fine, they’re happy, they’re great at what they do, and it might be interesting to see what their thinking is these days. However I’m thinking they’re going to be somewhere behind where the North is right now – large agencies can’t afford to be right on the edge, because that’s not where their customer base want them to be. The North is small companies doing stuff that is edgier because they have to get noticed. In my book, risk-taking and being prepared to fail gets merit.

   This isn’t just me being North-vs-South-ist here, I watch the industry pretty carefully and I really do think that the leading edge stuff in the UK right now, whilst still behind the US, seems to be happening in my backyard. Most of the cool kids aren’t going to London. I know it takes bravery for Yahoo! UK (London based) and the BBC (still mostly London based – for now at least), to think about running an event “up North”, but I think it would have been a better event.

4. My laptop is fux0red

   And I can’t be bothered getting another one sorted out before Friday. I could have gone out and picked up something from one of the Mancunian resellers tomorrow, and be up and ready for the event, but I’ve got more interesting things to do than try and get a development environment onto fresh hardware for a one-off.

And that’s it really. They might seem like stupid reasons to some people, but they all swing things in favour of staying in Manchester. I was really looking forward to meeting up with people down there and have a laugh, but I’d rather wait until a more interesting and local event happens around here. One friend suggests that by Saturday morning I’ll be regretting not going, but I think I would have regretted going a little more.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Tom Coates involved in the organisation of the Hack Day event. The important points are that he’s had the T&C’s changed so you can now disparage the sponsors. Please feel free to do so. He also explained the London location as being because it’s a “pan-European event” and apparently London is a better transport hub. That to me just suggests he doesn’t know a lot about Manchester, alas.

I’m still not going, but he tells me that means the ticket gets opened up for somebody else who might appreciate the huffing and puffing of the Yahoo! UK staff protesting that they’re lovely people really.

Meanwhile, I decided to go to the pub this Saturday and invite some friends. We’re going to call it AntiHackDay and that link takes you to the wiki page where we work out what to do with our afternoon. So, if you’re in Manchester, can’t make it to Hack Day (or weren’t invited), sign up.

Just noticed that if you’re an agile developer (like me) you and you’re in the North West of England (like me) you may want to go to the AgileNorth event on the 20th September. It costs £95, and the programme looks pretty reasonable.

Alas, I’ve only just found out and I’m already up for being somewhere else that day, but I’ll hope to see feedback around the blogs from those people going.