Persona Non Grata

So, in little under a week in Aberystwyth will host Hacio’r Iaith 2012 (28th January 2012). This will be third annual event, and is one of the largest ‘barcamp’ style conference in Wales.

I’ve been asked to explain exactly what a barcamp is… so here goes…

A barcamp is known as an ‘unconference’, it has no set schedule, speakers or events planned… all that is set up on the day.

Yes, sounds crazy, but it works. The conference schedule is decided on the day, by those that turn up. People who come are encouraged to sign up and give talks about whatever topic they like. Whilst the broad theme of the event is technology, this can be interpreted loosely to cover pretty much any topic, and discussions can range from the effect of Government policy on Web usage, through to the history of Internet memes…

I’ve been to quite a few barcamps and they really are that broad… during the 2011 London Barcamp, several hundred people descended to listen and give talks. In one room, a woman gave a talk about Chocolate (she’d set up a website where she reviews chocolate… as her day job… – she’d brought samples…), whilst in the next, a Whisky blogger ran a session “Absinthe for beginners”, whilst in another room a talk was detailing how to build a game for the iPhone. All of this, at one conference, in the space of an hour…

So, at the start of the day, attendees will be asked to gather at the grid to sign up to give talks. As I said, the talks can be on virtually anything (like I said… chocolate and absinthe…). So the next question is, do you *have* to give a talk…

Well, you don’t have to… but you should. The attendees at a barcamp have come to listen to talks. They *want* to hear from you. Noone is there to shout you down, boo you or make fun of you. They’ve come to hear from people who have a passion for a given topic. You really don’t need a fancy Powerpoint, it doesn’t need to be technical, and you don’t have to prepare anything. You can just literally sign up for a slot and talk. It’s about sharing your passion and your knowledge.

You could do a talk about something that interests you, show off a project you’ve been working on, or host a discussion about a burning issue. Just name your session, pick a time slot and that’s it.

Want some ideas on talks? Have a look at this Lanyrd.com search page, it has a list of almost a 1000 talks delivered at hundreds of barcamps all over the world on topics, including “Fancy a Pint?” at Barcamp London (One of mine – my co-host was a woman I got chatting to at the start of the day, and by the afternoon we were discussing how great beer is with a room full of people… no slides, no anything), through to “How to Podcast for Free” at Barcamp Liverpool (not one of mine…). Like I said, *anything*.

If you’re unsure about giving a talk, you can get in touch with me before next saturday (bryn.salisbury@gmail.com, or @bryns on twitter), or come grab me on the day. I’ve had wonderful experiences giving talks at Barcamps, and you should too. It’s a great place to practice public speaking in front of a group who really want to hear from you, and want to support you.

Other than the talks, you’ll also get to see Sioned (@llef), Iestyn (@iestynx) and me do a live recording of our podcast (The Haclediad) there. It’ll be an absolute blast. This year is shaping up to have the most attendees ever, and I’m REALLY excited. If you’ve never been, there’s a tremendous buzz from gathering together with so many people enthused around a topic or area, you’ll want to rush off and start a dozen projects right away… and that, if anything, will give you plenty to talk about when you come along to the one in 2013!

See you in Aberystwyth guys…

So there’s been some interesting debates going on in Wales recently after Bethan Jenkins AM (those of you who are ex-Aberystwyth students may remember her from her time as Guild President) wrote an interesting Op-Ed piece for Wales Home, called “Time for Radical Solutions” in which she advocates that the Welsh Assembly should look to convert the Western Mail into a publicly funded company (with editorial protection similar to that of S4C), then letting the company be floated a few years later to be a private company again.

The piece has drawn a lot of attention (BBC News – Western Mail could be taken over by government, says AM, Golwg360 – Galw ar y llywodraeth i gymryd y Western Mail and on Twitter), and seems to have achieved Bethan’s aim of stirring up a debate. Opinions vary from Trinity Mirror (the owner of The Western Mail) saying “no comment” (i’m paraphrasing) though to discussions on the Government’s role in media.

I personally don’t think it’s the Government’s place to be taking over media properties (even with guarantees of editorial independence). We’ve seen in the past how the BBC has drawn fire from politicians of all sides for editorial bias (particularly from The Conservatives). The perception that it’s a ‘Government’ paper would be difficult to shift, and journalists might feel weary of biting the hand that feeds it. Also, given the seemingly incestious nature of media in Wales at the moment, would the WM have ran the story about S4C’s battles with University of Wales if members of its board were also sat on S4C’s?

If you ask me, WAG should be looking to put the boot up the Western Mail’s backside and using it’s position to encourage and foster competition. Wil Stephens suggests that WAG should be looking to set itself up with a seed fund, and investing money in starting up new ventures, rather than taking over old ones (a sentiment I share). Huw Marshall also points out that the Western Mail isn’t exactly an “all Wales” property (I tend to agree, from my experience it’s almost entirely a South Wales affair). So the notion of setting up an ‘All Wales’ news organisation is quite appealing.

The Western Mail is still a profitable (if dwindling) business. What its owners; Trinity Mirror (and S4C for that matter), needs is some competition. Starting a news organisation is expensive (staffing, legal, hardware et al), and is well beyond the means of most… But if WAG helped to introduce a new player and disrupt the market, broadcast and print media in Wales would be forced to innovate in order to maintain market share. A new player could gather journalists from local papers and bring in the best of the Web’s talent and provide a new service, and Trinity Mirror would need to do something to keep up.

So, should WAG take over the Western Mail? No… but it can help us to make it (and media in Wales) much, much better.

With Hacio’r Iaith 2012 just around the corner (3 months to today infact…), I’m starting to collect some notes on a talk I’d like to give on what a next generation S4C would look like (hence the name S4C 2.0).

Since my posts back in April, I’ve had a few more ideas. I’d like though to open it up to a much wider audience and invite you (dear readers) to join in and tell me what you all think. What would you want from the channel? More online services? iTunes/Amazon/LoveFilm access? More multi-lingual content? Greater transparency from the management? A simpler process for getting more ‘independent’ content broadcast? More services for learners?

I’ll start to put this all together around Christmas, and keep you in the loop about how it’s all going.

Lest you think that I’m over on the Emerald Isle for fun (I’m having fun, but that’s not the primary purpose of my visit), I had one of those “wait, what? oh yeah…” moments during a discussion on secure applications development.

It centred around the this analogy (edit 21:18 – given by the interviewee):

I don’t know how many of you have been on a secure coding course (I’d hazard a guess and say “not many”), their tendency is to spend most of the time showing you what goes wrong (“look at how bad SQL injection can be!”), then spend a tiny fraction of that time showing you how to do it right. If we continue from our Continuing his analogy, the Interviewee said it would be akin to letting someone crash a car, and then saying “don’t do that…”.

So, my question is this… are we teaching these things the wrong way around? Is it not better to show people the correct way to handle things like user input, SQL queries, or error handling? Once we show them the right way, we can then move to show them what happens when it goes wrong. Having said that, any of these types of training guidelines would depend on the technology being used, and the associated infrastructure for reviewing the code afterwards, so maybe the answer isn’t as clear as we’d like it to be.

It’s an interesting idea, and one I’d like to explore further… if you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. If I do manage to nab some time, hoping to do a session on it at Barcamp London.

So I ran the session at Barcamp London, you can see the slides here:

An pretty good session, with a very interesting debate. Now to wait for some more feedback over the next few days.

So arrangements are well underway now for Hacio’r Iaith 3 in Aberystwyth, and we’ve already got some sponsors have been lined up. Now all we need is more people to sign up to do talks (to that end, I’m hoping to push out a guide to barcamp talks sometime near the weekend – probably after Barcamp London).

With the announcement today of the S4C’s shotgun wedding to the BBC, I’m even keener to develop a talk on what I’ve decided to call “S4C 2.0″. The talk will probably focus on a lot of the ideas I’ve explored here before (ad nauseum), as well as a few more ideas I’ve been developing off-line.

So, I’ve been on the go quite a bit lately… as I type, I’m listening to the rain lash down on an already sodden Dún Laoghaire (I’m out here for the week with work, staying at the rather nice Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel – @fitzcastle). I thought, given I’ve got some time to kill…

So, having missed Blackpool Barcamp last year, I was really quite keen to make it up for this year’s event. The first thing you noticed was how many more people were gathered there this year (which is a credit to the organisers, who’ve grown it from a really tiny event two years ago to one that attracts people from all over the country). I ended up delivering a talk that I’d initially prepared for Tweetcamp the week before but didn’t deliver. The talk centred around themes I’ve previously explored on this blog of how the web helped me re-establish my ability to write in Welsh.

It was a spur of the moment thing really, and I think had I maybe opted for a later session, I’d have had another hour to practice, and drawn in a few more people to see it… I’ve since had some time to work on it, so I can try again at…

So, picture the scene… I’m sat waiting on an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, and decide “you know what? I’m going to switch my phone back on” and the first alert I get is from Barcamp London, telling me I had a chance to nab a ticket off the waiting list, just as the plane starts to taxi…

Queue minutes of frantic fiddling as I try to remember my Eventbrite login details before the plane takes off. Thankfully, I got one, and I’m looking forward to seeing what a REALLY big barcamp looks like.

So, my Twitter followers will know that I’ve been quite excited to get a hold of Jeff Jarvis’ latest book “Public Parts”. I have to confess however that I’ve had little time to read it lately, and the few times I’ve tried to make time usually result in me waking up the next morning with a cold cup of tea on the sideboard, and the book neatly placed next to it. Thankfully, an hour’s flight to Dublin meant I got some time to catch up.

I’ll post a fuller review in time, but the hundred odd pages I’ve read so far have been quite enlightening. He offers a detailed insight into his life, and the advantages he (and others) have drawn from living an ‘open’ life on the web (he doesn’t advocate full disclosure, merely suggesting that there are advantages to be had by opening up). I must confess, I find it hard to disagree with anything in there. I too have found advantages employing many of the things he suggests. I’ve made good friends through Twitter, Google+, E-Mail Lists, my Blog and at Conferences. I’ve managed to reconnect with a part of my life I had feared I’d lost, and learnt more about photography than I ever could through formal education.

So, I think I’ll try to embrace the concept of publicness a bit more and see what happens.

So over the weekend, I spent the day down in the east end of London at Tweetcamp 2011. The conference explored the use of social media within life, work and everything in between. I was surprised to see the cross-section of people in attendance, which ranged from journalists to web designers through to marketing and PR people.

I ended up in a discussion on how you’d approach using Twitter in multiple languages. I got into an interesting chat with a woman working on the next generation of the web (and in particular the approach to a multiple language web). We ended up having a fascinating discussion over issues ranging from the best approach to social media through to how pubic services fail to address or take advantage of the developments in technology.

A fab conference, and a jolly good time.

In completely unrelated news, with my recent issues with my poorly work macbook, I came to the conclusion that I needed to address my approach to backups. I came to the conclusion that I’m both incredibly forgetful, and a little lazy when it comes to such things. My old approach was to connect a USB drive to the laptop (when I remembered) and let it finish. I looked over the backup logs and realised that before this weekend, I’d only backed up once in the last two months.

So, the best idea was to actually make the computer do it for me. Now, I wanted to have a local and eventually a remote backup. The local solution came in the form of an Apple Airport Extreme, which is now letting me share a hard drive over the network, which means that as long as the system is online in the house, I’m backing up my data. So, if the laptop gets broken, I have a backup. The next question is, what happens if the house burns down… What options do people use for a remote backup? I’ve seen adverts for services like Carbonite, but I’d like to get some recommendations from the rest of you.

So, until next time

News hit the world today that Steve Jobs lost his long fight with cancer. I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on his contributions to the industry in particular and to society at large. Whether or not you like Apple (I happen to quite like their products), there’s no denying the Jobs’ impact on our world. The initial release of the Apple I back in 1976 challenged the perception that computers were tools of business, through to the launch of their retail stores, the launch of the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 as well as challenging the preconceptions about what a computer was and how it should look. Jobs’ influence has pervaded every aspect of the industry.

Rest in peace Mr Jobs. You’ll be missed.

So, this Sunday I finally hit the ‘Deactivate My Account’ button on Facebook.

Why? I’d like to pretend it’s because of some massive ideological issue, or that I’m making a stand on X or Y, but honestly it’s because I’m bored of it. Yes, a privacy issue was the final straw, but there’s little more to it than that.

So, the final straw came after Facebook announced some changes over the last week at its F8 conference, where it announced a re-design to the interface, and some API tweeks. For me, the most interesting were to do with the ability of partners such as Spotify to automatically post what you’re listening to on your wall. The same system could also be used for sites like the New York Post to post the articles you’ve read, and as soon as they get a law repealed, what films you’ve watched in Netflix.

Now, the normal response to this sort of thing is that you’ve opted in to using the service, and if you don’t want Facebook to track what you’re up to, then log out. Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, except for a rather interesting article Logging out of Facebook is not enough where a blogger called Nik Cubrilovic shares his insights into how the Facebook login cookies work. It seems that even when logged out, Facebook can still obtain and track your activities when you visit a website with any of its elements loaded (e.g. the ‘Like’ button). In my view, this is a particularly underhanded thing to do, since the logout should be the last interaction you have with that website. By surreptitiously gathering user data with (what is essentially) a hidden bit of code, Facebook is spying on those users who’ve made an effort to take their privacy seriously.

So, that was the straw, but it’s a decision I’ve been putting off for some time now. I only really got into the whole thing because my Ex kept bothering me to join the damned thing. What I realised is that the 300-odd people I have listed as “friends” are either those I lost contact with years ago (people I went to primary/secondary school with), people I follow on Twitter/Google+, or people I email on a semi-regular basis. What little time I invested in it isn’t showing a return, and I’ve got better things to do with my time.

Am I saying you lot should leave it too? Honestly, I don’t know. If you feel like you’re getting something out of it, then keep using it. Otherwise, consider if you really need a way to keep in touch with that annoying guy you went to primary school with who keeps posting pictures of his drunken nights out in your old home town, or that girl you knew at University who keeps posting pictures of her kids. Like me, you’ll probably discover that you’ve grown so far apart, you won’t miss them at all.

Now, back to work…

Friends, I’ve ridden my hobby horse called ‘S4C rant’ to death. I’ve suggested things, had feedback both good and bad, and even got a few lines back from their press office. Sadly, I fear they’re not wanting any help. I imagine they’re all cruising along to somewhere, rudderless and taking on water, in denial that there’s anything wrong, convinced they’ll make it… somewhere (with “Nearer, My God, to Thee” playing softly in the background).

With a hat-tip to Leighton Andrews AM, I saw this article in the Western Mail about University of Wales failing to back a researcher over a critical report of S4C and I can honestly say I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Based on the Western Mail’s report, it seems that the report is pretty damning of the management, the strategy and pretty much everything going. Nothing said in the report is of any surprise to anyone who’s been watching what S4C is up to.

It goes on to say in the article that S4C now apparently wants its money back. To me, that says quite a lot about them. They commissioned the report to supposedly find out what they’re doing wrong, someone has told them and they don’t like the answer (confirming pretty much exactly what the report is supposed to have said). This type of a report should be the mother of all alarm clocks, shouting a quote I’ve cannibalised from a Risky Business blog post from a few weeks ago…

Honestly, I think I’ve coasted far past the point at which any normal person would have given up. I’m now at the point where I doubt anything can be done to save it, which is something I that find truly dispiriting.