The Ambient Kettle

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Laura Cowen

Back in 2007, my Mum and I got a pair of Internet-connected Nabaztag bunnies. Aside from all the online content we could subscribe to using the bunnies, the most fun thing for me was that we could ‘pair’ our bunnies so that they would talk to each other. If I moved the ears on my bunny, the ears on my Mum’s bunny would move to match, and vice versa. The 250 physical miles disappear for a few seconds when you see the ears move and know that it’s because Mum is physically moving the ears of her bunny. I know exactly what she’s doing at that particular pointing in time, as if we’re briefly in the same room. The technical term for this is, apparently, ambient awareness.

My Nabaztag bunny

The bunny ears experience of ambient awareness inspired my first (and, so far, only) Arduino project: Monitoring electricity using Christmas lights. The red/orange lights indicated the current electricity usage of my house and the blue/green lights indicated the current electricity usage of Mum and Dad’s house. The more electricity currently being used, the faster the lights flashed. Again, it was just that tiny tiny insight into what was happening 250 miles away. Just the mundanity of everyday life shared.

So I was curious about the Kickstarter project for the Good Night Lamp. The Good Night Lamp is a really nice and simple concept. One person has a Big Lamp (shaped like a house) and they give Little Lamps, associated with the Big Lamp, to friends and/or family anywhere in the world. When the owner switches off the Big Lamp (when they go out or go to bed), the associated Little Lamps also switch off. An appealing part of it is that you can collect a Little Lamp from each of your family or group of friends and arrange them on a shelf so that before you go to bed at night, you can see each of them ‘say goodnight’ as their respective lights go out.

Good Night Lamp

The problem I see with the Good Night Lamp is similar to the one with the Nabaztag. While I think it’s great having simple devices that do just one thing well, it doesn’t half clutter up the place. These kinds of devices need shelf-space. And it has to be shelf-space you can see easily in a place you’ll often be or they don’t work. Maybe as people replace all their books with the more easily stored ebooks, living-room bookcases will become filled with ambient devices instead. I got to chatting with Ambient Orb fan Andy Stanford-Clark about it.

While my and my Mum’s’ Nabaztags have now died or gone into hibernation and the Christmas lights never made it as far as the tree, our more lasting providers of ambient awareness don’t even have their own physical forms. Instead, they’re software on our smartphones and tablets, devices that we have around anyway, wherever we are. In particular, SMS updates of my Mum and Dad’s Tweets.

Every morning, my Mum wakes up, has a coffee with my Dad, and reads interesting articles on her iPad. I know this from when I’ve visited them and because when she reads an interesting article, she tweets or retweets it and I receive about half-a-dozen txts in quick succession. Later in the afternoon, after they’ve got home from wherever they’ve been that day (or have found free wifi somewhere while they’re out) and are drinking another cup of coffee or tea, I receive another half-a-dozen txts pointing to interesting articles online. Just receiving the txts gives me an awareness of them waking up or sitting down to read the paper. Clicking the links to the articles gives me an insight into what they’re reading and how they’re probably feeling about the topics of the articles. The fairly mundane, everyday things that we wouldn’t remember, or bother, to talk about on the phone a week or so later.

As drinking coffee or tea seems to play a regular, if side, part in the activities I’m notified about, Andy and I came up with the idea of the Ambient Kettle. In my house, we have a whole house Current Cost monitor that is connected to a server out on the Internet. It was the feed from this server that we used in my Christmas Lights project. Since then, though, I’ve added individual appliance monitors (IAMs) to a few of the appliances around the house, including the kettle. The feeds from these IAMs also go to the server and so can be used by applications that know which data to request.

So Andy hacked up a (private) Twitter account, @ambientkettle, which my Mum follows. Each time the kettle boils in my house, the @ambientkettle account tweets to my Mum:

@ambientkettle tweets

Without being physically present or explicitly letting her know that I am making a cup of tea, she can get a sense of what I’m doing. The messages in the tweets that @ambientkettle sends are pre-canned and chosen at random but made to be chatty enough that it seems a bit like the start of a conversation. Indeed, Mum sometimes tweets back to it to say that she and Dad are also having a cup of tea or are looking forward to one when they get home, or whatever. As I say, it’s mundane but it’s those kinds of mundane things that make everyday life.

I’ll be interested to see how the Good Night Lamp gets taken up. It was featured in the very mainstream Daily Mail yesterday and its founding team has a good record of startups, product design, interaction design, and Internet of Things creativeness. And there’s something very appealing about having ambient awareness of friends and family when we’re geographically spread apart.

Monkigras 2013: Scaling craft

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Laura Cowen

Monkigras goody bag

The work of William Morris, my GCSE history teacher said, was a bit of a moral dilemma. Morris was a British designer born during the Industrial Revolution. British (and then world) industry was moving rapidly towards mass production by replacing traditional, cottage-industry production processes with the more efficient, and therefore profitable, machines. One thing that suffered under this move to mass production was the focus on function and quantity over decoration and quality. Morris reacted against this by designing and producing decorations like wallpaper and textiles using the traditional craft techniques of skilled craftspeople. My history teacher’s point was that although Morris, a passionate socialist, was able to create high quality goods by using smaller-scale production methods, only wealthy people could afford to buy his designs; which was hardly equality in action. On the other hand, the skills of craftspeople were being retained, quality goods were being produced, and the craftspeople were getting paid for that quality of their work.

My pretty, handcrafted latte

Monkigras 2013, in London last week, took on this theme of ‘scaling craft’ in the context of beer, coffee, and software. All parts of this trinity of software development can benefit hugely from a focus on quality over quantity. Before I went to Monkigras, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a tech event advertised as having a lot of beer. It did have a lot of beer (and coffee) available but if you didn’t want it you could avoid it (several people I talked to said they didn’t usually drink beer). And no one seemed to get ridiculously drunk. And there were a lot of very cool talks.

The beer was also a fun analogy to apply to software development. Despite pubs in the UK closing hand over fist at the moment, microbreweries are on the rise. Microbrewing is about producing beer in small quantities on a commercial basis so that quality can be maintained whilst still viable as a business. One of the things we learnt from a brewer at Monkigras is that the taste of water varies according to where it comes from. Water is a major component of beer so if the taste of your water supply changes, the taste of your beer changes. To maintain the quality of the beer you brew, you must work within the natural resources available to you and not over-expand. Similarly, quality comes from skilled and knowledgeable people who need to be paid for their skill. If you take on cheaper staff and train them less so that you can make more profit, you will end up with a poorer quality product. You get the idea.

Handcrafting a wooden spoon.

This principle applies to all areas of craft, whether it’s producing quality coffee, a quality wooden spoon, quality conference food, or organising a quality conference, you have to focus on quality and ensure that if you scale what you do so that it’s more readily available to more people, you don’t sacrifice quality at the same time. And, importantly, that you know when to stop. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.

Software is misleadingly easy to produce. Unlike making physical objects, there is very little initial cost to producing software; you can make copies and then distribute them to customers over the Internet at very little cost. Initially, at least, it’s all in the skill of the craftspeople and their ability to identify their target users and market. If they can’t make what people will buy, they will go out of business very quickly. As software development companies get larger, the people who make the software inside the company become further removed from the selling of their software to their customers. So they become more focused on what they are close to, the technology but not who will use it.

Phil Gilbert on IBM Design Thinking

Phil Gilbert, IBM’s new General Manager of Design, comes from a 30-year career in startups, most recently Lombardi, where design was core to their culture. IBM has a portfolio of 3000 software products so, when Lombardi was acquired by IBM, Phil set about simplifying the IBM Business Process Management portfolio of products, reducing 21 different products to just four and kicking off a cultural change to bring design and thinking about users to the centre of product development. Whilst praising IBM’s history of design and a recent server product design award, he also acknowledged at Monkigras: “We are rethinking everything at IBM. Our portfolio is a mess today and we need to get better”. Changing a culture like IBM’s isn’t easy but I’ve seen and experienced a big difference already. Phil’s challenge is to scale the high-quality user-focused design values of a startup to a century-old global corporation.

One of the things that struck me most at Monkigras, and appealed to me most as a social scientist, was the focus on the human side. Despite it being a developer conference, I remember seeing only one slide that contained code. The overriding theme was about people and culture, not technology; how to maintain quality by maintaining a culture that respects its craftspeople and how to retain both even if the organisation gets bigger, even if that naturally limits how much the organisation can grow. Personal analogy was also a big thing…

Laser-scanned model of the engine

Cyndi Mitchell from Logspace talked about her family’s hog farm and working within the available resources. Shanley Kane from Basho used Dante’s spheres to describe best product management practices. Steve Citron-Pousty from RedHat use his background as an ecologist to manage communities and ‘developer ecosystems’ (don’t just call it an ecosystem; treat it like one). Diane Mueller from ActiveState talked about her 20%-time project to build a crowdsourced database of totem poles and the challenges of understanding what gets people to want to contribute to such projects. Elco Jacobs talked about his BrewPi project: automatically managing the temperature of his homebrewing fridge using a RaspberryPi based controller, and how he has open-sourced to build a community to kick start it as a potential small business. Rafe Colburn from Etsy more directly makes the link between craft and software engineering in his slides.

3D printer making a spoon

I don’t know much about William Morris so I don’t know which presentations he would have enjoyed or disagreed with. Morris was a preservationist and started the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to ensure that old buildings get repaired and not restored to an arbitrary point in the past. So maybe he would have found laser-scanning and 3D printing interesting. Chris Thorpe is a model train geek and likes to hand-make his own models of real-life objects. He too is interested in alternatives to mass manufacturing and has started to look at how to make model kits. He uses a laser to scan the objects and a 3D printer to prototype the models. He can then send the model to a commercial company who can make it into kits for him to sell. He has recently used his laser-scanning technique to scan a rediscovered old Welsh railway engine to preserve it, virtually at least, in the state in which it was found.

I had a great time with lots of cool and fun people. Well done to @monkchips for scaling a conference to just the right level of intimacy and buzz. The last thing I saw before I left was the craftsman making a wooden spoon pitted in competition against the 3D printer making a plastic spoon.

You can find many of the slide presentations and more about the conference Lanyrd.

Why Doctor Who Confidential mattered

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Laura Cowen

Behind-the-scenes documentaries, like Doctor Who Confidential, matter. They matter because they show viewers, in particular children still deciding what to do with their lives, that it takes more to produce a high-class TV programme than just a few actors who become famous. It shows what other creative and/or technical jobs there are in television.

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Doctor Who Official Convention (#dwcuk) in Cardiff. While one of the three main panels featured the three stars, Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (along with executive producers Stephen Moffat and Caroline Skinner), most of the other scheduled events were focused on how Doctor Who is made.

At the very start of the day, we went to see Danny Hargreaves ~~blow things up~~ talk about the Special Effects on Doctor Who. In his Q&A session (after making it snow indoors), the first question asked was “How did you get into special effects work?” and, between questions like how he blew up the Torchwood Hub and how he makes the Doctor’s hands and head fiery during a regeneration, a later question was “When did you realise you wanted to work in special effects?”. Attendees were interested not just in the fictional stories and characters but in how the programme is made and the interesting careers they might not otherwise have come across.

Throughout the day, I heard audience members ask how to become costume and prosthetics designers and how to become script writers. Danny described how his team designs and creates the effects, assess the risks of blowing things up, and who they work with to make it all happen. He also explained how he came to be a trainee in the nascent world of special effects before studying Mechanical Engineering so that he could build the devices they need for Doctor Who (and the other shows he’s worked on, like Coronation Street). Directors of photography, set designers, executive producers, writers, and directors went on to talk about what their own jobs entailed day-to-day and how it all comes together to make an episode of Doctor Who.

These discussions continued the story that used to be told after each new episode of Doctor Who by Doctor Who Confidential on BBC3. Doctor Who Confidential started in 2005 with the return of Doctor Who. As well as talking about some interesting perspective on making that night’s episode of Doctor Who, it featured interviews with, and ‘day-in-the-life’ documentaries about, the actors (including showing the less glamorous side of shivering in tents and quilted coats between takes), the casting directors, the producers, the writers, the choreographers, the costume designers, the special effects supervisors, the monster designers, the prosthetics experts, the directors, the assistant directors, and many, many others. It also held competitions for children to write a mini episode and then see the process of making it, which would’ve been an amazing experience!

Yes, it took a slightly odd turn in the last series when it turned a bit Top Gear by showing Karen Gillan having a driving lesson and Arthur Darvill swimming with sharks; possibly a misguided attempt to increase its popularity before it got canned anyway to cut costs.

I think it’s a real shame to lose Doctor Who Confidential and its insights into the skill, hard work, and opportunities in TV and film production.

Cool photo of Danny in the snow by Tony Whitmore.

Reflecting on our total home energy usage

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Laura Cowen

The graph of our total gas usage per year doesn’t decrease quite so impressively as our electricity graph, which I blogged about halving over five years. Because the numbers were getting ridiculously big and difficult to compare at a glance, I’ve re-created the electricity graph here in terms of our average daily electricity usage instead of our annual usage (click the graph to see a larger version):

If you compare it with the average daily gas usage graph below, you can see (just from the scales of the y-axes) that we use much more gas than electricity (except in 2007, which was an anomalous year because we didn’t have a gas fire during the winter so we used a electric halogen heater instead):

Our gas usage has come down overall since 2005 (from 11280 kWh in 2005 to 8660 kWh in 2011; or 31 kWh per day to 24 kWh per day on average) but not so dramatically as our electricity usage has. Between 2005 and 2011, we reduced our electricity usage by about a half and our gas usage by about a quarter.

Gas, in our house, is used only for heating rooms and water. So if I were to chart the average outside temperatures of each year, they’d probably track reasonably closely to our gas usage. In 2005 (when we used an average of 31 kWh per day), we still had our old back boiler (with a lovely 1970s gas fire attached) which our central heating installer reckoned was about 50% efficient. In 2006 (26 kWh per day), we replaced it with a new condensing boiler (apparently 95% efficient) but didn’t replace the gas fire until mid-2007 (the dodgy year that doesn’t really count). In 2006, we also had the living-room (our most heated room) extended so it had a much better insulated outside wall, door, and window. These changes could explain the pattern of reducing gas usage year by year up till then.

In 2009, January saw sub-zero temperatures and it snowed in November and December. I think that must be the reason why our usage for the whole year shot back up again, despite the new boiler, to 31 kWh per day. In 2010 (21 kWh per day), it was again very cold and snowy in January; I think the slight dip in gas usage that year compared with both 2008 (25 kWh per day) and 2011 (24 kWh per day) was down to a problem with the gas fire that meant we used the electric halogen heater again during the coldest month. In 2011 it snowed in January but was fairly mild for the rest of the year.

I think 2008, 2010, and 2011 probably represent ‘typical’ years of heating our house with its new boiler and gas fire. Like I concluded about reducing our electricity usage, I think our gas usage went down mostly by getting some better insulation and a more efficient boiler but we did also reduce the default temperature of our heating thermostat to about 17 degrees C (instead of 20 degrees C) a couple of years ago too (we increase it when we need to but it stays low if we don’t), which I think has made some difference but it’s hard to tell when our heating usage is so closely tied to the outside temperature. Also, we don’t currently have any way of separating out our water heating from our central heating, and our gas fire from the boiler.

Of course, what really matters overall is the total amount of energy we use (that is, the gas and electricity numbers combined). So I’ve made a graph of that too. Now we’re talking numbers like 48 kWh per day in 2005 to 33 kWh per day in 2011.

Overall, that means we reduced our total energy usage by about one-third over seven years.

Thanks again to @andysc for helping create the graph from meter readings on irregular dates.

Halving our electricity usage

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Laura Cowen

I learnt something interesting today: between 2007 and 2011, we halved the amount of electricity we use in our house:

In 2007, we used 6783 kWh of electricity (for electricity, a kilowatt hour is the same thing as a ‘unit’ on your bill). In 2011, by contrast, we used 3332 kWh (or ‘units’). 2007 was slightly on the high side (compared with 2006) because we had no gas fire in the living-room during the winter of 2006-7 so we’d used an electric oil heater during the coldest weeks (we don’t have central heating in that room) ¹.

That’s an average of 19 kWh per day in 2007 compared with 9 kWh per day in 2011. Which is quite a difference. So what changed?

In early 2008, I got a plug-in Maplin meter (similar to this one) and one of the very early Current Cost monitors, which display in real-time how much electricity is being used in your whole house:

Aside from the fun of seeing the display numbers shoot up when we switched the kettle on, it informed us more usefully that when we went to bed at night or out to work, our house was still using about 350 Watts (which is 3066 kWh per year)² of electricity. That’s when the house is pretty much doing nothing. Nothing, that is, apart from powering:

Fridge
Freezer
Boiler (gas combi boiler with an electricity supply)
Hob controls and clock
Microwave clock
Infrared outside light sensor
Print/file server (basically a PC)
Wireless access point
Firewall and Internet router
DAB clock radio
ADSL modem
MythTV box (homemade digital video recorder; basically another PC)

And that’s the thing, this ‘baseline’ often makes a lot of difference to how much electricity a house uses overall. 3066 kWh per year was 56% of 2007′s total electricity usage.

The first six items on that list draw less than 100 Watts (876 kWh per year) altogether. They’re the things that we can’t really switch off. But there were clearly things that we could do something about.

Over the next couple of years, we reduced our baseline by about 100 Watts by getting rid of some of the excessive computer kit, buying more efficient versions when we replaced the old print/file server and MythTV box, and replaced most of our lightbulbs with energy-efficient equivalents. We also, importantly, changed our habits a bit and just got more careful about switching lights off when we weren’t using them (which wouldn’t affect the baseline but does affect the overall energy usage), and switching off, say, the stereo amplifier when we’re not using it.

That brought our baseline down to about 230 Watts (2015 kWh per year), which is a lot better, though it’s still relatively high considering that the ‘essentials’ (eg fridge and freezer) contribute less than half of that.

And that’s about where we are now. We tended to make changes in fits and starts but none of it has been that arduous. I don’t think we’re living much differently; just more efficiently.

¹The complementary gas usage graph shows lower gas for that year for the same reason; I’ll blog about gas when I have a complete set of readings for 2011).
²350 Watts divided by 1000, then multiplied by 8760 hours in a year.
Photo of the Current Cost monitor was by Tristan Fearne.
Thanks also to @andysc for helping create the graph from meter readings on irregular dates.

UX hack at London Green Hackathon

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Laura Cowen

At the London Green Hackathon a few weeks ago, the small team that had coalesced around our table (Alex, Alex, Andy, and me) had got to about 10pm on Saturday night without a good idea for a hack, in this case a piece of cool software relevant to the theme of sustainability. We were thinking about creating a UK version of the US-based Good Guide app using on their API to which we had access. The Good Guide rates products according to their social, environmental, and health impacts; the company makes this data available in an API, a format that programmers can use to write applications. Good Guide uses this API itself to produce a mobile app which consumers can use to scan barcodes of products to get information about them before purchase.

The problem is that the 60,000 products listed in the Good Guide are US brands. We guessed that some would be common to the UK though. We wondered if it would be possible to match the Good Guide list against the Amazon.co.uk product list so that we could look up the Good Guide information about those products at least. Unfortunately, when we (Andy) tried this, we discovered that Amazon uses non-standard product IDs in its site so it wasn’t possible to match the two product lists.

The equivalent of the Good Guide in the UK is The Good Shopping Guide, of which we had an old copy handy. The Good Shopping Guide is published each year as a paperback book which, while a nicely laid out read, isn’t that practical for carrying with you to refer to when shopping. We discovered that The Ethical Company (who produce the Good Shopping Guide) have also released an iPhone app of the book’s content but it hasn’t received especially good reviews; a viewing of the video tour of the app seems to reveal why.

By this point it was getting on for midnight and the two coders in our team, Andy and Alex, had got distracted hacking a Kindle. Alex and I, therefore, decided to design the mobile app that we would’ve written had we (a) had access to the Good Shopping Guide API and (b) been able to write the code needed to develop the app.

While we didn’t have an actual software or hardware hack to present back at the end of the hackathon weekend, we were able to present our mockups which we called our ‘UX hack’ (a reference to the apparently poor user experience (UX) of the official Good Shopping Guide mobile app). Here are the mockups themselves, along with a summary of the various ideas our team had discussed throughout the first day of the hackathon:

Ideas what we had

View more presentations from Laura Cowen

Homecamp 4

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Laura Cowen

DC power, electricity monitoring, gas monitoring, data gathering, solar panels, hardware hacking, software hacking, behaviour change, open source, home energy, energy visualisations, cows…

Just some of the things we talked about this weekend at Homecamp 4 at the Centre for Creative Collaboration near King’s Cross in London.

A two-day event this year, Homecamp 4 (thanks to organiser Ken Boak) brought together hardware hackers, software hackers, home automation fans, energy and sustainability people, designers, and loads of enthusiasm and energy for sharing skills and experiences. And, thanks to the generous sponsorship by Amee and the support of Manager Debbie Davies at C4CC, we had lovely breakfasts, lunches, and Saturday evening drinks.

Saturday morning was dedicated to a series of presentations that had been scheduled in advance. It kicked off with a fascinating presentation by Simon Daniel from Moixa (inventor of the Palm folding keyboard and the USB rechargeable batteries) about how we could, and should, power all our lighting and computing at home off a couple of solar panels. By storing the solar power in batteries and then using it as DC power, rather than converting it to AC power, we’d not only avoid unsightly power bricks on everything, but we’d double the efficiency of the solar energy over converting it to the usual AC power to match our ordinary home electricity circuits and then convert it back to DC for consumption by LED lighting, laptops, mobile phones, and the like.

Another interesting point he made was that most young people either don’t own their own homes or they’re not likely to stay in their current house for the next 15 years so they’re unlikely to invest in solar panels. So the company is working out a way to produce essentially portable solar panel, battery, and control packages that could be installed (and transported when you move house) as easily as Sky.

Next up was James Smith from Amee to demo what you can do with the Amee API. Amee collect data about energy consumption and carbon emissions, most of which is publicly available but usually not in a form that’s easy to consume. A team of scientists search out data from all over the world about the carbon emissions of anything you can think of. The team reviews the data, corrects any errors they find, and then turns the data into code. Developers can then write applications that use the data through the Amee API.

James and Chris Adams, also from Amee, demo’d how to use one of the toolkits that Amee provides to developers to show how quick it is to generate a web form that calculates the carbon emissions of cows from ‘enteric fermentation’ (burping and farting, to you and me). His favourite Amee hack, though, was to display the carbon emissions of setting fire to things in Minecraft.

After a brief pitch by Casper Koomen from Amsterdam about Pachube, and an update from organiser Ken on his Nanode (previously seen, discussed, and built at Oggcamp 11!), Trystan Lea and Glyn Hudson (from North Wales) described and demo’d their neat open source, Arduino-based energy monitoring project, the OpenEnergyMonitor (first presented at Homecamp 2).

After a novel but tasty free lunch of Vietnamese baguettes, the afternoon proceeded in a more unconference-style format. In a mix of formal presentations and informal discussions, we had talks on a range of topics, including getting your hardware ideas produced commercially, home energy monitoring experiences and visualisations, home-grown wind turbines, 3D printing, and I gave a short introduction/overview on the psychology of energy behaviour change. Most talks got several questions and I was really pleased that my talk, despite having a fairly different focus from many of the others, generated quite a lot of interest and discussion both at the time and over the rest of the weekend.

The Saturday evening pub was unfortunately closed for a private party so Tony and I encouraged everyone back to the lovely Harrison Bar where we were staying and had already eaten a good dinner and noticed an interesting list of beers. If you like ginger beer, I recommend the Crabbie’s Ginger Beer (4%).

Sunday took on a more hackday feel and the attendees either hacked on Nanodes and similar hardware, played with software APIs, or wandered/sat around discussing cool ideas.

In all it was a very fun weekend. We had some great conversations and met some very cool people. Hopefully, there’ll be a Homecamp 5.

During the weekend, Tony and I, ever on the lookout for interesting content for the Ubuntu-UK Podcast, interviewed James about Amee, and Tristan and Glynn about their OpenEnergyMonitor project. Look out for them in upcoming episodes of UUPC.

Photos thanks to Tony Whitmore

OggCamp (2009)

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Laura Cowen

Two weekends ago, I, with the rest of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast team and the Linux Outlaws podcast team, was in Wolverhampton to run a new one-day open source community unconference called OggCamp.

A few people have asked “why Wolverhampton?”. Which is a fair question considering that four of the organisers live in Hampshire, one in the South-West, one in Liverpool, and one in Bonn.

Well, Wolverhampton is the location of the annual LugRadio Live open source community conference. The organisers of LugRadio Live (the LugRadio podcast presenters) are, or were, based in Wolverhampton. While there are many things you could say about Wolverhampton, one thing that always impressed me was that, to attend LugRadio Live, people flew to Wolverhampton from all over the UK, from all over Europe, all over the States, and even from Hong Kong and Australia at times (see my blog post about past LRLs for more).

Last year, after four hugely popular LugRadio Live events, including one in San Francisco sponsored by Google, the team announced that the fortnightly LugRadio podcast was going to end, and so the fifth LugRadio Live (in July 2008) would be the last ever LugRadio Live.

And then, under pressure from Popular Demand, they agreed to do another last ever LugRadio Live – in October 2009. This last ever LugRadio Live, though, would only be one day, the Saturday, like their first ever LugRadio Live. Which left a whole Sunday to fill. Which is where OggCamp comes in.

The Connaught Hotel Welcomes OggCamp When we decided to organise OggCamp, we had no idea how it would go down. We figured that, between the two podcasts (Ubuntu-UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws) we’d had enough positive feedback that we could get at least 50 people along. Because it would be the day after LRL, there was a chance that enough LRL attendees would stick around for the day on Sunday and coming to OggCamp too. To make extra sure of that, we decided to hold OggCamp in the official LRL hotel (so that the geeks could just roll out of bed and into OggCamp), and to make the event free to attend.

In the end, about 130 people came to OggCamp. Which was brilliant!

The sight of people queuing up three flights of stairs to come in at 10.30 on the Sunday morning left us briefly gob-smacked.

We kicked off at about 11am with a quick introduction from all the presenters in which we explained how there was no pre-arranged schedule and that to sign up for a talk you just had to write it on a sticky note (large notes for full-hour talks; half-sized notes for half-hour talks) and stick it in a slot in the grid on the wall.

First up was Andy Stanford-Clark who did a brand new talk, specially written for OggCamp (and completed the night before while the rest of us were at the LRL kareoke party), about the geekier details of his Twittering House (the stuff the BBC didn’t get!). By midday, the schedule was getting pretty full (something of a relief!) and the planned topics included web services, how to prove identity on the Net, how to encourage young people to use Open Source Software, politics and geeks (from ORG), translating Playstation 2 games, and how to explain programming to non-programmers!

At 3pm, everyone gathered in the main room to watch a live joint recording of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws. This started with a live raffle draw (surely a first in open source events?) for some very cool prizes donated by our sponsors, including a couple of Viglen MPC-Ls, some Ubuntu laptop bags and hoodies, an O’Reilly book, and an Arduino Mega. After the raffle, we did two segments: one about producing media using Open Source Software, and one about whether or not the Open Source community spreads itself too thin by creating so many different distributions. The segments included a lot of audience interaction, and also real-time twittering from the audience on to the TwitterFall screen behind us on-stage.

The live show was something that we had been nervous about because six is a large number of people to be talking anyway but also because the two podcasts (UUPC and LO) are quite different in style so we had no idea how well we would integrate. The two podcasts released their own versions of the live show during the following week and, if you’re keen, you can compare and contrast the two: UUPC (family friendly) and LO (includes the naughty words). I don’t think either podcast did much editing of content, which drew this comment from a UUPC listener.

So, all in all, I think we can say that OggCamp was a success.

It was certainly a lot of fun – if exhausting!

We also sold enough raffle tickets and OggCamp limited edition souvenir mugs to financially break even on the whole event. Which was good from our point of view. And there has been a load of positive feedback from the attendees, including questions about whether we’ll do it again next year. Although we’ve tried to not to commit to anything, by now I think we can safely say that there is likely to be another OggCamp next year.

(For more photos, see the OggCamp group on Flickr.)

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Raising The Eight Bar

Author Archives: Laura Cowen