So I have volunteered (read been roped in by Mike) to curate the upcoming Bathcamp evening. For reasons I am not quite sure about given my own leanings away from the topic I decided to try and put on an evening based around the idea of a ‘Web of Data’.

Thankfully my Twitter stream has a number of experts in this area and a few of them are locals so I was able to get a couple of great speakers lined up quite quickly and am hoping to confirm at least one more in the near future. I’d really like to get someone from a more mash-up sensibility to come along – and would especially love someone from Bristol Streets to speak – I’ve emailed via the contact form but if anyone knows anyone involved give me a shout.

**Updated 24/3/2010 12:18 – Toby Lewis the guy behind Bristol Streets got in touch and has agreed to speak at the event. Really pleased.**

The following is my blurb to publicise the evening – I’m also going to take the opportunity to pimp the recent JISC Linked Data report that Paul Miller wrote and the JISC Expo call as well.

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Back in 2006 (was it really that ago!) Tom Coates, ex of Up My Street, the BBC and more recently of Fire Eagle and Yahoo, gave a presentation at a handful of events called ‘Native to a Web of Data‘ that seemed to show a way to bridge the gap between the distinct worlds of the Social and Semantic Web(s).

Now in 2010 this is rapidly becoming the reality of the web and the rise of things like the open data movement in the public sector and the availability of location data due to ever ‘smarter’ phones is only fueling this change.

Tonight’s speakers are working to make this Web of Data a reality:

Leigh Dodds – Leigh was the CTO of Ingenta where he was responsible for the ongoing development of their publishing platform based on Semantic Web technologies. Leigh is now at Talis as Programme Manager for the Talis Platform.

Leigh has been developing with Java, XML, and Semantic Web technologies for a number of years and has released several small open source applications and APIs. He has also contributed code and documentation to several open source projects.

Libby Miller – Libby was co-creator of the FOAF project, and has worked on Semantic Web query languages, prototypes and data modelling. She helped build the Semantic Web and FOAF communities through formal and informal means, including via an EU project, which she co-wrote and co-ran.

Recently she worked for the online TV startup Joost and is now working on the pan-European project NoTube which is using semantic technologies, for personalised creation, distribution and consumption of TV content.

This week it was announced that there was going to be an Ignite event in Bristol during March as part of the Global Ignite week. For those of you who don’t know (and shame on you if that is the case) Ignite is

..a style of presentation where participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced.

It is a very challenging format for the speaker but tends to make for an interesting presentation and certainly helps with ‘death by powerpoint‘. Anyway in a decision I am sure to end up regretting I have volunteered to do a talk. I have also decided to talk about something entirely non work related (though no less geeky) so if I am (un)lucky enough to be one of the chosen speakers I’ll spend five minutes on the topic of Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from 2000AD!.

The venue for the event is a real winner as well – The Polish Club is a bit of a hidden gem in Clifton and makes a nice change from the usual suspects like the Watershed.

One of the nice things (unless you are the speaker and it goes horribly wrong) about Ignite is that the talks traditionally are videoed and posted online and just to demonstrate this here is a video of my current favourite Ignite talk;

So after only a little under 3 months at Becta I have resigned and rather luckily found myself in a postion to head straight back to JISC. Alot of issues led to this decision and I won’t go into them in any depth but suffice to say I wasn’t comfortable with some aspects of the role in reality as compared to the job description and also never really settled being away from Bristol.

As is so often the case it takes making a mistake for any real lessons to be learned. In this case I am now clear that while I’m happy to travel anywhere for work Bristol is my only home and that I need to be closer to the action as far as work is concerned.

I am taking a very different role this time in JISC and am really looking forward to it. In many ways I never really left JISC; it is the core of my professional network and I have tried to keep up with its activities over the last 2 years (almost to the day!) since I left for my secondment at HEFCE.

Hopefully exciting times lay ahead and I look forward to sharing some of them here..

As someone who has just started a new job and has dutifully read all the HR policies and procedures (honest!) I read this Netflix presentation with a mixture of jealousy and awe.  It isn’t a perfect document and does make an awful lot of assumptions about the sort of staff they have working for them but there are so many gems within the 128 slides that I am willing to let that pass (magnanimous of me don’t you think!)

Now it has to be said I don’t think this philosophy would have a cats chance in hell of surviving in the public sector or education but it strikes me that an awful lot of private companies are in a real position at the moment to make radical changes and there are lessons to be learned here.

Anyway read the presentation; it looks long but only takes a few minutes to read and is well worth it.  Slide 61 is a presonal favourite of mine also slides 86-91 strike a chord as well (and lets not even talk about the vacation stuff!)