A few hours ago I received a cryptic email from Lovebytes containing a single evocative image…
Following the link took me to a windswept 360° panorama high in the hills above what appears to be Sheffield.
The implied adventure and mystery of this invitation is sublime. No noisy declarations of sponsors or speakers just a time, a direction and the confidence that you'll follow the trail… I think I will.
This weekend sees the UK's first DIYbio summit take place at Manchester's Madlab, founded my good friends – Hwa Young and Asa Calow.
The DIYbio movement intends to democratise biology and enable "citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety" and the summit is part of Manchester's Science festival and includes speakers from Genspace, Hackteria and Transit Lab.
I've been following the work of synthetic biologists like Drew Endy and the Open Wetware Lab for many years, but it was back in Spring 2009, when Asa and I attended the Real Hackers Program RNA workshop at ETech in San Diego, that I saw that Asa had the bio bug too. Over the course of a couple of hours, we were taught how to hack E.Coli into various bio applications, by Ginkgo BioWorks' Reshma Shetty.
Through Hwa's been running various DIYbio meetups recently – includng an octopus dissection workshop! – it's great to see high impact work like the summit being concieved and delivered by the Madlab crew. Indeed, as Monica starts to formulate the 2012 edition of LSxJunior, Asa and I are keen to run a workshop on 'genetics and DNA sequencing for kids'.
Find out more about the DIYbio Summit at the Madlab site.
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I wonder if any of the outputs from the DIYbio summit will find their way across town to ian Forrester's Last Weekend Dining Club…
In establishing CARBON:imagineering, a little over three years ago, one of our goals was to reinvigorate the technology ecosphere in Leeds and more broadly, Northern England.
In the course of this journey, I've come to believe that cities, and our understanding of the concept of a city, are critical to this, and other wider projects. There's a subtext of anti-urbanism that lingers in British culture, yet cities as social and physical constructs carry within them the seeds of prosperity, happiness and almost counter-intuitively, the "green-ness" that most of us seek. Also, for Brits, we identify more closely with cities than city regions, counties or the home nations.
Being involved in helping Old Broadcasting House flourish at the heard of a vibrant technology scene; engaging in free-form discussions with Leeds' civic architect John Thorp and chief economic officer Paul Stephens; visualising the rebirth of Temple Works; observing the civic passions of people like Matt Edgar, Emma Bearman and others; all illustrate a palpable exhilaration at shaping the future of an old city, with deep problems.
Yesterday I was asked by the Renaissance Leeds team to comment on innovation strategies for the city; what is it, why it's important and how we ‘do’ innovation. I immediately though of GOOD magazine's series of Ideas for Cities, a 'continuing brainstorm on the future of cities'. Some of the more compelling ideas, particularly relevant to the tech industry, included…
Tech
Mission; working with a large tech company – say Google – to
establish a location for startups, meetups, popup classes, new projects
& lectures.Decentralised
Design Hubs & Work Centers; Neighborhoods become local
“offices” and create workplaces to support and encourage employees
to work in these hubs rather than driving or commuting.Incubation
Infrastructure;
Cities partner with property owners to outfit homes and workspaces with broadband, connectivity
and computers as well as meeting rooms and to help nurture entrepreneurial activity.Talent Districts;
Converting neighborhoods into districts for
personal and civic development, encouraging residents to win residency, subject to meeting a developmental and goal.Free-agent Portfolio; Citizens collect "lifetime learning points" for skills and qualifications with civic administrations providing a "talent agency" and infrastructure to employ those earned credentials and progress people along a career path. I can almost envisage points as an augmented reality game 🙂
Always-on Service; a civic "call centre" staffed to answer any question of concern at
any time – like NYC's 311.
Zooming out further into the future, Matt Jones' The
City As A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future underlines the
powerful notion that cities are perhaps the eternal solution for humanity.
I'm uncertain of the best courses of action to recommend – witness Leeds' calamitous Clarence Dock experiment – but I sense we're not even asking the the appropriate questions of ourselves as citizens, but offloading this responsibility onto civic leaders.
I don't really remember where I first came across the TED conference but in recent years, I've quickly become hooked on the eponymous talks and, in recent months, TED seems to be serendipitously intersecting with my career in many wonderful ways…
The speakers list looks awesome, with Stephen Fry, Rory Bremner, Karen Armstrong, Stefana Broadbent, John Lloyd, Daniel Pink & Aza Raskin amongst others. Oddly, for a tech conference, delegates are discouraged from using laptops or phones during sessions; Nokia have suggested even a pen and paper might be frowned upon. It'll certainly be a novelty maintaining focus and attention for hours at a time. I couldn't even do that at university…like a laptop, I tend to fall asleep after extended periods of inactivity.
Regardless it's a real privilege to be invited to TED Global, and along with a pair of Foo Camps, I'm just a Web2Summit away from my exclusive tech conference treble.
Like Foo Camp, TED is subject to accusations of elitism and exclusivity. Ironically, those are the qualities that make each gathering special. There's a kind of meritocracy at work, generally driven by achievement, but 'by-invitation-only' conferences do make me slightly uncomfortable. On the other hand, Foo's philosophy of asking invitees to select next year's group does ensure there's a constant churn of people and ideas each year. Today's Times, has a useful analysis of the culture of TED at TED conference offers ideas to change the planet – in 18 minutes.
Now will the official TED bag be a Timbuk2 or from Rickshaw Bagworks…
Yesterday was a perfect day for Leeds' emerging digital industries…
FOWA's Leeds stopover will be one of the tentpoles for LS2, the second Leeds web festival. Next week, we're hoping to tell you a little more about the other great events we have planned for May and June 🙂
I've had a great, warm relationship with O'Reilly Media over the last half decade or so, hanging out at various ETech and Foo Camp events, striking up friendships with their people, helping plan both ETel conferences and contributing to Web2Expo Europe. Tim O'Reilly and I recently spoke about his background and it turns out his mother is from my hometown of Bradford, a place of which he has a lotta fond childhood memories. Indeed, Tim recorded a special message for us back in November…
With that in mind, it's a total pleasure to bring my favourite tech/media luminaries to my adopted hometown of Leeds for their first Ignite evening in the UK, a rapid-fire succession of lightning talks, pioneered by Brady Forrest in Seattle. Ignite organiser Craig Smith, of O'Reilly UK, was keen to hold the first O'Reilly-sponsored Ignite in the North of England, bringing together people from around the M62 corridor and the North East. Craig's originally from Huddersfield and along with Tim's heritage, has helped to locate the event in the heritage of O'Reilly's own people as well as celebrating the region's emerging grassroots tech scene.
We're expecting around a hundred attendees – from London, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle – and have scheduled eighteen talks in two blocks throughout the evening. We're really proud of the quality of speakers and their submissions – it really wouldn't be possible without their efforts. We have speakers from local startups, international charities, venture capital firms, national broadcasters, academia and healthcare. Wow…and wow!
As well as a great mix of cultural, creative and technological sessions, there'll be opportunities to hang out, socialise and also appreciate the work of some local artists (just before we open up)…here's the schedule for the evening:
17:00 Outofoffice: Art Installation
18:00 Doors Open: Drinks, Snacks & Networking
19:00 Katie Lips: Bringing Social to Coffee on iPhone
19:05 Jeff Allen : IT in Africa
19:10 Tim Panton: Don't forget voice! Telephony hacks for web 2.0 hackers
19:15 Michael Sparks: Embracing concurrency for fun, utility & simpler code
19:20 Dean Vipond: Perfection in design
19:25 Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino: Could hardware hacking save us?
19:30 Ian Pringle: No News Is Good News
19:35 Dominic Hodgson: The Future of search
19:40 Ed French: Funding for technology startups
19:45 Break & refreshments
20:05 Tom Scott: My Life In Twenty Graphs
20:10 Stuart Childs, Richard Garside, Dave Lynch:
FriiSpray Digital Grafitti with IR tracking
20:15 Katie Brown: Recovery 2.0 – Digital Inclusion & developing social models of recovery in practice
20:20 Arturo Servin: Practical Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
20:25 Glen Smith: Mass customisation and the one-to-one future
20:30 Guy Dickinson: The Future Of Reading
20:35 Philip Hemsted: Psycho teams and theory of mind
20:40 James Boardwell: James Boardwell: From patterns to patterns!
20:45 Ian Forrester: Tweethookup
20:50 Wrap Up
21:00 Close
Ignite will also be a great example of where Leeds' coworking community is flourishing, particularly the residents of our venue at Old Broadcasting House. Kensei Media will be providing a live HD webcast of the event with True Media filming each presentation for later publication online. So if you can't make it on Thursday, we'll have everything available online within a few days 🙂
We'd also like to thank local brand an interaction designer Dean Vipond for help with print design, Sun Microsystems's Startup Essentials programme for kindly sponsoring the evening's drinks and nti Leeds for the use of Old Broadcasting House.
See you all next Thursday evening – in the meantime, Leeds will also be playing host to another GeekUp event as well as Katie Lips' workshops on The Amazing iPhone and Going Social.
The festivities of last month’s sophomore BarCamp in Sheffield, prompted sponsor Yorkshire Forward to offer a £500 prize to attendees who could best promote the city. We’ve already seen entries ranging from terror karaoke to hypnotic brain loops.
So here’s my entry, paying homage to the city’s steelworking heritage, it’s celebrated celluloid child – The Full Monty – and it’s bright future, currently very visibly ‘under construction’.
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Thanks to J.J. Abrams for shooting a bunch of steelworkers and promptimg me to learn to use iMovie 🙂
Something interesting’s afoot in Leeds, as a group of the city’s digital artists prepare to record its first geo-located album, Our City, Our Music.
We’re all accustomed to certain ‘geo-retarded’ music only being available digitally in the US, but what Ben Dalton, Megan Smith and Ben Halsall are proposing is to shoot a couple dozen videos around the streets of the city – using HP’s Mscape – capturing the contributions of local performers, artists, residents and filmmakers in a collective production.
Mscape’s an interesting choice, retrofitting GPS-enabled devices to encode audio and video with locative data at the point of recording. Indeed, Our City, Our Music is the winning project a contest organised by Just-b, HP Labs and the Arts Council.
Throughout the coming year, the group will be shooting twelve live videos (one a month?) with the hope that local filmmakers and bands will volunteer to contribute to each segment of the project, providing a kinda locative, musical narrative to the city…and I think other cities if the project is a success.
Uploading your music video to YouTube is a cost-effective way to promote your video. It doesn’t require a huge budget, unlike other promotional methods such as TV commercials or billboards. If you want your video to have a bigger impact, you can try https://themarketingheaven.com/buy-youtube-views/ to buy youtube views and in that way you can reach a large audience and potentially generate more revenue.
Volunteers have until 4th January to apply…head on over to www.ourcityourmusic.com for more…
Wow, it’s almost four weeks since this month’s edition of OpenCoffee Leeds, which also happened to be the opening event of LS1, our first Leeds web festival. At last month’s event, we just had a couple dozen – albeit interesting – people, but this time around we were back at the 25-ish level of attendance that we’re used to and the room was buzzing again. So, what of the most interesting conversations of the morning…
Also lurking in the background were Jane Lambert, The Hodge, Stuart Childs, Warren Slingsby, Katherine & Johnny from Kooji Creative, Tarique Naseem and nti Leeds’ Geoff Gifford who kindly provided the coffee & cake.
You can see some of Craig Smith’s photos from this month’s event here and here (thanks to Craig for the photo above!), and please join us in a couple days time on Tues 2nd for OpenCoffee {September}.
