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Category: Dotnorth

  • We Made (Another) BarCamp!

    Barcampleeds
    Wow. We did it again…We made another BarCamp 🙂

    Last year, we just had 28 days to prepare Leeds’ first unconference – and none of us had done this before. This year, we had a couple extra weeks and some sponsors already in the bag, but the team was less available, we’d scheduled an additional day’s talks and we were also committed to organising other events for LS1 – Leeds’ First International Web Festival.

    However, in a little under six weeks since announcing, and literally just hours before the doors opened, everything lined up for us. Most most importantly you all made BarCamp Leeds {2008}.

    We were a little worried that we didn’t manage to grow attendance and that the board didn’t fill up as fast as last year’s fifteen minute sprint – but actually, it helped the more reticent speakers find space later in the day when they’d summed up the courage to contribute…so here’re a few interesting snippets from the weekend…

    • We had 130 passes, 116 confirmed attendees and around 90 showed on the day. Sadly, though we registered more people this year, the turnout was about the same.
    • We estimated around a third of the crowd were new BarCampers, serendepitously ensuring we had new perspectives and contributors this time.
    • We gave out 80 grab bags, courtesy of Orange, including 50 USB mice from Yorkshire Forward (with some surprise integrated storage!) and 20 1GB USB drives from Orange.
    • We ordered 100 pastries, 25 bagels, 50+ tarts & cupcakes, 40 muffins, 55 pizzas, countless trays of M&S sandwiches and sushi, lotsa sweets, beverages and one jar of Nutella and some Jelly Beans (to satisfy Deb!)
    • We managed to maintain a live linkup with BarCamp Omaha for just over an hour, greeting our American cousins as they booted up their local BarCamp a few hours after us
    • There was a definite tilt towards startup and entrepreneurial sessions this year, as well as a handful of design and media topics. Notably, there were several roundtable discussions, which proved to be some of the most popular and insightful sessions. If last year’s theme was showing what you know – this year was certainly about translating that knowledge into something valuable. Tim Langley,
    • We think there’s a definite correlation between the higher quality talks this year and the sushi lunch – just shows what brain food can do, even for supersmart geeks 😉 Thankfully, nothing went to waste with everyone taking bits and pieces home with them..not quite Carbon Neutral, but certainly Nutritionally Neutral.
    • We had no prie draws this year (hey, everyone was a winner with those Orange schwag bags!), but the BBC’s Ian Forrester and Dom Hodgson deserve special recognition for running seven sessions between them!
    • This was our first weekend BarCamp. We wondered if people would come back for Sunday and we weren’t disappointed; with around half of the previous day’s attendees returning for Day Two. So many, that we had to order a lunch we hadn’t planned on, but Tom Hughes-Croucher from Yahoo! offered to cover the order.

    The personal highlights for me included…

    • A roundtable discussion, chaired by Mark Ng, on bootstrapping tech communities. Mark is currently spinning up Dorset Digital dotdorset and was interested in the journeys Manchester and Leeds had taken in growing tech communities from the grassroots. Paul Robinson and I related the legacies of both cities, problems with investment and possible futures. The room almost polarised into those of us seeking to attract investors and those wishing a different path. Yahoo’s Tom Hughes-Croucher hit upon the notion of taking a trade mission of Northern startups to Cambridge and London as well as making the North an attractive scouting destination for VCs. A forehead-slapping obvious idea that we hadn’t considered previously, but we will collectively explore – Yuuguu and Treasuremytext are already interested 🙂
    • Ian Forrrester’s ‘Ask The BBC (Anything)’ session on Sunday morning was a feisty and illuminating debate on the role of the BBC across the North, with the recent move to Salford Quays and the dangers of the BBC stifling content producers whilst also having a valuable role to play in regeneration as a trusted national institution.
    • Hanging out with the OpenStreetMap group, including Cloudmade’s Sean MacDonald, and riffing ideas for locative collaborations with Leeds City Council’s Chief Architect John Thorp as well as Snapture – a proposed locative photoarchive of the city.
    • Tips from Mark Rushworth on migrating my Typepad blog to WordPress, in his workshop on Link Building for SEO.
    • Paul Key’s very hands-on session on music production using Ableton Live.
    • Simon Wheatley’s fantastic ‘My Last Project’ session with a bunch of 20:20 talks on presenter’s last project. I really wanted to contribute to this and thought about re-running on Sunday morning, but I just never found any time to prepare 🙁
    • Hanging out with old friends Ian Hay, Paul Key, Mark Taylor and Dean Vipond as well as new friends Paul Stringer and Katie Lips 😀

    Everybody’s Blogging About It…

    We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat…
    We’re already starting to think about LS2 and next year‘s web festival – we’d really like for ‘LSx‘ to grow into something like the Leeds International Film Festival and perhaps even SxSW…

    BarCamp will be central to LS2, likely taking place in June or July, at a larger venue, coincide with a few other (secret) plans and perhaps beginning with an evening dinner and intro session so everyone can hit the ground running on Saturday.

    Again, you guys made BarCamp Leeds {2008} work, so we’re counting on your
    help, your ideas, insights and advice for BarCamp Leeds {2009}!

    Lastly, we’d like to put a shout out to people like Linda Broughton of nti and Leeds Met, Katherine & Johnathan of Kooji Creative, Richard Hamer of Blue Sky PR, Mohsin Ali‘s 300+ photos, Yuuguu’s Phil Hemstead, Rockstar Games, Stewart Townsend from Sun, Ian Green at Green Communications, Plusnet‘s Dean Sadler, Stickyeyes, Apple and Adobe for all contributing their time and resources to make BarCamp possible for the rest of us. And of course, to all of you.

    See you all next Summer 🙂 

  • Girl Geek Dinner {Leeds}

    Lydias_crowd_2Last night saw Leeds’ first Girl Geek Dinner and the third of eight events taking place throughout the city’s inaugural web festival at Brisbane, LS1.

    Around sixty girls and a half dozen guys squeezed into the night’s venue, The Study, on the third floor of the Living Room. Though the heavens had opened up with torrential rain early in the evening, inside, the room had a warmth and palpable buzz in anticipation of the evening ahead, and is also a really comfortable place to be, thanks to the carpeting from a large collection of quality rugs, which can be found online and is used to remodel the room.

    Truth be told, coorganisers, Linda Broughton, Maz Hardey and I weren’t sure what to expect; though we’d registered just under seventy people, we worried that the weather deter attendees; we really had no idea how many would actually show and what kind of geeks to expect. Fortunately, The Study was standing room only as early as 6pm – I think we only had 3-4 no-shows – and was buzzing with conversation.

    Maz opened up proceedings with a video introduction from the founder of the Girl Geek movement, Sarah Blow, who set a challenge to surface strategies for attracting more women (and men) to the industry.

    Lydia Machel opened with the first talk, attempting to define ‘geek’ and speaking about seeing ‘code as poetry’ (a sentiment that many in the room emphatically supported), along with the journey she’d taken through various disciplines to her current focus on developing braille music tools.

    Next up Lorna Mitchell spoke about Professional Development for Girl Geeks (slides here) nothing unfamiliar, but a useful and pragmatic round up of observations of career progression, mentoring and training – which actually wasn’t gender specific, but nontheless useful to the crowd.

    To close out, Maz opened up the mic to the floor, with brief plugs for the British Computer Society, GeekUp Leeds and UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology from Hannah Dee, Deb Bassett and Ruth Wilson respectively.

    After the talks I managed to catch up with a bunch of interesting people –  Cornelia Boldyreff, a professor of software engineering at the University of Lincoln, working with OLPC’s Sugar operating system; intellectual property lawyers Louise Handley and Eloise Corcoran and Yorkshire Forward’s digital industries manager Emma Frost.

    Perhaps what was most memorable about the event wasn’t the concentration of female expertise and talent, but that the group represented a startingly wide range of demographics, skills and professions – all of whom are critical to the creative and digital industries.

    You can catch some photos of the evening here – and look out for the next GGD Leeds, sometime in November 🙂

  • LS1: The (first) Leeds Web Festival

    Lsone_2
    As London’s blogoshpere bloviates about the unfolding story of that city’s Silicon Roundabout, it’s easy to overlook the progress others are making to bootstrap technology ecospheres elsewhere in the UK.

    Leeds is by no means London, Boston or San Francisco, but the one of Britain’s emerging city regions is quietly orienting itself to the future by bootstrapping at the grassroots; kickstarting new ventures, firing up coworking spaces, attracting modest VC funds and starting to find its voice.

    And this is nothing new. In the UK, the first dotcom boom was rooted firmly in Leeds as well as London. Giants such as Freeserve, Ananova and Energis provided large pieces of the consumer and communications infrastructure that delivered the web to people’s homes, supported by one of the UK’s most vibrant media and academic hubs.

    But Leeds isn’t about to dwell on its past contributions – we’re about defining the future…

    Tommorow marks the start of Leeds’ first web festival – LS1 – a bunch of unconferences, keynotes and meetups that almost accidentally landed in the same fifteen day period of August, but which the respective organisers agreed would make for a great platform to show off what the city is contributing to web culture and commerce.

    All the respective organisers  – myself, Linda Broughton, Jeremy Jarvis, Chris Garrett, Tim Waters, Deb Bassett – are hoping you’ll visit our city and come away with some new insights and ideas. We really hope you’ll drop by.

    Friendships will be forged, deals struck, ventures launched and ideas transformed into memes. Leeds is not a tech nexus yet – we’re a baby hub –  but we’re building the infrastructure for innovation and invention that’ll help us find a place in the future of the web.

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {July}

    Opencoffeejuly_2This month, OpenCoffee was a little quieter than usual, with only around twelve people arriving throughout the morning…infact the smallest crowd since we started out in June last year. I’m wondering if people are finding Old Broadcasting House less reachable or pleasant…or if the weather was just too good to be hanging around with a bunch of geeks…!

    But bigger isn’t neccessarily better and there was actually quite an interesting and varied group of people about throughout the morning…

    • Fresh from a trip to Apple’s WWDC event as well as Las Vegas and Hawaii, the University of York’s Maz Hardey rejoined OpenCoffee after a long absences of several months. Maz is about done with her PhD and I imagine will be ramping up her social media consultancy work at White Cat and also advisory roles with startups such as moonri.se…Maz and Linda also suggested that the days before BarCamp Leeds this August might make for a great time to run the city’s first Girl Geek Dinner. Sadly, even though Maz was around in the afternoon working in met:space, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk 🙁
    • We managed to tempt back regional venture capitalist Ed French, from the Rising Stars Growth Fund; Ed also took the chance to grab a coworking hotdesk to work at during the afternoon.
    • I noticed a recent posting on the global coworking mailing list by Reach Further’s Liz Cable and invited her alog to this month’s meetup. Liz’s newly launched venture Beyond9to5 is looking to provide support and advice for those working from home.
    • I had another fascinating chat with Arturo Servin, also studying for his PhD at the University of York, on the state of the tech sector in Mexico and how his hopes to encourage the kind of grassroots activism he’s seeing here in the UK…incidentally, Arturo just pointed out that Mexico’s Telcel are including MacBook’s as part of their iPhone tarriffs!

    Kinda serendepitously almost everyone this month was a Twitter user – @lindabroughton, @lizcable, @edfrench, @mazphd, @katielips, @ikisai & @the_real_r2d2 – all but Glen Hopkinson…but we had him killed 😉

    Join us next month on Tuesday 5th August for OpenCoffee Leeds {August}…this meetup will be the opener for what might become ‘Leeds Web Week’, including OpenCoffee, an evening keynote from Fred Wilson, BarCamp Leeds {2008} and another Open Street Mapping party…all to be confirmed!

    Do let us know if you can make it next month 🙂

  • Leeds Met: Innovation North Showcase 2008

    Itpspringshow08
    Damn – looks like I’ll miss the ITP Spring Show again this year (no cheap flights to NYC..grrr!) but I’ll again have the pleasure of reviewing the work of my alma mater at the VIP Evening of this year’s Innovation North Showcase at Leeds Met.

    Inn08I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of last year’s graduates, so I’m expecting a little more this year…just a few days ago I met with a number of this year’s post-graduates from the Creative Technology programme; it was really gratifying to see that they all wanted to startup companies around their research work…

    • Stefan Phillips is looking to create a sound design business, providing guidance on the use of audio cues in web, broadcast and radio media. I was a little dubious about web, but suggested looking into writing thought leadership pieces on sound design principles for interactive media – perhaps UIs for consumer electronics is more appropriate.
    • Juan Pablo Delgadillo, known as JP – had been applying his background in architectural studies to 3D visualisations. JP and I got talking about how his skills could help in a potential collaboration with Leeds City Council in visualising and democratising the development of the city centre; perhaps as part of the proposed ‘map room’ the City’s toying with. Tarique managed to surprised JP by explaining that his painstakingly crafted environments could be rapidly transformed into real-time, live environment with just a little bit of tweaking!

    So <sighs> maybe I’ll make it to ITP next Spring…third time lucky huh?

  • Dotnorth Snippets…

    A quick roundup of techly-geek things happening across the North…

    • The results of the Leeds Flickr Group’s Photoshop CS3 course are online…
    • Look out for Andy Mitchell’s GTDInbox, a Firefox addon that mods Gmail to reflect the Getting Things Done philosophy.
    • Don’t forget April’s GeekUp Leeds, back at The Lounge after a couple month’s away at OBH and The Living Room…
    • Early May also sees the <yawn> Yorkshire Digital Awards </yawn>…needless to say, the vibrant grassroots communities of Leeds and  Sheffield will be ignored in favour of old media dinosaurs and telcos.
    • Registration has opened for b.TWEEN08, also in mid-June.
    • Sensoria, Sheffield’s week-long festival of film and music, Sensoria, is coming up in mid-April.

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {April} + Coworking Day

    CakecrowdLast month’s
    OpenCoffee {March}     could have been a bit of a downer, with only a handful of people attending. I’m still wondering if I shoulda canceled it while I was in the US for ETech and eComm, but sounds like 10-15 people did make it out to Loftart so it was worth keeping the doors open 🙂

    This month, inspired by Paul Robinson’s mashup of coworking and OpenCoffee in Manchester, we relocated to Leeds Met’s Old Broadcasting House, spiritual home to the city’s geek communities; from coworkers and Flickr groups, to BarCamp and a recent Geekup!

    Though OpenCoffee started slow, albeit wih a handful of new faces, about thirty minutes later the cafe area of OBH was buzzing with around 25-26 attendees, so the venue change didn’t affect the numbers – phew! So this month…

    • Telco 2.0’s Keith McMahon made an appearance, sounds like he’s helping the NetStart guys with some telco-nomics for their platform project. Keith’s in great company at Telco 2.0 with luminaries such as Martin Geddes and my old boss Dr. Norman Lewis; incidentally, they published a great post on digital music business models just the day before.
    • I had a long chat with Leo Fowler, Technical Director of Kensei and one of OBH’s newest coworkers. It sounds as though Kensei will shortly be providing media hosting, management and delivery technology as a white-label service, but are looking for venture funding to grow quickly. I’m not quite sure what they do yet, but they seem to have big ideas and ambition…a startup to keep an eye on for sure.
    • My friend Ross Brown made it over for a too-short half hour, but long enough for us to talk through some editorial ideas for Dotnorth and the timeline for spinning things up.
    • Though Leeds Met student, Stuart Childs had been along to a previous OpenCoffee, this time he brought along his friend Chris, so we, um, doubled the student uptake? Seriously, where are all the students at Leeds various geek+tech meetups?

    We had a few mixed reports on the success of Paul’s coworking day over in Manchester, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Most OpenCoffee attendees just wanted a peek at the facilities. Other’s stuck around to chat, share ideas and get a little work done…

    • Neil Wilson who’d travelled over from Halifax’s Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre stuck around to get his email – we spoke for a while about the region’s digital industries. The EWIC is oddly named (and located!) but it appears to be providing some usefully priced not-quite-working facilities over on the tops of the Pennines 🙂
    • NTI’s Linda Broughton and I met to discuss our shared plans for 2008 regarding the coworking community and the city’s startup/innovation community.
    • My former colleague Mark Sailes was progressively irritated by me trying to convince him to buy a Mac…Ihe spent the rest of the day coding up some proof-of-concept work for Vlume.com. I had more success convincing Gavin Sweet to go Mac, once he saw Windows XP running under Parallels – yay!
    • NetStart‘s Gavin Sweet, Lee Strafford and Marco Potesta convened the NetStart board along with Keith McMahon.

    The coworking afternoon had no agenda – only to give OpenCoffee attendees a taster of the facilities and also give an opportunity to work, meet or just hang out…I think it worked out in that regard.

    However, I’m unsure whether to bundle both events together going forward…OBH is a little tricker to get to, for parking and distance from the core of the City. There’s perhaps a place for separate monthly ‘OpenCoffee’ and ‘Open Coworking’ days a couple of weeks apart…or maybe we do run a single day as a sorta BarCamp-lite each month. No food, just coffee and cakes. No sessions, unless you want to convene one. We need to think a little more…

    In the meantime, here’s a peek at Broadcasting Place, the area that’s taking shape around Old Broadcasting House.

    See y’all next month!

  • (Dot)Northern Snippets

    More goodies…

    • Ray Kurzwell – yes Ray Kurzwell – has been added to the roster of speakers for Newcastle’s Thinking Digital in May. I don’t think the Singularity will emerge from the North East, but it’s possible to argue that Newcastle United players are transhuman 😉 Oh yeah, <coughs> Greg Dyke too.
    • Media Lab Europe lives! MLE alumni, Stefan Agamanolis – and leader of its Human Connectedness group –  relaunched much of MLE’s philosophy in the ‘Highlands & Islands‘ as the Distance Lab.
      OK, it’s waaaaay North, but it still counts 🙂

      Distance Lab has apparently been
      around a couple years, but I’m ashamed to admit I only discovered it today – thanks to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Stefan oversaw some of my favourite projects at MLE, including Desktop Subversibles, iCom and tunA and I’m sure the new lab will be doing equally great things. I always thought Negroponte picked the wrong country for MLE – the UK was a better home…though I woulda argued for Leeds or Manchester 😉

  • Think and a Drink

    Thinkandadrink
    Last Thursday I was invited by Gareth Rushgrove to speak on a panel at Codeworks’ Think and a Drink event in Newcastle.

    Each month Codeworks orients the evening around a theme of interest for the (paying) audience…this month, the focus was on Web 2.0 & Business with a pair of talks from Gareth Rushgrove and BT’s Chief Web Services Architect, Paul Downey. Both talks largely focussed on Web 2.0 in general, rather than a particular focus on business or enterprise – that’s OK, maybe I misunderstood the brief 🙂

    The panel session – which also included Hedgehog Lab‘s Sarat Pediredla – was much more broad ranging, exploring disruptive innovation, startup culture, routes to investment, consumer technology’s impact on the enterprise and the positive impact of that on productivity.

    Some highlights included…

    • Meeting Codeworks’ CEO, Herb Kim for coffee just before the event – Herb has a really interesting background and seems to be making quite an impact with Codeworks’ role as a publicly-funded shepherd of the industry. I’m not sure how Codeworks compares to the MDDA or CSY, but they certainly put bmedi@ and Leeds Media to shame.
    • A cute demo of mojo from Paul Downey.
    • Meeting Sunderland-based Dutch entrepreneur, Dirk Kok of IsMyMusic.com as well as Codeworks’ PR & Comms Manager Lewis Harrison and Aoife Ross.
    • A couple of guys who wanted me to explain how money could be made from social networks and open-source; I explained that I didn’t feel Facebook had longevity and that companies like Amazon, eBay, Google and countless startups are minting money from the utilisation of open source to create new value 🙂

    My general impression is that the North East seems to be where Leeds and Manchester were perhaps in late 2006 and where Sheffield and Liverpool are right now. There’s a lotta energy and optimism but Newcastle’s tech+creative+digital communities are just starting to get a feel for how to find each other and collaborate; I’m pretty sure meetups like Refresh Newcastle, Think & A Drink and the upcoming Thinking Digital conference are only gonna make this a whole lot easier.

    —

    It’s easy to forget that the four other cities of the North are all handily arranged along the M62 and M1, less than an hour’s drive from each other. The North East is maybe physically more distant, but that could help avoid an echo chamber effect and lead to some distinctive digital culture for Newcastle and its neighbours.

    If the M62 corridor can evolve into the North’s Silicon Valley, perhaps the North East will be its Seattle or Portland 🙂

  • You Go Girl!

    Girlgeek

    Maz, Linda and I started talking about a Leeds chapter of Sara Sarah Blow‘s Girl Geek Dinner a few months ago as a response to the modest turnout of women at tech/geek meetups in Yorkshire. We’d planned to shoot for January, then February filled up, so we figured March.

    But we’ve been beaten by Valerie do Delonibus!

    The North’s first Girl Geek Dinner is due to take place on 12th March in Manchester. Seriously, Valerie’s been thinking about this for some time and thanks to an introduction by Manoj, we all figured it’d be great to collaborate and run Leeds and Manchester events together. I hope we’ll be able to follow Valerie’s inaugural event with a GGD in April or May but I’m sure she’s gonna put together a great evening and I can’t wait to go 🙂

    You can find out who else is attending at the Facebook group or register at the official site.