traveller with a tale

The other week over some post Thinking Digital drinks (for which I took a three hour train ride) Tara Hunt told me about this awesome trip she was planning to take whilst moving from San Francisco to Montreal. The trip echoed an idea that Patricia Hanrahan and I had been talking about a year ago. Travelling across America, Live Streaming, having a blast. Our idea never came to fruition, but Tara’s was real! - The Whuffaoke or Bust Tour

A few days later I was all signed up to karaoke me way across America, and in mid July I will be heading stateside to start this epic trip along with Tony Bacigalupo, Alex Hillman and Ridley…

We will be travelling in some kind of bus or truck with enough space to sleep 4 people and a doggie and stopping in 13 cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boulder, Omah, St Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia ,New York City, Boston and Montreal), in each of which we will hold a book signing (for Tara’s new book The Whuffie Factor) and host an awesome karaoke party…

We are still looking for someone to loan us a truck (you will get *awesome* coverage) and for people to help us with the parties in each city with beer, venues, snacks etc. If you think you can help us, checkout Whuffaoke Sponsors

So get ready to karaoke like its 2009 (with realtime web streaming) and join us in your city on the Whuffaoke Tour

…stay at The Palace. This incredibly understated Madison Avenue masterpiece is the perfect location for a weekend get away. A few blocks from the crass and overly glitzzy Waldorf, The Palace is, in the centre of the world of New York’s Elite. Avoid the paperatzi and 15 minutes of fame found at those New York establishments pandering to the neauvaux riche and the MTV famous, and stay where taking the limo to the 34th St helipad to be whisked of to your private jet for a weekend in Paris is the norm. The service is as expected in a New York hotel where the staff almost certainly earn more in tips than salery, simply superlative.. Make sure your room is on an executive floor as access to the lounge on the 39th floor with it’s included breakfast, lunch and evening desert and drinks, and it’s view of Manhatten’s Skyline is what makes this hotel one of the top hotels in the world. Oh, did I mention it is the very same Palace as features in Gossip Girl…

… then you should shop in the Harijuku district of a Tokyo. This eclectic district makes London’s Camden Town seem tame. Not because of the incomprehensible Japanese signs, or the hordes of tourists photographing the barley legal teens wearing provocative anime-inspired costumes normally reserved for the bedroom lives of the slightly more adventurous. But because merely spending an hour or two wandering these backstreets will turn you into a teenage Japanese girl (or boy) actually considering buying a little bo peep costume to wear to the park next Sunday. The kitsch little shops will draw you in with their subliminally infective trance music until you break down and buy a tiny top hat to clip to the side if your head, or a Lolita style corset for one of your friends back home. You simply must make this a priority for your Sunday afternoon in Tokyo.

Yes, that’s right, I spent an entire 42 hours at South by Southwest Interactive 2009. For this experience I travelled over 10,000 miles, took 4 aircraft, spent 2 hours in holding patterns, and ended up with one very tired body… Was it worth it? Without question, absolutely.

I set out from my house at zombie o’clock on Friday for an 8:40 AM Continental flight to Houston, then transferred to a local aircraft to Austin where I was whisked off to the Omni Downtown where I stayed in an executive room on the 13th floor. 42 Hours later I did exactly the same, in reverse. 

What happened in these intermediary hours is full of the stuff dreams are made of. The kind of dreams dreamt by geeks who have only ever heard of the spectacle that is SxSWi. I partied almost continously for these hours pausing only for a few hours of respite, a shower, and to change outfits… something that took place at least 6 times whilst I was there. Yes, I took with that many outfits. A girl has to impress, you know!

On my first night, whilst I sought the other Englanders, I met some awesome people from Portland, who introduced me to some locals at College in Austin, who took for for late night drinks and an all night breakfast in a ‘68 Buick with stuck open windows. In there somewhere were about 6 parties all around town, and conversational topics as diverse as modelling student chances of success with fluid dynamics, and what type of porn people were into.

I ended the night in my bed at the Omni exhausted from 14 hours of travel and some 22 hours awake. The bed in the Omni was incredibly comfortable, and the shower the next morning was exquisit, especially being able to shower whilst looking out through floor to ceiling windows over the city, quite an experience. 

My first and last only full day began with rushing out of bed and up to the executive lounge in order to partake in the free (read already paid for) breakfast. Just a short while later I found my way to the bloggers lounge which became my base of operation for the remaining 28 hours. Just hanging out there I met some really fantastic people working on all sorts of interesting things. I didn’t manage to make it to any sessions, though I have the impression that I didn’t miss out all that much. Towards the end of the day plans were hatched for that evening, and I set of to shower and change (again).

I can’t honestly tell you much about that second night in Austin. I remember being quite sober for a while and running about town with Tara Hunt and Jen Myonruk looking for the hippest party which was eventually to be found at which is normally a gay leather bar, but for SxSW is turned into a Cog’aoke (competition based karaoke) Venue. Having been introduced to Tony B. Goode (who, I’m told, went on to win) the free alcohol became too much and somewhere between bumping into fellow Englanders like Norm and Nik F and making my way to the stage to cheer on Tony it all became too much and the memories end. 

I have a vague recollection of later on events at The Driskoll where an early on impromptu gathering of friends for drinks by Erica O’Grady turned into a full on party. The one image from this event that is burned into my mind is Tod wearing what I think was a wedding dress…

My final day at SxSW was shrouded by the foggy after effects of phenomenal quantities of alcohol, and I spent most of my time sitting in the bloggers lounge eating far too much popcorn and feeling sorry for myself. After a day af very gentle conversation I eventually made my way back the Omni for the last time, to collect my baggage and head to Austin’s Airport for the final leg of my 42 hour bender at SxSW. 

Will I be back again next year? You bet I will, and for much longer that 42 hours.

Historically, BarCamps have been open to as many people as wanted to attend, with signup via putting your name on a wiki. This worked great in the early days, or in locations where there are virtually unlimited numbers of attendees. However, in the last few years BarCamp has become increasingly popular, which makes running a BarCamp in London quite a challenge as finding even a large venue, let alone a huge one, is hard.

For BarCampLondon6 we are fortunate enough to have The Guardian on board as our venue sponsors, and they are kindly donating the use of their stunning new Kings Place conference suite for the entire weekend, along with all of the bit and pieces like wifi and security. The venue is pretty big and we hope to have one of the largest BarCamps in London to date, but the numbers still have to be limited for security, technical reasons (read satisfactory connectivity), and simply physical space. 

Whilst we anticipated that the demand would be great to attend BarCampLondon6, we never quite expected that it would be fully booked just a few seconds after release during both of the first two ticket rounds. Taking this into consideration we started discussing how to solve the problem of ticket availability. Clearly there are many people who want to attend, and the current system is a lottery based on how fast your connection is, how in line with out server time your watch is, and how fast your computer is, or rather how frequently you can click the refresh button. Not a particularly fair situation. 

A number of different options were mooted both during the planning teams discussions, based out of blog posts (here and here) and from conversations we have all had a previous barcamps and other unconference style events. Some of the ideas raised include the following each of which has it’s own associated benefits and caveats:

Small, More Frequent Events
We definitely agreed that this is a good idea and I tend to agree, however, I think that there will always be demand for these large scale, cross domain BarCamps. I also think that even if only “small” events were organised some would inevitably receive more publicity, become more popular and spiral out of control into high demands events putting us back in exactly the same position.

Technical Challenges
This would involve solving some kind of automated non verbal reasoning challenge before being allocated a ticket. The idea is interesting, but ultimately I think that this is not appropriate for a BarCamp since not everyone who attends is technical (nor do we want this to be the case), which would bias towards software engineers. This idea would probably work much better for hacking / mashup style events where you want a high level of attendee technical skill

Payment
Putting aside philosophical thoughts on whether we should charge or not, the problem is not solved since most attendees would probably pay something to attend. For example, many large popular events such as concerts charge huge amounts for their tickets, and despite their huge scale sell out in similarly absurd times. For what it’s worth, I don’t think BarCamps should be paid for events. Having sponsors who are not entitled to anything more than some advertising is the right way to go in my mind. 

Short Essay Question - “Why do you think you should come to BarCampLondon6?”
This would put us, the organisers, in an unfair and highly compromising situation of having to choose who to attend, not something I would look forward to at all. This also has the greatest potential to upset people who are not selected. A modification of this idea would be to have the public vote up or down (digg style) on potential participants based on a few sentences, though whilst this takes the onus away from the organisers, it still has massive potential to create friction.  

Lottery
Un unbiased lottery is probably the “fairest” way to allocate tickets, although not neccesarily the best. Depending on the type of event you may want to target specific types of individuals more than others, or you may want to bias the attendence in some specific way.. By allowed the lottery to be open to all and sundry and reducing the barrier to entry (ie, not during a specific 30 second window) more people who are potentially less interested in BarCamp might sign up. I don’t see this as a problem especially when using in conjunction with the traditional “6PM on the dot” method.

We chose to go with the Lottery model at this stage as it seems to fit most with the aims of BarCamp and is the simplest to manage. There were some technical details to work out such as how you ensure that each person only has one ticket, and so on, but I will cover those in another post. 

As a final addendum an Gavin Bell suggested an interesting idea on his blog called seed16 where you start with 16 people, who can each give out 3 tickets to people who can each give out 2 tickets to people who can each given out 1 ticket. I think this is a fascinating idea, and fully support trying out an unconference style event like this. It was too late to consider it for BarCamp, and I have a feeling it creates quite an exclusive event (which can be a good thing, although not for BarCamp).

Gavin, if you want any input from me on any event you organise in this style I’m more than happy to oblige.

There are a whole different set of problems with how to deal with people claiming tickets and then not turning up, but more on that another time too.

I hope this clears up some of the myths and mysteries surrounding BarCampLondon6 Ticketing, or rather ticketing in general. If you do have any questions about BarCampLondon6 please direct them to help@barcamplondon.org as I am just one of a whole bunch of planners.

Finally, the most important bit of UI that Amazon had been mising is finally here. Previously one had to naviagate dozens of submenues in order to find a box where one could type the names of owned boks but today (and yes, I realise this may have been in for a while, but I don’t often visit Amazon), I was able to tell Amazon about books that I already own in a simple and easy fashion

It makes me happy when Big companies to the Right thing.

The latest instalment of my crazy life took place on the west coast of the united states, a place generally quite close to my heart, not only for being geek mecca, but because I genuinely feel at home in San Francisco. But I jump ahead. The plan was a long weekend stateside at BIL Conference, a fantastic unconference style event full of real science geeks, artists, and generally incredibly clever people. The co-conspirators were two colleagues from both work and a social enterprise project I am working in called One Click Organisations. 

Friday lunchtime we were chauffeured to Virgin’s Terminal 3 at Heathrow courtesy of James (t) and treated to Premium Economy check in thanks to Charles’ (t) Silver Flying Club membership. Fortunately the traffic wasn’t too bad and we were spared sometime in Duty Free where James carried around my Globe Trotter whilst I rushed from shop to shop desperately trying to find a bag to match my dress, replacing the one I managed to leave at home (Classic, I know, but what can you do.) Eventually I settled on an awesome punk-like Burberry design, and parted with a horrendous sum of money, such is the life of an LA Socialite. But more on that later. 

When we landed in Los Angeles I discovered that the Small SUV I had rented for a few days was large enough to engulf my entire Ford KA, inside it’s body. The monster truck (a Nissan Rogue) was, however, quite pleasant to drive, and was a very pretty blue. 

BIL Conference itself was a bit of a blur, with James and I heading up to downtown Los Angles the first night for an evening of black tie partying, champagne, and debauchery at a Black Card Circle Foundation event. The night was full of insanity, as usual happens when Tara Hunt (t) and I are put in a room together: we were thrown off a bed whilst posing for a photographer because it wasn’t a “real bed” (how wonderfully existential), attempted to drink Courvoisier perfume, and I tried to bribe my way into a closed charity auction. All of this fuelled by vast quantities of free (or paid-for-in-the-ticket-price) alcohol. At the somewhat early close of the evening, we were due to be whisked away in a porn limo to The Standard (which happened to be the hotel we were staying in) for the after party on the roof. Somehow, our driver got mixed up, and we found ourselves in a Venice Beach beach front house, with a crate or so of champagne, awesome company, and even more debauchery. I can only assume that James took us back to the hotel in a taxi at some point, I don’t remember much after the second bottle of Veuve…

The following day we were back at BIL where I presented my short talk on Democratic Source Development, a principle we developed in One Click for open source development which affords all members of the core development team an equal say in what happens. We finally ended up in a seaside bar chilling and chatting. What really set BIL apart from other similar events such as BarCamp was the type of people it attracted. Everyone was really top of their field with very few people in the barcamp stereotypes of web development and social media, more of a focus on scientists (with an interesting emphasis on neuroscience) and artists doing some incredibly creative work. There was much of talk about the crossover of art and science, future science and lots of very cutting edge work. An unmissable conference for anyone who is a real science geek. I really hope that BIL Global (to coincide with TED Global) in Oxford lives up to it’s forerunners - yes this is an offer to help in the planning and running of that conference, I’ve been totally sold!

I finished my long weekend with a flying 28 hour visit to San Francisco where I was hosted by the the wonderful Tara Hunt and Jen Myronuk (t). I wish my stay with them could have been longer, but work (and the fact I was now eating into holiday days) beckoned me back to the UK. I spent my final morning working at Citizen Space, a co-working founded by Tara, and frequented by SF’s top geeks, an excellent place to spend a working day. In fact, the announcement for BarCampLondon tickets was sent from Citizen Space, an apt location given the history of BarCamp.

On return to the UK I met a very interest photographer on the plane with whom I chatted for a few hours before drifting to sleep in my 4 seat, economy class bed, thanks to Virgin Atlantic economy saving measure of closing the middle section of the plane for takeoff, allowing the quickest of us to make our move on entire rows once the seat belt sign had been switched off.

And all of this in just in some 100 hours! Where to next? Check my dopplr!

This is going to be short and sweet because I don’t want to spend my precious little time in San Francisco on the interwebs. I’ve been at BIL conference this weekend and it was amazing. I don’t think I can actually put my thought about it into words right now even if I wanted to. 

I’m not sure if it was the intensity of the weekend itself, the fact that I flew 6000 miles ONE WAY to get to it, or the fact that I would have to return to planet earth just a few short days later. Either way, right now I feel really special for being fortunate enough to be out here. 

Ok Guy’s I’m getting out of here, time to go explore.

Ryan Air announced today that they will start fining passengers who break their hand baggage allowance rules. This includes the preposterous concept that you may carry only a single item of hand baggage and a hand bag are actually one and the same. Yes, thats right, your hand bag must be carried inside your hand baggage no matter how small it is. 

I often carry a small handbag with me when I travel containing essentials including passport, travel documents, some money, medications, etc. Something small enough to fit under the seat infront of me. My actual hand baggage normally consists of a Globe Trotter trolly case designed to fit just within the size requirements so no problem there. My Globe Trotter, however, being a traditional piece of baggage, just smaller, has no outside openings or pockets. Once it’s closed and locked doesn’t open easily, perfect in for the security concious. I could carry my hand bag inside my Globe Trotter, but then every time I wanted to access my passport or travel documents it would take 2 or 3 minutes to set it down, open it, remove them, show them to the security team, and then pack up again. 

Anyway, I have no intention of complying with this utter nonsense and shall attempt to travel with my reasonably sized hand bag in addition to my hand baggage next time I fly Ryan Air

I have somewhat of a penchant for barcamping. Not really sure what it is, but ever since my first barcamp, BarCampLondon3, in 2007 I have been totally addicted. I think the opportunity to meet so many fascinating people is part of the draw, it’s not every day that you can meet people from so many different backgrounds all of whom are so passionate about their thing, be it cupcakes, cartography or computers.

I think one of the key barcamp concepts is somewhat underplayed, and it’s certainly my experience that first time campers are often unaware of: Your talks needn’t be computer geek talks. I say it again, Your talks needn’t be computer geek talks. Actually, I would rather they were not. I work in the industry, I try to keep up to date with tech goings on. What I don’t know about is detail from the hundreds and hundreds of other topics out there. Some of the most fascinating talks I have been to have been about non technical subjects, and I make as much effort as I can to deliver a session on one of my other passions these days.

The challenge is making first time campers aware of this before they come to the camp. So many of them arrive with a techie friend thinking they will just sit and listen, and we loose all of that opportunity to learn. So my message to you, first time barcamper, is take whatever subject you are passionate about, be it cocktail making, modern literature, or even road sweeping, and run a session to educate us about Blue Curacao, Phillip K Dick, or Tarmac!