BarCamp London 7 (a VERY rough & fairly long post)

[the_eggwhite]

Introduction

I've been vaguely trying to get to a BarCampLondon for a couple of years, but somehow never quite managed it. Either the timing wasn't right and I had a schedule clash, or I just didn't find out about the ticket releases until after they'd happened. This year, though, the stars aligned and not only did I hear about it in advance, but the event itself was on a weekend when I was available.

True to form, circumstances had a serious go at keeping me away - the company I work for was bought, with the deal closing the day before BarCampLondon 7. The result - I'd spent the previous weeks buried in work and uncertainty, and was expecting to spend the following week buried as well. With this in mind, I decided not to actually stay over as I felt that getting proper sleep was an urgent requirement.

But I was determined to go along, and I'm very, very glad that I did.

Saturday Morning - Arrival & Intros

Never having been to a barcamp before, I decided to head along close to the start of registration as I had no idea what might happen before the main sessions got up and running. As it turned out, it was mostly coffee and milling for a fair while, so I took the opportunity to get the netbook out and start getting myself hooked up to the wireless. At first I was slightly traumatised as I could happily get access everything except twitter, but that soon resolved itself and I was able to start firing off tweets about the event left, right and centre.

The first thing to happen to properly kick things off was a bit of a general introduction to how things would work over the weekend, what was where and how to not be thrown out of the building. It was then followed by some icebreaker exercises, for which we were broken down into smaller groups and run through a "brief introductions" session, followed by collaborative lego building session. The lego building suffered a little from having 50 odd people all trying to build something in the middle of a huge conference table, and it decended into farce pretty quickly as we had only 5 minutes to build a bridge. I also had my first "who do I work for again?" confusion of the weekend whilst introducing myself.

After that, people descended on the schedule board en-masse to try to book their slots. I held back a bit on this as I wanted to get a bit of a feel for things first. One of the main ideas of BarCamp is that everybody presents a session - in this case, a 20 minute slot with a 10 minute gap for questions & moving on to the next slot. It's an interesting idea, but a little daunting when you're steered towards picking a session topic before you've had a chance to see any and get a feel for the format... so I held off a little.

Saturday Afternoon - BarCamp Bootstrap: 1st Timers Panel

Then the sessions got properly started, and I worked my way over to "BarCamp Bootstrap: 1st Timers Panel"... which the presenter had expected to be a double session rather than a single one, so things got rushed through a little. First, we were divided into people who knew what they were presenting, people who had ideas and people who had no clue. We were then broken into small groups with one or two from each of those, so we could discuss what to talk about. I floated a couple of almost formed ideas, but felt a little out of place as the folks I was grouped with were firmly at the developer end of the scale, with me a as a Design / UI / UX guy... But I did end up firming up my thoughts on the matter a little, so that was useful in a way.

Next, we were all lined up and fed through a process where everyone had to deliver a line of nonsense in front of the group, to help us get past the fear of spouting rubbish for an audience. I didn't really need that bit, as I'm an old hand at spouting bollocks at a crowd, but it was quite entertaining all the same. I think an entertaining improv session / theatre exercise might be to have a random nonsense sentence generator, and for performers to perform a scene on stage using the lines it produces, as it produces them. It could be worth a laugh.

After that, we were told the basic rules of Werewolf, but didn't have time to play it... which was a slight shame as my weekend schedule meant I never got the chance. Next time!

From here on out, we're into the sessions for real. I'm going to try to at least mention all of the ones I was in, but probably only briefly unless I have any particular insight.

Saturday Afternoon - #themineproject (Alec Muffet)

My first proper session was one that looked interesting from the title blurb - being able to share things online whilst retaining complete control over everything. The "what" was certainly interesting, but the how was a bit too techie for my first session of the day, so I'll admit to glazing over a little... but I'm certianly going to keep an eye on the mine project as it evolves. I'll also be recommending it to a couple of folks who've expressed an interest in being able to share certain bits of online content with specific individuals in a very controlled fashion.

The Mine! Project

As a bit of an aside, the first video on the page linked above includes a fantastic and slightly different take on user-centric design.

Saturday Afternoon - Lunch!

Despite being a free event, BarCampLondon is catered. It's a bit basic, but good all the same. Lunch consisted of a Jacket Spud with a choice of fillings. Chilli was available, so I didn't need to think too much, which was handy as the queue was huge and the serving area was tiny. There was a steady supply of fruit juice too, so I was well catered for on the liquid front.

Saturday Afternoon - Google Street View + Virtual Reality Goggles (Tom Scott)

This session was the first example of particular style of presentation that I'd come to recognise and quite enjoy... the "Here's something cool, what can I use it for" session. In this case, Tom Scott had hacked together Google Street View and some virtual reality goggles, allowing a 360 degree view of a location through those goggles. This had been done for a TV project, but was cool enough to show off on its own. It was more than a little hacky, as it worked by translating the movement of the headset into faked keyboard input, which could then be used to control Google Street View.

After everyone had had a bit of a play with the goggles, a few folks started popping up with ideas for how this would be useful. The one that stuck in my mind came from Jamie Knight - the idea that this could be incrediby helpful for helping folks on the autism spectrum learn routes, and he even knew of a couple of projects to put the speaker in touch with.

It's this kind of thing that I now really see as one of the strengths of BarCamp - they're really a good approach for helping good ideas to become useful.

Saturday Afternoon - CSS Nuggets (Anna Debenham)

Anna's one of those scary new "up and coming" youngsters who make you feel like you're old and past it. I usually consider myself a bit of a CSS guru, but this session made me spot that I've actually got a little bit stagnant and need to start experimenting and kicking things around a bit more again. Whilst none of the CSS selectors mentioned in her session were completely new to me, some of them were ones that I'd previously dismissed as either things I couldn't use whilst IE6 still exists or things I couldn't conceive of a use for.

Some interesting uses of :nth-of-type for grid layout fixes put that selector right back in the playing field. It might still be less than ideal for IE, but I can certainly now see uses for it where progressive enhancement is concerned.

Her closing slide was also a clear, simple statement of truth for all things web. Even if you just skip through the rest of her slides (viewable with the link above), check out the last one. Even taken completely out of context, it says all that needs saying.

Saturday Afternoon - Stuff You Shouldn't Tweet That I Have (Dom Hodge)

One of the more entertaining sessions. This session did two things that might seem contradictory, and it did both of them very well. First it highlighted why you should be careful about what you put up on twitter or on blogs, and then it made it clear why you shouldn't hold back. It seems the presenter has a long history of having people try to sue him for what he says on his personal blog, and making takedown demands because he makes them look bad by talking about their mistakes.

Lots of entertaining anecdotes, and ultimately it lead to some discussion about what's acceptable to blog about in different places and different ways... as well as some talk of corporate blogging guidelines, which lead to another session later in the weekend.

Saturday Afternoon - Wave WTF

This was something of a disappointing session, largely as it tried to be an open discussion session... but without any structure it just descended into people talking over each other, constant interruptions and failed attempts by other people to join in. Much like google wave itself, really. Wave looks great, but the preview programme seems kind of broken - lots of people who can't use it for much because the people they want to collaborate with aren't on there yet.

The fact that nearly a half of the 20 minute session was spent trying to work out how to make the wave public so people could participate says quite a lot about the problems. It says even more that the wave was still only available to a select few by the end of the session.

Saturday Afternoon - Design in Lost (yes, the TV show) (Yaili)

I went to this one mainly for some design stimulus - JJ Abrams shows and films usually make very good use of some pretty strong design work, so this intrigued me. It wasn't really a session for deep insights, but it was nice to see some of the design progressions and variations, as well as the level of thought and planning that goes into it all.

Saturday Afternoon - The Essence of Building Social Web Apps (Gavin Bell)

This was a particularly interesting one for me - he discussed what he sees as three key elements of a social app. Unfortunately, I can't remember all three as my laptop had run out of battery at the time so my notetaking was slightly scuppered. From what I do remember, he talked about stories and about games - I'm really hoping to see a better writeup of this one. One thing I did take note of was noticin.gs - a kind of social photography game that takes place on flickr. This was particularly noteworthy as it doesn't involve any signup at all - you just have to use flickr.

Saturday Afternoon - Balsamiq Mockups (Cristiano Betta)

I've used the free online version of this, and found it quite useful... so when a session came up with some free licenses on offer, I thought I'd go along. Alas, I didn't get a free license - there were only three of them in a draw. It was also interesting to see some of the more advanced features available in the paid-for version.

Saturday Afternoon - OMG JavaScript (Ben Firshman)

Another talk on the "if we can do all this with JS, why do we still need flash" front. In this case it was delivered by the guy who developed a javascript NES emulator (you probably want to use Chrome). He answered the "why do we still need flash" question himself, as Javascript can only be used to play sound files... not to generate sound itself. His trick to get around this in the emulator was to use javascript to control a simple flash movie to generate the sound.

Saturday Evening - Dinner

So we had Chilli Jacket Spuds for lunch and Curry for dinner. I was becoming quite glad I wasn't going to be staying over! I also discussed some details of my impending talk with a couple of folks... I may possibly have ranted a bit too.

Saturday Evening - Slicing Music 3 Ways (Dylan Beattie)

I was intrigued about what this session might be about, and where the guy delivering it might go with it... and it turned out that it was mostly a presentation of an interesting idea, along with some experimentation around that idea, but with no point beyond idle tinkering. I should make it clear here that this wasn't a problem in any way - it was an interesting session, and several folks suggested how it might be useful as a music fingerprinting and recommendation tool.

Essentially, Dylan had seen how when presented with multidimensional data, we're very good at reducing that dimensionality to make the data easier to percieve and interpret. So he thought he'd apply that to music. He took what he saw as the three main distinguising features of music - texture, melody and rhythym - and then "flattened" each of them in turn for a selection of songs.

First he removed melody by taking a midi song and editing it so that all of the notes were the same note - so that all that was left was the choice of instrument and the rhythym. What was left was still totally recognisable, but totally different.

Then he removed texture. Texture was described as the shape and feel of the music that's provided by the choice of instruments - and that it can be changed by playing the same notes in the same sequence on different instruments, again leaving something recognisable but different. By way of example he took a metallica song (two guitars, bass, drums and vocals) and then playing a cover of that song by apocalyptica (four cellos, nothing else), focussing on how a significant crescendo in the original song was striking, but in the cover was barely noticable - the texture was gone.

Finally he removed rhythym by essentially removing any progression from the song - taking a static instant from the song and looping it. To me this wasn't really removing just the Rhythym, though - it was stripping the melody as well as you were only getting one set of notes in any given slice, reducing from 3 dimensions to just one. Even so, whilst you couldn't recognise songs, you could tell when different songs were played. I think a slightly stronger - but still flawed - way to remove rhythym would be to take multiple slices from the song and overlay them, so you end up with more than one set of notes at any time.

Bizarrely, despite being somebody who has consistently failed to gain musical talent, this was actually one of the sessions that really captured my imagination. I think at future barcamps I'm often going to enjoy the "here's something cool, now what can we do with it" sessions quite a bit.

Saturday Evening - Finger Spelling (Ben Fletcher)

First, some history: I've always had terrible hearing. Technically I was deaf from birth until I had some surgery at four years old. My hearing's still not fantastic. Yet I've never learned British Sign Language - growing up, things were always focussed on getting me properly caught up with spoken english. I only really caught up with everyone else's conversational skills when I was well into my twenties. I still sometimes lack confidence in conversation unless I'm feeling really relaxed, and will often rely on people's expressions and body language more than the words that come out of their mouths... Leaving me with an idea of what they were feeling whilst they spoke rather than what they were actually saying.

So I thought that I'd go along to this session and see what I could pick up. Fingerspelling is basically the letters of the alphabet in BSL, which can be used to spell things out if all else fails. I'm glad I went to this, even if I was a bit rubbish at it. I can remember a few of the letters now, but not many. After the 20 minute session I still hadn't got things ironed out enough to spell my name... but I was getting there. My main problem was that I kept switching my "handedness" - apparently it is all mirrorable, but you need to pick which way round you're doing it and stick to it, as opposed to switching around mid word and not realising.

One day I might actually get around to taking some proper BSL lessons. I've kept meaning to, but never managed to find the time. It's still on my "to do list", and after this quick taster I think I'm going to bump it up a couple of spots.

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

I'd have loved to have stuck around for the party, but given the week I'd had and the week I was expecting to have afterwards I decided that going home to sleep would be a good plan. So I fled for the train, where I got out my newly recharged netbook and started writing my presentation for the following day. The topic I'd chosen was "Polishing a Turd - What to do when you inherit a web monstrosity and aren't allowed to scrap it" - a subject I felt that my years working for a certain academic institution would let me speak about with some authority.

Over the years, I've developed a fairly reliable approach for spinning shit into... not quite gold, not even silver, but perhaps as far as wood or plastic. But getting that down into a few slides for a 20 minute presentation? Harder than it sounds. I'm not putting my slides up here yet because I'm not happy with them - I plan to try to tidy them up, annotate them and turn them into another blog post instead. I'll summarise them briefly in this post when I get to talking about my own slot.

By sunday morning I still wasn't entirely refreshed and awake. I'd created my slides, but had no imagery on them - just text. So I spent the start of the morning scouring flicker for creative commons images to use. I confess - they weren't credited properly as I ran out of time. They will be credited before the finished slides go up online, though. My slide creation overran the first slot of the day, too, which was a shame. The only reason it didn't overrun the second session too was that I didn't want to go straight from planning the session to delivering it - I wanted a break for my brain to settle itself down again... so some later slides had repeated images.

Sunday Morning - Designing for the teenage generation (jack_franklin)

I'll confess that my original reasons for choosing this talk were a) I'd been talking to Jack beforehand and b) I was presenting in the room next door right afterwards. That said, the more I thought about it, the more reasons I came up with... not least of which is that the people who are teenagers now are going to be running companies soon. They're also the first generation of users for whom the web has always been there. Everyone who's past their teens saw the web come in as a new thing - they try to define it by the media that came before it, rather than defining it by what it is. Radio and TV worked the same way, changing massively as the first generation who grew up with them came of age - we're just starting to see that now on the web with teenagers, making them possibly the most important people to watch if you want to understand how the web is going to work in the future.

...and that's before I even got to the talk.

The main things I took away from the session are as follows:
1) Everything needs a hook. If there's nothing to grab attention, they'll go elsewhere. By comparison, look at a baby boomer (or older) watching TV. They'll pick what they want to watch, or pick a channel they like, and stick with it. Then watch a gen-Xer - they'll turn the TV on and flick through channels until something grabs them... The situation on the web is analagous. Games and puzzles work well.

2) tl;dr (Too long; Didn't read). If you have to think about how long it takes to read, it's too long and you've lost them already.

3) The above don't apply for the important stuff. If, for example, Amnesty International were to try to highlight the plight of political prisoners with a fun flash game, it'd seem cheap and insulting. If it's important, make it clear without dumbing down.

Sunday Morning - Polishing a Turd (that's me, that is)

Time to bite the bullet - my arbitrarily selected slot, in which I was going to present my arbitrarily selected session. My first barcamp presentation. As mentioned earlier, I was speaking about my approach to handling an inherited web monstrosity, and how to move it from being a monstrosity to something you can happily admit to working on.

I'm not going to go into much depth in this post, as I plan to follow up with another later. So, in summary, it boils down to beginning with a few steps of triage to clear away some of the nonsense, giving you a clearer picture of what *really* needs fixing.

First, three steps of triage:
1) Cut your losses. If it's actively broken, unusable and not a quick fix, pull it. Don't try to fix it - just stop it creating more problems.
2) Stop the bleeding. If all of *your* time is spent dealing with the fallout of a problem, fix that just enough that other people can deal with the fallout instead. If you're dealing with fallout, you're not dealing with the root problems and you need to free yourself up to do that.
3) Quick Fixes. Find the things that can be fixed by a quick code change, or by simple UX changes, and just fix them.

Second, identify and fix problems in pain order:
1) Find the thing that's causing the most pain. How you define "pain" will depend on your organisation.
2) Fix the problem - fix the user story or the business requirement, not the feature. If the business problem is lead capture, then don't just look at the lead capture code & forms - look at the lead generation process and how leads are captured across the site. Don't just fix the symptom - reevaluate the whole lead capture process and be prepared to reimplement it entirely if needed. If it's causing the most pain, then it's worth the effort to do it. If the user story is "As a [persona], I can [do thing]", then look at the whole story from end to end - not just the reported bug along the way. If you spend all your time fixing symptoms, the root problems are going unattended.
3) See what's causing most pain now, and fix that the same way. Repeat until you no longer work on that site.

The only real problem I faced here was a technical one that left me a little wrongfooted. I've never used my netbook for a presentation before, so it was only when I got into the room that I found out I couldn't have my notes on the screen AND my slides on the projector... I could have my notes on the screen OR my slides on the projector. So I had the slides and not my notes. Which meant I rambled, went in circles a bit and probably missed some stuff out. I'll chalk that up as a learning experience and get some printed notes next time.

I think I didn't flub it too badly, though, as people seemed to be interested and entertained. I can't ask for more than that, really, provided they weren't just fixated on the trainwreck in progress! Half the time when I present I ignore my notes and get sidetracked anyway, so it's not a great departure.

Sunday Morning - Cool things with sensor networks (Tom Parker)

This is another session where I ought to give a bit of history. After my design degree and before becoming a professional, full time long-suffering web geek, I spent four years researching real world application of artificial neural networks. My particular field was in the use of sensor fusion in heavy, complex online machine monitoring... where "online" means running and being monitored in realtime, not "on the net". Basically, slapping a bunch of sensors on big mechanical gubbins and using neural nets (and other stuff) to say "summat's up" before the problems got expensive or explosive.

Whilst I have no desire whatsoever to go back to the field of Machine Condition Monitoring, I do still find the sensor fusion side of things really quite interesting. So seeing what other fields were doing with it was really quite cool. It was also interesting to see how things have moved on since my research.

Sunday Afternoon - Augmented Reality examples (Carin Campanaro)

This was a talk chosen at random as I didn't have time to really think about it very much - I was already late, so I looked at the board and picked the first session with interesting words in the name. In this case "Augmented Reality". In this case it was a general catchup on the state of things in the AR world... I'm not going to say very much as a result - I'll just link to her slides:

Augmented Reality (AR) - The Future of Mobile Applications?

Sunday Afternoon - Should Social Media be Regulated? IBM's Approach

This session was a topic that grew out of the discussion from a previous session, looking at how companies can work with social media. In particular, it was focusses on IBM's social media guidelines and the process by which they were created. I really like the approach IBM took, and how they've evolved their guidelines with time. Initially they started as blogging guidelines, and they were created by an open discussion amongst those who were blogging. When it became apparent that social media had outgrown blogging, they decided to reopen that same discussion to update the guidelines.

The resulting document is freely available online. If, like me, you're involved with determining how to approach blogging and social media within an organisation, I'd suggest looking to IBM's approach - even if you end up with different results at the end.

IBM Social Computing Guidelines

Sunday Afternoon - Lunch!

It was slightly odd to walk out of the session and find the lobby area covered in picnic rugs with brown-bag picnics on them, but it was a nice touch. It meant people had to sit in small groups and chat whilst eating, rather than sitting round huge tables as we had at the other meals. I spent most of my lunchbreak having a bit of a chat with Ann McMeekin (aka: Pixeldiva)... and she did a pretty decent job of selling me on her upcoming session. So when lunch was done, I knew where I was going. Which was handy.

Sunday Afternoon - Expand the Awesome: Design for a wider audience (Ann McMeekin)

I've always had a bee in my bonnet about accessibility, even if I've not always been in a position to do as much about it as I'd like. Sometimes employers don't see it as a priority, and then you just have to sneak it in without telling them... which is usually quite easy to do because accessible design is good design. It's not about making special accessible bits of a site so that blind people can use it - it's about making the whole thing accessible so that anybody can use it.

She pulled up a lot of great examples of inclusive, accessible design, which I could regurgitate here, but instead I'll link to her blog post on the matter. She says it better than I can. Examples where everyone benefits from the design, rather than just those whose requirements differ from the norm...

Pixeldiva: Expanding the Awesome - Design for a Wider Audience

I'm also going to call out one of the links she includes. Even if you don't read her post, go watch this TED talk.

Sunday Afternoon - Autism, Internet and Antelope: Cognitive Accessibility and how people with Autism use the web (Jamie Knight + Lion)

I got sidetracked and missed a session, so instead sat out in the corridor talking to Jamie Knight about an assortment of things that he'd cover a bit in his session... which was next, and was the bit of the day I was making a point of hanging around for. Jamie's quite well known as not only being a good web-guy and generally nice chap, but also as being somebody who can help us neurotypical types understand how things are for folks on the autistic spectrum or with other cognitive differences.

His session was essentially an explanation of what the autistic spectrum is, how many cognitive "disabilties" are really just differences.

Amongst other things, he made a reference to the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical - which is a parody of the way that people on the autism spectrum are treated and referred to. Whilst it's a parody, it's an interesting read, as it shows what most of us are like from a different point of view - and why most of us seem utterly freakish and nonsensical from that point of view.

I can't really think of much more to say about his session, other than that it was well worth hanging about for, even though I badly needed to go and get some actual downtime.

When it was over, I fled home to relax... but I've already found myself constantly thinking about what I can do at the next barcamp, how I can get more involved and get more out of it. I've also been recommending it to work colleagues all over the place... So I think I've thoroughly got the barcamp bug.

Some extra links

Saturday Timetable (may not be accurate)
Sunday Timetable (may not be accurate)
Slideshare presentations from the event
BarCampLondon7 flickr pool