Being Blonde

This weekend (14-15th March) saw the Maker Faire UK set out its wares as part of the Newcastle ScienceFest 2009.

Bit of background, Maker Faire was established by Dale Dougherty  who along with Tim O’Reilly, founded O’Reilly Media. Dale is the founder and publisher of Make: magazine which celebrates tweaking, hacking, creating, merging and generally mangling technology.

The problem I have with this event is the name – Maker Faire. It conjures up images of paper doilies, home baking and bad arts and crafts, even the website graphics use party bunting which doesn’t really help matters. The reality of the situation though is that it is a lo-tech nirvana full of passion, creativity and innovation. It is more about personal technology and making technology personal than slick, mass produced tech which, as an pproach, is refreshing in itself.

The Faire was in a Marquee in Times Square, the Life Science Centre and also the Discovery Museum. There were about 30 stands that covered everything from virtual graffiti, twitter controlled devices including Arduino bot, a host of audio and visual interfaces to robots, plants, dolls and hats (all of which were far more interesting than I’ve just made them sound).

Walking round the event with two kids both under the age of six did pose a few “issues” for me but I managed to get a fairly good overview of Make: and some of the fantastic projects the guys had created. This is a small selection of what was on offer…

And the weekend wouldn’t be complete without some Robot Wars thrown in courtesy of Robo Challenge…

Here are the results of a quick experiment conducted in our Edinburgh office whilst everyone was having tea and enjoying cakes made by our pals at Stripe for Comic Relief.

We’d been in a meeting talking about the design for an in-house portfolio project we’re working on. This involved one of the team attempting to sketch an outline of Scotland on a notepad. The scribble was so laughably bad that we decided to extend the task to the whole office. Everyone had 30 seconds and no Google-peeking.

What this says about our observation and spacial awareness skills we’re not sure. It probably won’t form part of our design credentials.

It’s been a while. The You Are What You Shirt category has gathered dust and cobwebs. But this morning’s fire drill presented this opportunity, courtesy of Roy.

The devil is in the detail. Read the small print.

And so it began one cold January morning during a hunt (a friendly chase really) for social entrepreneurs. But as the weird and wonderful ways of the Web work -  several hyperlinks later and I’ve found myself somewhere else entirely.

http://sociability.org.uk/ (Andy Gibson’s thoughts on Mind Apples and how to preserve our mental health … it’s good stuff.)

http://www.unltd.org.uk/index.php (a charity which supports social entrepreneurs - incredibly comprehensive and clearly very dedicated to the cause.)

And http://multichannelthinking.blogspot.com/ (Some interesting thoughts on the retail market … how sad to think that in a recession we’re doing ourselves more damage by not co-operating, thinking collectively and actively collaborating).

Come on people, lets get it together.

Sincerely,

Doogie Howser.

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success - well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival -  http://bit.ly/yblG3

(Thanks to freezelight for the photo)

I’ve had a rewardingly unrewarding time skim-reading (skim re-reading) Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. I was looking for a quote to illustrate a point I’m making in a presentation. Alas to no avail.

However, I did stumble across the gems below in the process.

(The context for this is that the book is about a group of friends who are also geeky (and lowly) Microsoft employees. It was written in 1995 and the prescience of the author should be appreciated from that perspective).

The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists - the people who were bored with high school - the sort of people the teacher was always telling, “Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to.  Why don’t you just apply yourself?” Look for these people - the talented generalists. They’re good as project and product managers. They’re the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long term stability of the company.

“@” could become the “Mc” or “Mac” of the next millenium.

It’s like male geeks don’t know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it’s a user interface problem. Not their fault. They’ll just wait for the next version to come out - something more “user friendly.”

There’s an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project.

Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don’t have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

So the story goes something like this…

Blonde design / storyboard viral application for client.

Client likes design, but isn’t sure about the name.

Client’s fantastic project manager (FPM) at Blonde decides to open an internal competition for Blondes to suggest new names.

Some silly [and inappropriate] ones were suggested and when Blondes voted, it seemed that silliness got the better of the poll.

FPM took executive decision to remove silliness from poll and focus attention on some sensible options.

Such decisive [and responsible] action was interpreted as censorship of creative input by a Certain Individual in Blonde.

Fight breaks out.

Certain Individual posts Twitter rant on censorship.

FPM replies to Twitter rant with a formal blog post that admittedly would only make sense if you knew the context of the original debate.

Unfortunately FPM makes political statement in blog post that may not sit well with the political alignment of all Blonde clients.

Certain Individual censors FPM.

Moral of the story.

What goes around comes around.

Whilst I’ve been writing these posts, can’t help wondering if we should have weighed Blondes before the vending machines moved in (last week)….

….and then weigh them again in a few weeks.

Oh aye.

They [the techies] say that the intensity of programming sometimes means that developers need to break from their work now and then and explore a more playful way of thinking.

Indeed.

Thank-goodness for Project Managers.

The power and autonomy of CMS (content management system) publishing can be daunting for those used to operating in an offline environment. Not so for Robertson who have embraced their CMS, actively updating projects, news, job vacancies and continually look for ways to appeal to a broader audience online.

Blonde were briefed to provide the Robertson Group with a new website, accommodating 10 ‘sub-sites’ for all of the individual companies within the Group.

The ‘Group’ site holds all the information for Robertson’s core business, with the sub-sites holding information specific to their companies and regions.  All sites carry consistent branding and functionality, with a multi-level CMS (Content Management System) designed to support the different access levels of Robertson employees.

Much effort has been invested in achieving a highly visual site that carries a life of its own and aims to be much, much more than simply an information hub of a bricks and mortar business.