Open Tech Day (update)

06/07/2008 by nicola.

OpenTech schedule

No idea if presentations will be available or on presenters’ blogs etc. I found the sessions really useful, I don’t think I get nervous when attending conferences as an attendee but I was more bothered this time - being new to ‘higher level’ development and having seen how some online communities can be with ‘newbies’ but concerns were unfounded - everybody that I spoke to was great - interesting and helpful. Having conversations between sessions was just as helpful in terms of ideas and pulling thoughts together. Talked with some people about programming including the fragmentation around mobile phone development (and these are people who have actually experienced the real pain of it having actually developed stuff, I have only done to some extent with web design for different browsers - but this is far more complex).

Starting to think that as I develop with programming - if I can get to a foundational level of some sort with mobiles - being able to tell a computer (or mobile device) to do something and actually find a way of getting the computer/mobile to do it, could possibly be one of the greater freedoms I am likely to experience in my lifetime. Downside being that if you develop stuff, then people are going to come to you expecting bug fixes - wouldn’t want to be weighed down with that. Getting stuff out in beta, working with a community, get new releases out as soon as possible - seems to be the route to take.

Which leads into one of the great sessions about innovation and why nothing in IT is simple from Simon Wardley who said he was going to deliver 150 slides in 15 minutes. I didn’t count but wasn’t bothered - no death by powerpoint here. He explained that in IT - moving towards commoditisation - away from products to services - one of his slides showed about loads of different types of aas’s in existence (e.g. SAAS software as a service) He also explained that as information becomes more certain - i.e. case studies and best practices emerge, - you are moving further away from innovation and its strategic value drops -

Excellent point - one of my personal biggest frustrations working within learning technology - how many times do you get asked in a day when you explain about a new technology - show me examples and then even further - show me local/global/corporate/big4/academic/HE/surrey etc etc etc - which then brings us back to ‘risk’ and how to evaluate & manage it, at which point the momentum of innovation has moved on and gone elsewhere. Don’t think it means it doesn’t happen, you still experiment with new technologies and you can innovate as a result of evaluating your experiments - but you are not starting with a blank canvas.

Matt Webb (co-author of Mind Hacks) - session on interconnected, fascinating visualisation of information about his research into cybernetics and neuroscience - how people have connected with and developed technologies. He also has started drawing maps of connections between all the leading thinkers (& inventors) and how they were all connected over the last century - I hope he does get an opportunity to develop and publish his research further - its fascinating, all the links and patterns between people and the conversations, projects between them. I’m not doing justice to it here, because I know next to nothing about neuroscience, but his interconnected blog shows in more detail. Really amazing stuff ! Mind Hacks is definitely on my future reading list too.

The Android session was good - nothing amazingly new for me, interesting that software on a phone currently costs around 25% of handset development and has been increasing. Each application has its own process, shouldn’t lose state (i.e. when you restart or go back into, you don’t have to redo a lot of things from where the program code was last - at) and can be all be modified, reused. Michael Jennings mentioned that the developers from the $10m developer challenge, all get to keep their code and can do what they want with it - its not Google property. Discussion seems to continue about whether Android which should help with reducing fragmentation by providing this one open platform - might also experience fragmentation with Android handsets themselves - so the same old mobile development problem could continue ? (I don’t have an answer to this right now, will return to once I am further along with Python and I get further into Android)

Had completely random thought at this point - does anyone know of any research into eye-tracking patterns on mobile phones - i.e. whether we scan a mobile screen in the same way as a pc one? If anyone does and could point to - that would be really useful.

Linking data with W3C semantic web project - Tom Morris provided an overview of his involvement with this - I can’t provide a decent overview, need someone like Stephen Downes to explain it - but basically they are building data commons with RDF - RDF because its easier to combine multiple bits of data. Uses sparql - looks like SQL but isn’t. More info about linked data project and getting semantic.

There was a sponsored presentation from Tiddlywiki - I can’t make my mind up about whether I like Tiddlywiki or not, but it is very clever and fairly easy to use. I looked at it as part of a wiki project I think around a year ago - one of the main points is that it doesn’t require a server to edit it. They are now part of BT Osmosoft - there is a new product - ripplerap which is designed as a free, opensource - conference collaboration tool.

Using open source for local political campaigns - to save a bicycle path in Bristol. The campaign was run by using open source technologies to connect and collaborate with everyone - sourceforge hosted code -perl mining of council petitions -mapping -google docs for collaborative editing -pay as you go drupal hosting -pay as you go SIM card for the press contact - home printed stickers to put on buses -bulk scanning of FOI documents, leaflets etc .

They created videos on Youtube of people using the path regularly, videos of local MPs supporting their campaign, used the website and email from Google apps, to arrange events such as campaign walks along the path. They have scored a temporary victory but campaign is ongoing. Steve Loughran suggested creating a sourceforge for political campaigns with drop downs to quickly select choices for local or regional campaign - interesting idea. He also mentioned one downside - in that using open source means that your interaction with data is exposed i.e. government both locally and centrally can use it for data mining to get information about what you personally have been saying, doing and who you have been contacting.

UPDATE
Re using python and bits of string to fight arms dealers, this amazing story - Alexander Harrowell’s post available now - the power of open networks in 2008 is just - mindblowing! Don’t need any more reminders about whether its worthwhile or not which is my ultimate takeaway from yesterday.

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