Category Archives: events

#opentech 2013 – a game of two halves

May 19, 2013eventsopentechJukesie

Yesterday I attended #opentech (well some of it) for I think the third time. It is something of a unique event these days I think – on paper it looks like a pretty normal tech event but when you look a bit closer you see just how special it is. In some ways it feels like it is from another time – a more techno-hippy version of the wider world of the web.

It is determinedly old school in its organisation – I love the fact that is a fiver on the door There are dozens of high quality speakers throughout the day which many a £1000 entry conference would kill for though despite this at least for me a lot of the joy of the event is the conversations in the bar and corridors.

I was actually early for a change so I managed to find a seat in the Main Hall and settled in for a morning of talks.

The day kicked off with a bit of a ‘what I did last summer’ talk from @russs (is that enough S’s?) and the geek festival in a field he and friends organisation – Electromagnetic Fields.

All in all it was a very impressive undertaking, though the guys are clearly not going to become location scouts anytime soon – choosing a field next to a motorway, a sewage plant and in danger of flooding maybe not the wisest – thankfully the wind was blowing the sewage smell away from the camp! They supplied power AND high speed wifi to 300 people in tents for a weekend of hacking and beer (with a bar under the M1!). In fact the wifi provided by the 30 metre microwave mast they installed and the network routers hidden in portaloos was so good they were upset that the bandwidth didn’t get worked harder!

They are going to give it another go in 2014 (September-ish) though at a different location and aiming for more like 900 people!! Check the project out on Twitter at @emfcamp

[as an aside it sounded a lot like a scaled up version of that Big Bathcamp Mike arranged a few years ago at Rutland and I seem to remember him having an idea for a Geek festival so another one to cross off the to-do list mate!]

The second talk was something of a love letter to the NHS though to be honest it took a bit of a while to get to any kind of point. The speaker clearly had something of a reputation as a bit of a showman but I found his style a bit difficult to engage with even if when he got to the point I found the core of the presentation really interesting – using open data to identify spending patterns in the NHS and in particular spotting where the NHS trusts aren’t taking advantage of the saving offered by generic drugs and are instead still in the pocket of big pharma. He showed some genuinely interesting maps (I especially liked that they had been filtered so as not to just follow local populations)

which really illustrated his points nicely and were a fine example of simple but effective visualising of data – something I am clearly interested in these days.

After a short break it was time for a GOV.UK double header. Tom Loosemore was first up giving a whistle stop tour of the work of GDS which was an impressive mix of light hearted, politic and making some serious points.

I’ve followed the work of GDS closely since before it was actually GDS (I was lucky enough to see the Alpha before it launched and even did the original ‘alphagov’ Wikipedia page ) and I know a few people involved so it wasn’t exactly new ground for me but there some new nuggets amongst it. The fact GDS can veto appointments at some level (I missed what) is huge – forcing the Civil Service to put digitally savvy people in to senior roles not just moving people in because they are the right grade.

The scale of the work fixing transactions was also an interesting insight as its the area I know least about – also always funny to see that picture of Daffydd at Number 10 again! Also when talking about the more to open source and the culture change that invoked he linked to the best tweet ever for those of us in this corner of the web by world (for context CESG are the cyber-spooks at Cheltenham)

Screenshot_19_05_2013_09_00

Tom does give great presentation. He handled some quite difficult questions later on with aplomb and kept the crowd onside throughout – he also gave very honest answers right up to (but not beyond) crossing some kind of Civil Service line. Skillful in of its self.

Early on he also spoke about how his role (since he was banned from coding 8 years ago!) was about ‘creating space for others’ to do their work. This is very much my aspiration as a manager but I wonder how well I manage it.

Next up with Jordan Hatch talking about how GDS avoided ‘breaking the web’. I really enjoyed this slightly more technical talk – some elements of it were above my head (NGINX could be a Star Trek: Voyager character for all I know!) but I am a big believer in this particular goal of “no link left behind” and believe it is something too often ignored or at the very least shortchanged. GDS built custom tools (now available on Github) to manage the migration mapping (the Migratorator) and also a gamified tool with scoreboards that then allowed people to check old page v new page and decide if it looked like a correct mapping (the Review-o-matic). The redirect engine (if thats the right term) is currently managing 180,000 redirects from what was Directgov, Businesslink and the 26 department (and No10 and the DPM) websites.

After a bit of a liquid lunch (Staropramen for less than 3 quid a pint in London – good times!) I settled in for Bill Thompsons talk. This is the second time I have heard Bill speak and the experience was identical to the first. I was swept along during the talk and felt smarter just for following along but at the end I realised it was some kind of illusion and I didn’t really understand anything! Thankfully he has had to good grace to post his text on his blog so at least I can link to it (and reread it a few times.)

The was about it for any formal session attendance from me – I did catch a bit of Richard Popes ‘Tiny Data’ session which I enjoyed – he also wrote the tweet that summed the whole event up for me as well:

#opentech was lovely. No reason at all, that other conferences should not be that good, cost £5, and be community led.

— Richard Pope (@richardjpope) May 18, 2013

I was sad to miss Paul Clarke give his session but I mistimed it and the nature of the room layout meant arriving late would have meant crashing in right at the from of the room when Paul was in full flow.

As always I had loads of brilliant conversations – I caught up with Zoe and her tales of Stockholm and launch parties with Labrinth, chatted to Phil for the first time in ages, shared a beer or two with Tony discussing open data, MOOCs, hacking and who knows what else. Met Harry for the first time in person and had a good chat about a little ebook project we find ourselves coming at from different, but complimentary, directions. Had a great insightful chat with Nick about some shared challenges and his idea for an ‘exceptions club’ and randomly met Dan Wilson who was a co-founder of Timetric one of the big third party users of ONS data – that was also very helpful.

I ran out of steam a bit early though (that liquid lunch probably didn’t help!) and heading home to Bristol in time for Dr Who and a much needed Chinese takeaway.

Huge thanks to the team who put it together;

Huge hugs and high fives to @smithsam and team for a great day! #opentech

— The ODI (@UKODI) May 18, 2013

Crowdfunding a Conference?

December 18, 2012eventsJukesie

An email conversation with Gez Smith reminded me of something today that has been rattling around in the back of my head for a while. Since Kickstarter launched in the UK I’ve had this vague idea about whether it could be used to take some of the risk out of organising some kind of event.

I have a bit of a bi-polar relationship with running events – I find them hugely stressful but also incredibly satisfying. The Bettr conference I ran at the start of 2011 almost broke me but Gov:West this year was actually a pretty fun experience and a big part of that was because alot of the risk was by-passed as the event was a part of the wider Bath Digital Festival. This meant that the venue was sorted from day one which allowed me to concentrate on the fun stuff like inviting great speakers and sorting the post-event beers!

I wonder if you could use Kickstarter to raise enough in advance to ensure the venue was paid for and that speaker expenses were covered through a mix of ‘pledges’ (from get a ticket, to micro-sponsorship etc). Venues can get be reserved for a spell usually before full payment is required so on some practical level it is probably possible. I’m guessing you’d need to have a few speakers lined up in advance to encourage people to sign up as well?

A quick scan of Kickstarter suggests a few people have already been down this road so there is something of a template to follow and I certainly think Bristol has room for another event in the calendar.

I think you can probably tell I am thinking this through as I write this! I am not even sure what kind of conference it would be – I am murder when it comes to coming up with conference ideas – have as many of them as I do useless domains Though assuming my career doesn’t take a radical change in direction I would imagine something about digital and the public sector would be most sensible.

I wouldn’t be in a position to do anything about the idea til April anyway but hopefully this will stand as a reminder to revisit the idea then!

Open source and government as a platform

October 11, 2012eventsworldgovsummitJukesie

Today in a change to the advertised schedule I was lucky enough to be invited to the ‘World Government Summit on Open Source‘ organised by Drupal folk Acquia just down the road from my hotel.

With Tim O’Reilly as the opening keynote and US Government CIO Steven VanRoekel also speaking it was a great opportunity to learn a little about what is going on with digital in the public sector this side of the pond.

There were other interesting speakers (in particular I enjoyed the talk by Cammie Croft about her work with Drupal at the Department of Energy) but I am going to focus on these two talks as I feel they nicely articulated a vision (Tim) and a plan (Steven).

Tim O’Reilly gave an updated version of his ‘Government as a platform’ talk that he has been talking about since about 2009 I think. I am a big fan of Tim, his company and his take on digital government so it was great to hear him speak ‘live’.

Two of the things he spoke about early on were things I’ve written about here before – namely the wonderful GDS Design Principles and also the need to take lessons from the ‘lean startup’ movement – particularly when it comes to the need for data driven decision making.

He is quite clearly proud of his association with the Code for America organisation and highlighted a couple of their flagship projects – including Honolulu Answers – a very GDS style project that used search data to decide what information people were *actually* looking for and then held a citizen ‘write-a-thon’ to actually make that content usable for people and to strip away all the bureaucratic language. The other project he highlighted was Open311 – a service that allows open data to actually be presented in a useful manner but also for community involvement as well.

[he also spoke a little about the Adopt-a-Hydrant project and how that has evolved and forked.]

An example of Government providing a platform for innovation was the story of how GPS was developed by the US gov for military applications but then opened up in the 80s for wider exploitation leading to turn-by-turn directions and, god help us, FourSquare

A big part of his talk was about the importance of open source and how it was built with an ‘architecture of participation’ – people can work independently for the greater good of the software. The same was/is true of the internet and the web as well.

He mentioned a quote from Larry Wall that I thought really should be an underlying philosophy for all of us working online;

“Make easy things easy, and hard things possible.”

Github also got its first, of many, mention of the day. It is clear that Github is seen as a key factor in the rise of open source in government over here.

Steven VanRoekel opened up his talk with a story about the 1st US Government open data and crowdsourcing project. In the 1850s Joseph Henry, 1st Secretary of the Smithsonian, created a network of volunteers around the US who telegraphed his staff a weather report each day and it was captured according to colour coded pins on a huge map in the lobby of the Smithsonian Castle. This eventually became the basis of the US Weather Service.

Today the challenge is breaking down the Departmental silos and encouraging a new culture of innovation rather than risk aversion.

The new(ish) US Digital Strategy was publicly endorsed by the President and boils down to 6 main principles.

A couple of really interesting things that caught my eye were;

every .gov website will have a /developer section where APIs and documentation can be accessed,
a ‘bring your own device’ policy is being implemented – including reimbursement for data contracts,
like the UK there is a moratorium on new .gov domains,
they have centrally procured a new Analytics engine that is going to be used across all .gov websites (replacing things like Google Analytics)
and a particular favourite of mine was the creation of a Digital Innovation Centre at the heart of government that will offer training, support and also practical assistance where needed to teams seeking to implement the Digital strategy without maybe all the skills in-house.

The other programme that got mentioned alot was the Presidential Innovation Fellows. This aims to recruit the best and brightest digital minds whatever their backgrounds to work on specific projects, six month projects for the Federal government. The MyGov project might look familiar to anyone who has looked at GOV.UK but they are all worthy projects and it is an interesting way of getting people who might not usually be drawn to public sector work to get involved.

It was an interesting insight – there are alot of similarities to how they are addressing the digital challenge facing the public sector but also alot of differences. I think GDS are ahead of the game in some respects – especially the single domain work but my take was that the US approach had its strengths as well – particularly around developer community outreach.

A really worthwhile way to spend a few hours (once I got in past the armed guards at the conference centre!) so I am very grateful for the opportunity and to whoever pulled out and freed up the ticket!

OpenCFML for government (and beyond)

October 10, 2012events, workcoldfusion, opencfmlJukesie

I’m very lucky to be spending this week in Washington DC attending a couple of related conferences about CFML and in particular the MuraCMS that I’ll be using for a major project in the coming months.

Now I can hear all you Ruby, Django…even .Net and PHP…guys giggling from here. Yes Coldfusion does still exist! Despite the combination of Coldfusion and open source being seen as something of an oxymoron by some the rise of FOSS tools has given the language a shot in the arm and the OpenCFML Foundation, who organised the event I was at yesterday, has been formed to increase the profile of that.

There was quite an honest assessment of the task at hand. It was admitted that most conversations about CF start with the statement ‘no, it isn’t dead‘ With Adobe* mainly focusing on the upgrade market their isn’t really a champion advocating CF to the wider web community and that combined with the fact that many of its main users are big enterprise or government and not the kind of organisations to be out there shouting about their shiny new project (that might change with me about though!) just reinforces the perception that CF is a dying language.

Now I have no idea about the strengths or weaknesses of it as a scripting/programming language I’ll leave that to the ‘talent’ as I have said before. What I will say though is that on the evidence of yesterday at least there are some very impressive looking products being built with or for CF and that there are some pretty high profile sites in the US Government making use of the technology. Plus Apple. Which isn’t bad. [Apple use CF for B2B and intranet sites.]

The event itself was pitched as a primer for Gov types to better understand the opportunities that open source CF projects offer and while I did stray off topic at times and become a little over salesy it was a useful introduction for me. It was also interesting to hear people from various branches of the US Federal government talking about very familiar problems (in particular how to escape Sharepoint but also procurement problems, accessibility issues, publishing bottle-necks…it was clear it is the same all over!) Also despite some very high profile open source projects in the US gov web space(like the Whitehouse and Drupal) it was clear that open source is still avery hard sell with some CIOs etc which surprised me a little.

I was particularly interested to hear about the US Senate intranet which is run on MuraCMS and where any downtime is considered a national security issue. Also the Department for Homeland Security uses a number of CF tools including Mura (and the open source CF engine Railo) for its ‘food security’ programme which provides secure, collaborative websites for all US states. Probably the site most people will have seen though is this one. The Mars Rover website (and a number of other NASA/JPL sites are based on CF).

The open source developer community is clearly smaller than that of the other popular languages but there are upwards of 2000 live projects in Github and based on the level of geeky conversations in the bar last night the community is as passionate as any I have encountered.

All in all it was an interesting day and now I am looking forward to the main MuraCMS conference today.

*Adobe now own the commercial ColdFusion brand – previously it was Allaire, then Macromedia.