Innovation in Software

Last night was GeekUp Manchester night, and as a one-off the geeks combined forces with Manchester Digital and Northern Digitals to have a “Bastille Day BBQ” at Atlas on Deansgate.

I haven’t been to GeekUp in a while, and I’d heard that attendance was dwindling down to almost Manchester BSD UG levels (which is now half a dozen mates having a few drinks in the Briton’s Protection).

Last night – with 250+ members of the local industry looking to let their hair down – was quite a different affair.

In fact, it had the air of something much bigger and interesting than anything I’d seen in the city since the days of my department at MMU running Wired City (recently resurrected, but I can’t find an authoritative URL for it), and was kind of like all the social events across the city combined, run by some of the people behind Big Chips, all with more beer and food. It was also surprisingly upbeat, with everybody busy and nobody complaining about the economic slow-down – in fact, some of the discussion was about how to get hours down to a manageable level so as to take weekends off.

I ended discussing something last night with Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist that I realised I hadn’t really stated publicly yet: I don’t need to lead or direct something in order to participate in it

I am a man who likes to be in charge of my future. I do not react well to being directed into anything, and resist attempts at management if I consider it futile or inefficient (I was a pain in the backside for some of my teachers at school).

My community involvement in the last few years has as a result been mostly trying to lead things. BarCamp Manchester, helping where I could with GeekUp, pushing along co-working and other collaboration opportunities, cheering on NWDC and all of its participants… and more.

I’ve enjoyed my part in all of that, and I’ve met some incredible people in the process. However, a couple of months ago I informed the other directors of Fly The Coop that I intend to stand down as chairman at the next AGM. I do not intend to run another BarCamp. If somebody wants to run a co-working day or HackSpace I’ll show my face and take part if workload permits, but for now I have no plans to lead or direct anything other than my own businesses (I’m currently director of four, soon to be three, then back to four again probably), and to focus on helping my customers.

It took me six months in the wilderness to understand it, but now I have, I think I can be of more value to the community as somebody in the cheap seats, participating. I hope you’ll agree.

I also discussed the fact that word-of-mouth is the very best sales channel available.

I’ve been doing some serious sales work in the last couple of months. I have mined the Official Journal of the European Union for public sector opportunities, I’ve done cold-calls, I’ve done networking events, I’ve really pushed the boat out in order to secure the cashflow to hire the three full-time staff I want to in the next couple of months (more about those guys soon, I hope!). I got the odd tickle, but nothing solid so far.

Virtually every single sale I’ve landed on the order books in the last couple of months has come from somebody, somewhere, being in discussion with a client and saying something along the lines of “I think we need Paul Robinson for this one…”, and bringing me into the project. Six months from now, I hope to have a team who everybody who knows it wants involved in more projects.

Reputation is everything. I have no idea where I got mine from as 95% of my work is behind the scenes and under NDA involving back-end processes and intranet functionality, but I’m grateful for it anyway.

As such, I need to be more public about the work I’m doing, provide a better public profile of my clients and what I do for them, and go to a lot more events where I try and find partners for future projects. The Internet might be making geography irrelevant for a lot of work, but it doesn’t make relationships any less important – in fact, in a World where there are thousands of development teams a click away, a team you can trust is becoming more valuable than ever.

And lastly, I discussed for a while Vagueware’s plans for the future and if I’m going mad.

I concede that from the outside, my behaviour must look quite odd. A couple of years of scrabbling away, a year of landing a whole bunch of contracts in one go (one of which became very intensive for a while and so the sales cycle seized completely), all punctuated by random bursts of community activity, and then a half-year of what seems to be freelancer-grind, culminating in… a recruitment drive and an announcement that suddenly this company is about to get medium-sized quite quickly.

Some people think I’ve struck gold, others seem to be confused still as to what it is Vagueware does, and others don’t get the idea that managing true R&D innovation is difficult and can’t just be done the same way you build a regular e-commerce platform. Some ask about Kagtum, others want to know about the idea bank. It all seems a bit of a mess, and many people seem confused. If I’m honest, I’m still clarifying some of the details myself.

This is all entirely my fault. It’s not that the direction isn’t clear, it’s that is not clearly communicated. Over the next month the website will get an overhaul to make it clear:

• What Vagueware does, and who it does it for
• What Vagueware intends to do in future
• Why you should give a damn given I’m just that bald guy at the social stuff that talks a lot

I actually feel as if I’m letting some of you down at times, but last night it became clear why until recently growth was so hard to come by: it’s difficult to get leads if people don’t know what you do.

So, my bad. Sorry.

Last night overall was pretty great and I definitely think we should do larger events like that more often. The diversity and depth of the sector in this city is one of its strengths and last night left me considering long and hard whether I really want to move away next year (more on that some other time).

We tend to silo ourselves far too much – designers only hang out with designers, developers with developers, and so on. It is only by mixing it up we can find the best opportunities for collaboration and go forward together.

We should be abandoning titles we assign ourselves and start to think about how to help each other more. And that means more events like last night.

Well done to the organisers, and here’s to the next one.

P.S. there was something else brought up last night: some of you have been pulling my accounts from Companies House. Save yourself some money, and next time just ask me, I won’t be offended and I won’t even ask you why you want them – as a member of the public you’re legally entitled to them on demand.

What does irk me slightly though, is the conversation I had suggested some of you had been discussing said accounts between yourselves and picking holes at my 2-year old accounts (2008 hasn’t been filed yet), behind my back. That just seems a bit rude. I’m sorry if I’ve offended or upset you in some way to the point of you wishing to find chinks in my armour in any way possible, but if you have something to say to me please just say it to me. I know my style can come across as arrogant and patronising to some, but I genuinely would prefer to have an open discussion with people rather than you spend time questioning an ancient business model of mine behind my back.

See you all again soon at the next GeekUp or other similar event.

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Douglas Adams

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it’s no secret within the local geek scene that I had a mild health scare around this time last week.

Note, for somebody who has never been to hospital other than as a visitor, a “mild health scare” feels like the scariest thing in the World.

The short version is, something odd happened, it could have been a lot worse but the diagnosis is ultimately positive in that it is not the very worst it could have been.

However…

It scared me. I’ll be honest: I work harder than most, I enjoy my social life more than most, and I have found it hard over the last three years to say “no” to anybody. I want to be involved in everything, if not organising it. I have the kind of lifestyle that worries mothers and makes fathers yearn for their own youth.

To find myself in the position I did made me realise I was risking everything

Between the scare and the diagnosis I had a lot of time to think about how that strategy was failing me, my family and my clients. I have started to evaluate what it is I want to continue to do that I did before, and what I am happy to consider left behind, dead.

There are lots of impacts that have emerged, wide-ranging in their scope. However, I shall limit myself to a discussion of the professional impacts here:

Basically, If I work 60 hours per week (as I have done), I get ill. We all do. You can perhaps do this for a short period of time or doing menial work, but if you’re doing abstract thinking to deadlines at that load for three years, you will break. Therefore including travel, I’m not prepared in future to go above 45 hours per week.

Going to geek events, reading mailing lists and RSS, etc. I now have to consider work.

Given my clients and other business need me for about 40 hours a week, I therefore have to be selective about the other things I do. Whilst I will remain a champion of Fly The Coop, NWDC, and remain a vociferous supporter of the local tech industry and help it when I can, I will be:

• Unsubscribing from most mailing lists I’m on
• Going to fewer geek events
• Saying “no” to more requests (but please don’t let that stop you requesting)
• Spending more time doing the things I think I do best

I don’t expect most people will notice or care, but I do note that people sometimes notice when I’m “quiet” for a while, so this is advance warning. I am no longer receiving mail for most groups I’ve been active with regarding email. I will show my face at about a quarter of the events I did before.

The flip side, is this blog is about to return to the regular, well-researched writing that highlighted its early days. For blog readers, this is excellent news.

Good luck to all of those in the community – I will be back, but only once a few other things are sorted out.

At tonight’s GeekUp (Briton’s Protection – just 50 yards from the usual venue – 6pm), there is another social discussion event. This time, another area I spend a lot of time thinking about is up for consideration. From the announcement:

Discussion Topic: “The Future of the Internet”

• How do you see people using the internet in 5/10 years time?
  • What features do you want to see browsers supporting?
  • Will people still be using browsers? If not, what will they be using?
  • Does anyone actually use 3G video chat? Will VoIP mainstream
    follow too?
  • Will Google always be the number one search engine?
  • Will Google be even bigger? Perhaps it might run our lives …
  • Will IPv6 actually be adopted by the masses?
  • Anyone up for a 3G wireless dongle biometric implant to hook your
    memory up to the net?!
  • Semantic Web – is it the future? what does it mean?

How we intend to get through that lot in a couple of hours I have no idea. I expect I will be writing up notes and reporting back tomorrow if people can’t make it, but if you can make it, you should.

I wrote this article about a week ago, but resisted posting it. Reading it back, I’m now even more convinced I’m right.

The simple truth is, OpenCoffee as a format doesn’t work in Manchester and we should be glad about it.

Here’s the basic format of an OpenCoffee meeting:

• Meet in a coffee shop (or hosted environment with coffee available) early-/mid-morning
• Meet people involved in startups who want to network
• Ideally grow businesses through that networking

Now, here’s an exercise. Spot the two big reasons from that format why it struggles in Manchester.

First, there is timing. The people who would be interested in meeting developers, entrepreneurs and technologists in Manchester tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Working for somebody else, in a salaried job. They can’t do OpenCoffee because their boss would notice their absence doing networking for the new company they’re about to start.
• Working for themselves and insanely busy and so find it hard to justify taking a couple of hours out of their schedule just to meet up
• Working strange hours that means they’re almost certainly fast asleep 7am-11am which are the “prime” traditional times for an OpenCoffee

Then there is the fact that OpenCoffee comes with an agenda: I am here to meet people to help my business. That just doesn’t work in Manchester. Ideas flow freely and sometimes get turned into business agendas, but the one thing that will kill an event in Manchester is an explicit attempt to progress your own agendas. Just meet, chat, see whether there is anything you can do for each other, if not just see what is going on.

People in London and New York don’t “get” this. They hate it. They need OpenCoffee. We hate the London events, and we should be glad about that. It’s what makes our community ours.

So, let’s design the perfect event for Manchester then:

• It should probably happen in the evenings when most people are about
• It should have a focus, but not an agenda
• The networking should be casual, not explicit
• Given it’s after work, some people will want beer, not coffee

Congratulations, we’ve just designed GeekUp. What’s that? You want investors in the room and a more structured event? Oh, OK, well, that’s NW Startup 2.0. You don’t want to pay for NW Startup? Well wait until the next BarCamp and we’ll try and get some investors in the room.

Remind me again, exactly what the point of OC would be if these events exist?

Co-working is likely to go on incidentally – it makes sense for those who want to explore ideas together and collaborate in a way that doesn’t feel like a wasted day. OpenCoffee – for Manchester at least – is dead.

If people – and I mean people prepared to actually show up, because personally I’m tired of doing the announcements knowing it’ll be dead – howl in protest I’ll run it one more time to see if there is real interest, but I suggest that for now we just let it go.

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.

This is the second part of my write-up from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Part I is here

The second session was Deborah Murrell from CLEO who talked about trying to deploy Moodle to every school in Cumbria & Lancashire. Some schools have used Moodle as their primary web-site CMS, particularly primary schools. It’s an unintended consequence of giving them something to work with, I think.

In terms of success, whilst the pedagogical case for VLEs has yet to be proved (i.e., nobody knows if they really do help learning), this experiment looks as though it’s helping kids get access to resources even when at home. The areas they need help with are mostly around MIS integration, but part of that problem is that the most dominant provider of school management software is a commercial developer who considers open source a bizarre anachronism.

CLEO is planning on working around e-Portfolios and identity management in the future, so it looks like it could be an interesting experiment for a whole range of VLE-related areas, all possible thanks to the very open nature of Moodle.

Ian Lynch of INGOTs was up next, trying to get us all interested in his new qualifications. One of my bugbears around ECDL and similar qualifications right now is that they think the World revolves around Microsoft. Ian’s work is quite intriguing, but there is still a way to go before he can really underpin the notion of “lifelong learning” around open source in my opinion – the material he has available is still aimed very much at the schools market. Still, every journey starts with a step and I’m sure this is going to go places in time.

Mike Partridge of Stockport LEA stepped up to the plate next and made us ask questions about the nature of technology in the education system. He talked about how since the 1980s technology has led and education has had to play catch-up – he’s now interested in looking at ways that pedagogical frameworks can be embodied in the technology. He talked about social learning, individual learning styles, and independent discovery of skills.

In fact, if he wasn’t from the LEA, I could have easily assumed he was basically advocating Democratic Schooling. He is from the LEA though, so I think it’s more a case of trying to find a way to let teachers and students better understand each other.

GeekUp-regular Richard Smedley from M6-IT then talked about deploying open source systems into schools to the level of one per two children.

Some of the techniques he’s using are pretty innovative, such as recycling old hardware into thin clients to reduce financial needs. The figures he cited were pretty amazing as well – a fit-out that might have needed £100,000 using commercial software and brand new hardware, he was able to complete for £6,000 leaving enough cash lying in the school’s coffers for a building extension and a new part-time teacher.

It’s figures like that which are going to have a real political impact on open source in schools, and it was the politics of the situation we turned to after lunch, which we’ll get to in Part III.

I’m not posting many articles this week (either on the blog, or on the main site) because I’m doing an awful lot of running around the North of England.

Yesterday was Leeds for the GeekUp over there. I didn’t get a chance to speak to as many of the locals as I wanted, but I think I’ll be heading over there again in future. In fact, I know I’ll definitely make it for November, and hope to make it for December. It was busy last night – numbers were probably higher than the Manchester event last week. Next week it’s the Liverpool GeekUp, which I’m also hoping to make.

Today it’s meetings around Manchester with patches of downtime for coding, and tonight it’s mashup* over in Sale which I’m looking forward to. I’m not sure what to expect of the talks, but it should be interesting to hear what some of the more ‘suit’ types are doing right now. If you make it, hope to see you there. If not, I’ll hopefully be blogging it anyway. If you’re a geek and the £25 entry fee is causing you problems (we were all students living on Pot Noodles once), let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Lee Strafford who is willing to help you out.

Tomorrow, it’s Liverpool and the Open Schools Alliance event I wrote about on O’Reilly GMT at the weekend. That’s a whole new area of interest for me, but I’m starting to realise that open source in schools is going to matter. IT skills in schools in general is going to matter, in fact – the current stance is that computers are black boxes not to be meddled with, and that’s going to have dire impact on our technical culture a decade from now. I feel like we’re letting a generation of potential geeks down right now.

Normally when on the road I’m able to get a reasonable amount of work done – I don’t drive, so trains with handy power sockets are my preferred mode of transport – but this week is proving difficult. Therefore, make the most of the peace and quiet.

Thing I hate most about being constantly on the move: not having a decent home-cooked meal. Vegetarian options on the move are dire and mostly involve cheese. Bah.

Andrew Disley and I got asked to give some background on the geek scene in Manchester by Craig Smith over at O’Reilly GMT. Craig published it just before the weekend (in hindsight, I should have sworn less and used proper punctuation), but it’s nice to see Manchester get some love from people outside of the local geography. I think most people who follow GeekUp will have seen the resulting piece by now, but if not, here it is:

Scenes: Manchester and the North-west

It would seem that in the post-Christmas gloom, the Manchester blog/geek community is keen to get together, get fed and get learning! If I were to attempt everything listed here, I’m sure I’d end up deciding I don’t really need my flat any more and just move to the next venue and catch some sleep there.

First up, there is the first dedicated Northwest Ruby User Group meeting happening tomorrow (Wednesday the 17th) evening. Things kick off around 18:30, and it should be interesting to see who turns up. The agenda for this talk is “What’s new in Rails 1.2” which means those of you too lazy to watch the svn commit logs on edge rails can catch up. It’s hosted by the lovely people at MDDA.

One of the highlights next week is the 2007 BCS/IET Turing Lecture – now fully booked, but will be available online afterwards, and I’ll sure to link to it here – which this year will be given by Grady Booch, Chief Scientist of IBM. The talk is entitled ‘The promise, the limits, and the beauty of software’ and the synopsis will sound compelling if you’ve liked some of my longer articles on this blog. Personally, I’m really looking forward to it.

Next up is the developer showcase for Windows Vista, back at MDDA again. This event is basically a sales showcase. I’m attending, I admit, to assess competition. I don’t think it does me any good to remain ignorant of what Microsoft are up to, even if I can’t as yet see a compelling reason to adopt the technology. This year is going to predominantly be about helping people move to open platforms for me, and Vista is certainly not that. Even so, I’ll attend and blog my rant on my return, I’m sure.

That’s followed on the same evening by the Manchester Geek Dinner over at the excellent Shimla Pinks which is strictly RSVP, 18:00 drinks for dinner at 19:30. For £20 you can get a decent meal with drinks at Shimlas and the food is renowned across the region. I must be a glutton for Microsoft punishment as the MS guys will be at that as well, so it would be great if a couple of Unix types want to attend and we can keep each other company. :-)

On the 30th January, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical guys have another in their series of talks, this time at Manchester Lecture Theatre in All Saints West (MMU) for Professor Simon Schaffer’s lecture on the relationship between the British Empire and Science. I like history, I like science, sounds better than staying in.

After that, if you want to see a second type of launch event intended as a more general showcase of Vista, with security highlights for developers, on the 31st you can head back to MDDA for a Manchester VBUG.net event which will have you covered.

After that lot, we return to another monthly cycle of regular meets. On the first Tuesday (the 6th) we’ll have the Manchester BSD Unix User Group which meets as ever at the Briton’s Protection on Great Bridgewater Street. This is very casual, and half the attendees don’t even run BSD any more, so feel free to come along if you just want to hang out in a pub with some Unix types. We don’t bite, providing I remembered the prescriptions.

The following Tuesday is the GeekUp meeting, on the second Tuesday as ever and always well attended. Right now, there is some debate on the mailing to replace the February meet-up with a – wait for it – roller skating disco meetup. I’m not making this up. It may be that this gets added on as an extra event, but some people want to do a replacement for the normal meeting. Check the website for updates.

If I think back to a few years ago, there was nothing in Manchester for geeks to attend other than 2600. Even last year there was little out there. It might be that they always were out there, but now word is getting around and so more people are discovering them. MDDA seem to be keen to get stuck in and lend a hand in terms of providing a venue, and the rest of us are certainly getting creative about what we want to meet up over. The tools out there – upcoming.org, the geekup afeeda, the mailing lists – are all helping too. 2007 looks like a good year to be a sociable geek in Manchester.