Geekyoto

Last week I attended Geekyoto in London (and visited some friends). I just had time to typeout my notes of the day with short blurbs on each presentation and pointers where I can find them. Great event where I learned a lot and took away quite a bit of inspiration.

Video’s of each presentation should become available in the near future and I would recommend watching it.

Christian Nold

Nold did a talk on local experience maps to visualize the impact of the environment on people. One very cool demo where he would map the galvanic skin response people have over locations on isomaps.

Alex Haw - Atmoss

Surveillance as an anti-architectural tool and surveillance as it relates to the body.

They made a map of all the area in a space which was covered by security cams and then got rid of all the rest (because that obviously does not matter). Showed some stuff about work space positions and efficient use of space. Also tackled domesticity and the dilemma between exhibition and privacy. Privacy could just as well be served not by building opaque walls but by putting shields in front of people’s eyes where you control up to what resolution you are visible to whom.

Also showed some work visualizing database cells into physical locations, one for the Deutsche Borse. And another one for a faculty of architecture where activity within the building would be mapped to a lightscape in a central space with fiberoptic lamps (this blogpost has pictures).

Moixa

Efficient re-usable energy. Green energy is not yet mass market. The battle between AC and DC. Pretty much everything you use locally uses a small DC current but we need to generate large amounts of AC to transport over long distances. Not efficient.

Demo of the USBcell battery which is a battery form factor chargable from a powered USB port on any pc. That way you don’t need to mess around with chargers anymore and most people have a charger device handy most of the time.

Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman

компютри втора употреба

During sabbath Jewish people need to observe some strange rules. They cannot change the state of anything electrical. So to work around this they have timer lights and water reboilers. Sabbath is a time when people come together and they are more focused on

They checked what the environmental impact of the sabbath is and found out that it actually saves energy. You could observe an environmentally friendly sabbath by inviting friends over, no TV, no phones, no computers, just chat and walk.

Gavin Starks - AMEE

What if all the energy data of the world was available? AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform where they collect the energy footprint of everything in the world.

Mentions this blessay by Stephen Fry.

75% of change does not require new technology
25% of change has no cost

Vincenzo diMaria - Saint Martins ID

Showed a design prototype of a trinacria box for sun dried tomatoes from Sicily for some sort of agro-tourism.

Bruno Taylor - Saint Martins ID

Talked about the nature of play in a changing public realm and why there is no play on streets right now and adult supervision most of the time. Are we creating a future of socially inept individuals? The YouTube video with the bus stop swing he mentioned.

There’s a tension between vandalism and playful behaviour. Children come at the bottom of the user hierarchy on the street level while they should be considered first.

Richard Sandford - Futurelab

Picture by Rachel Clarke

Beyondcurrenthorions.org.uk

How do we make better futures? Challenged us to think about alternative futures and to believe that we can make a difference in it. What we imagine is what gets built. Events are not predestined and an uncertain future may be a good one because we get to change things. Future literacy consists of knowledge, awareness and confidence and it should be embedded at the school level.

He also mentioned the notion of the extended present of about 200 years which stretches out from your grand parents to you and then from you on to your grand children.

Wattson

Picture by Mark Simpkins

Also saw a design demo of the Wattson device and Holmes web interface from DIY Kyoto. (explanation). It was more or less a product pitch but for a very relevant and well designed product.

Edward Scotcher

The image of Africa as tremendously behind is no longer accurate. It is a place where mobile phones, internet cafés and WiFi are all around. Traditional forms of media are not trusted and web2.0’s market for information has a large potential to create transparency.

Personal site is Moamba.net
He mentions White African blog article.

Ushahidi and Sokwanele are two Google Maps initiatives to map actual events and increase awareness in regions in Africa. As time goes on only more people will have access.

Bryony Worthington - Sandbag

Politics broke the system of emissions trading and she wants to fix it. The system has removed the individual’s ability to make a difference. She wants to remove permits from the system, destroy unused ones and lower caps alltogether.

Sandbag.org.uk is an initiative to bring emissions trading into the pubblic domain

James Smith

Can software save the planet? He makes socially responsible software like Carbon Diet and Do the green thing.

Jeremy Gould and Mitch Sava

Government Barcamp crossovers. Break up policy issues into Symptoms, Actions, Objectives, Issues, Outcomes and invite collaboration.

Mentions Polywonk

How do we show support to let politicians make the right decisions with confidence?

Ben Saunders

Final talk by Ben Saunders about arctic expeditions very inspiring with great stories and pictures illustrating some of the most difficult conditions on the planet.

“Nobody else is the authority on your potential.”

Picture by kokeshi

(Thanks Cristiano for your tireless photography.)

Last week was busy. I was home pretty much only to sleep and lived off train station junk food. Not the best life, but a lot of fun and cool things happened.

One of these was the Next Web conference, a great startup event where a lot of interesting people from the European and American startup scene were present. The conference was complicated for me slightly because Eelke and I volunteered to shoot a report of it for Frankwatching, one of the Netherlands’ leading Web 2.0 blogs.

The report is in Dutch but there are some choice bits of English interview in there, especially a Q&A with Robert Scoble which cuts pretty much to the essence of what he told us at The Next Web. It is up at Vimeo:

Frankwatching @ The Next Web 2008 from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

I’ve never done something like this before, but I’ve wanted to for a long time. This was a great opportunity. Suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, very tiring and I learned a lot. I have a lot more respect for (video)journalists now.
I expect to do more with video in the future especially for travelblogging and ambient recording and I’m thinking of getting a Flip.

The Next Web was a great conference with a spectacular ambience fitting the growing European startup scene. I didn’t hear a lot of new stuff from many speakers. I like my speakers in depth, on the edge and interdisciplinary because I learn the most from those. But maybe that’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

I will be off to Berlin tomorrow with Tijs to attend Plazecamp at the Plazes HQ.

For those of you who cannot attend but are interested in geopresence, you can participate remotely.

Expect a more detailed report concerning: geopresence, mobile applications, web application focus, geographical browsing and competition in the presence space after the weekend.

Picture by Breyten Ernsting

Picture by Katie Lips

Yesterday we had the year’s end software social. A nice evening with some drinks with startup friends in Amsterdam and talk about work and parties, Python and DiSo.

Not a lot of reminiscing but instead lots of optimism —which I share— looking forward to the coming year. Have a great New Year’s and see you in 2008.

Day 2

The party of last night, made this day start at a suitably late time. I just got into the venue in time for Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s demo of Photosynth. This guy is one of Microsoft’s biggest PR assets, and I hope they chain him to the building or something.

Rod Beckström closed off the keynotes with a great presentation about his principles of flexible network structures explained in his book “The Starfish and the Spider”. I’m definitely going to read that book.

My head could not cope with any of the sessions planned for that afternoon, so I spent the rest of the day hanging around the expo and we made an early exit.

Day 3

Today and the last day of the conference, we got in in time for Cory Doctorow’s presentation about the European Copyright Wars. Cory mainly explained the various legislations in place both in Europe as in the US and listening to him, you would think the battle had already been lost.
It seems that EFF and EDRI are making strides in this fight and they can use all the support they can get.
I asked Cory what he thinks about the Pirate movements and he replied he thinks it is useful to have people out there who take an extreme position. We are fighting a war here and some nukes may come in handy. I’m checking out the feasability of a Dutch Pirate Party.

Then it was off to the final keynotes where Tim O’Reilly interviewed Ari Virtanen from Nokia and managed to bore the entire audience to death. This interview missed all the sharpness and candour of the Microsoft one. The one guy who asked why Nokia changed the size of their plug, got applause but Cristiano couldn’t muster the courage to stand up and ask why the N95 is such a horrible phone.

Reshma Sohoni finished off the keynotes with some stuff about Seedcamp and then it was thanks and greetings from the O’Reilly crew and the Web 2.0 Expo was over. We played some final rounds of Werewolf with the regular crowd, and headed out for dinner.

During dinner we talked about lots of stuff including cameras and experience design. About why iPods, iPhones and TomToms are the best devices in their fields for random definitions of ‘best’.
It’s interesting that with all the talk about it and the importance of the subject, that a lot of people still do not get it. I thought the stuff we heard at dConstruct was pretty self evident, but it looks like there’s still a lot of awareness to be raised on this issue.

Day 4

We will be around for one more day before driving back to the Netherlands on Saturday. Let’s see what Berlin has to offer on the touristic side.

Here’s a general run through of our experiences in the first couple of days in Berlin.

Prelude

The barcamp during the weekend before was most excellent. Brave step for our German friends to do pretty much all of the presentations in English. This is certainly not normal during Barcamps on continental Europe and presenting in a non-native language is certainly a challenge.

We played some werewolf, but seeing as we got kicked out of the venue at 23:00 (no camping!) that was stopped somewhat early. We managed to get some more time in on the second day in between some nightly exploits exploring Prenzlauer Berg.

Opening (Day #0)

I chilled out a bit and caught the Jeff Wall photography exhibit in the Guggenheim. The museum is celebrating their 10 year anniversary and I believe admission is free. Highly recommended. Then Reinier picked me up and we drove by car to the venue but we couldn’t find it for the life of us.

The venue is quite remote and it’s a concrete conference monstrosity. Getting there by car is challenging, if you take into account the completely unusable signage on German roads. People of Germany, there’s an experience which could stand to be improved.

So we had missed the opening keynote by Tim O’Reilly but we registered and caught the ignite talks among others Katie talking about their SMS backup and sharing application Treasure My Text.

We ended the day having dinner with Nicole, Jody and some others.

Day 1

On the first day of the conference we arrived a bit early for the keynote talks. I was glad we had already picked up our badges because the registration that morning seems to have been immensely crowded.

We paid visits to both the Sun and the Amazon stands on the expo floor to ask them if they could help us with Tipit.to stuff. A bit surprised that Google wasn’t represented.

The keynotes were mostly interesting. It was nice to see Kathy Sierra speak for the first time. I had been a long time reader of her blog, so most of the material was familiar but she delivered a great presentation.

There was also a conversation between Tim O’Reilly and some high up from Microsoft and Tim’s hard hitting honesty seemed to be a bit much for him but he took it in good stride. Tim exemplified a lot of the issues that we as an audience care about and which Microsoft completely ignores. It was good fun.

The rest of the talks were soso but Werner Vogels talking about Amazon’s scalable infrastructures was interesting enough. His accent gave away the fact that he is a Dutch guy. The people at the Amazon stand could only give us some vague general answers, so it would be nice to talk to Mr. Vogels.

After that we went to some sessions. The Google Open Social talk had to stand up against very high expectations and was messed up pretty badly. I think we now pretty much understand the architecture and its limitations, but some other social networks took the opportunity to turn it into a marketing frenzy for their boring application.

Having been beaten numb by stupid marketing types, I thought Matt Biddulph’s “Coding on the Shoulders of Giants” talk about Dopplr’s extensibility would be a nice breath of fresh air. I was already familiar with the material because James Governor had blogged Matt’s slides before and I have been working from those slides to make Yello Yello a more Web 2.0 savvy company.
It was nice to see Matt present it in person and it was nice to be able to ask some questions after the talk.

We wanted to rest a bit especially after the very intensive rounds of un-cricket at the Expo floor. So we returned home and ate one of the best hamburgers ever at Marienburger in the Marienburgerstraße. After chilling out a bit more at the house, we made our way to the Münzsalon for the Plazes+Netvibes party which was every bit as awesome as was expected.

Picture by katielips

Now on to the second half of the conference.

We just had the first incarnation of Open Coffee Delft in Bacinol (announcement) and it was a fun event, just as small scale as the Web 2.0 drinks of last Friday but no less fun. Jeroen Visser and I were joined by Kilian Valkhof and Redmar Kerkhoff. Reinier and Mik Nijhuis unfortunately were not able to make it.

Though small, I see a lot of potential in the event format and the diverse mix of people who are mostly doing pretty interesting things. We discussed al sort of thing such as work, FOWA, Mac, Linux, Open Source, branding, OpenID, Processing art, improvements in Leopard, cameras and the likes. Plenty of cool stuff and lots more to talk about at our next meeting in Rotterdam in two weeks (Upcoming).

Two weeks after that we might be headed back to Delft, if we can secure a nice venue here, or else we might head out to the Hague. And Jeroen talked about a gathering of internet creatives that he is planning on November 30th.

For up to date information and all relevant links see the Open Coffee page here on Four Starters.

Don’t forget to register for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Today is the last day of the early price. See this post by Brady on how to register.

I just registered and Reinier and myself will drive to Berlin from the Netherlands. We have 2 seats available to join us for the ride. Definitive date of departure and return to be discussed. Fuel price split, this will probably be the most comfortable and cheapest way to get to Berlin.

And now it’s off to the Hague for the Web 2.0 drinks in the Boterwaag. See you there.

Update: Cristiano is also coming. Right, Cris?

In the Summer we had done a small series of OpenBeer events on Friday afternoons. Now that Winter is approaching we thought we would resume the series in Delft with official OpenCoffee meetings.

The idea for now is to have biweekly meetings on Tuesday mornings at 09:30 somewhere in Delft. The next meeting is October 9th at 09:30 at Bacinol (Wateringsevest 38) at the office of Jeroen Visser.

Join us webprofessionals in the Delft area to have some coffee and discuss business and events.

We have an upcoming event and a Google Group you can subscribe to if you want updates on the event.

See you guys October 9th.

I was at the constitionary conference of the Dutch guild of frontend coders today. The guild is an initiative by Peter-Paul Koch to form an authoritative institution on standards based web development.

A lot of meetings and consultations with various institutions and freelancers etc. have taken place and have resulted in a mission statement, guidelines and proposed organizational structure. Information on the guild can be found on PPK’s webpage (in Dutch).

Front End Guild

The idea of the guild is to certify frontenders so clients know they are hiring somebody who knows about webstandards and is able to make standards aware choices for your web project. The guild will have a certificatory exam and candidates who succeed on this exam will receive a ‘standards aware’ certificate.

The fact that such a professional organization is being formed with standards based webdevelopment at its heart, says a lot about the standards movement and the progress that has been made. A lot of companies have been pushing standards for a long time and this is a way of formalizing that push, while at the same time serving as a wake up call for those firms who still haven’t adopted web standards.

On the other sides these kind of certification programs serve for large clients and large contracting firms to help each other out and in the process close off their markets. I have not become a member because I am naturally suspicious of certification and I don’t see any immediate benefits of membership at the moment. Furthermore I don’t think any exam taken by a commission would prove much about my knowledge or add anything of value to it.

Controversy

The guild has not been without its share of controversy. Some web developers in the Netherlands most notably from Q42 have raised questions about the objectivity and independence of the organization. These have been both questions about the place where the discussion should be hosted but also a lot of issues about strategy, mission and focus.

In the discussion on PPK’s server some comments by people were deleted without clear reason or procedure. This lack of transparency and obviously strange practice of censorship created a lot of doubt in people (including myself).
At some point Lon Boonen of Q42 posed a counter candidacy to be chair of the guild.

I visited the conference on webstandards organized prior to the constitutive meeting. Because I arrived a bit later I did not sit in at all of the panels. Here some short reports from the panels I visited and the issues raised.

Clients Panel

This panel with some clients (‘opdrachtgevers’; couldn’t think of a better translation) told about their requirements for websites and how they got aware about the necessity to code sites with standard awareness in mind.

They seemed to be a very clued in group with a lot of knowledge about standards and why to use them. One of the arguments they gave was that separation of content, style and behavior gives them more grip on a project. A lot of problems why standards could not be properly implemented was put on the CMS and editor level.

One of the issues they did raise and which directly relates to the raison d’être of the guild is that they have a hard time finding parties who can guarantee standards compliant code. They expect the guild and its certification to offer an easy way of finding standards aware front enders.

Interesting to hear the perspective of these clients, but these seem to be clued in more than your average client. It would have been interesting to hear more about ways to convert clients who do not yet see the importance of standards.

Code Review and aside on XHTML

Tom Greuter from Info.nl did a short code review on a project they did at Info.nl with a look inside of the templates. You could see that they have a lot of clue at Info.nl and that they produce some very tight templates, CSS and JavaScript. Also interesting to see that jQuery is indeed quite popular both at Info.nl and with the people at the conference.

I do keep being surprised that XTHML 1.0 Strict is heralded here and at pretty much every shop as the new gospel. What happened to using POSH and HTML 4.01 which will work everywhere. Did they simply go out of fashion because they were not new and snappy enough anymore? It’s not like there is no literature on the subject or that XML is at all alive on the web.
You can have a technical discussion on this issue, and you could side with either one considering the technical merits. The actual distribution however suggests that nobody has looked at the technical merits at all but that everybody has simply jumped onto the same bandwagon. If we want a vital and really standards aware frontend community, it would not hurt to incorporate more independent critical thought into it and teach people to make their own informed decisions.

Flash within the guild

To end the afternoon Bobby van der Sluis made the case for why Flash should be taken into the guild as a discipline in front-end coding. He took a very circumspect way of getting there and posited Flash as a plugin technology in the continuous development of the web and in its relation to the other technologies we already have to our disposal. This was a very smart way of putting things but unfortunately it did not really address any of the real issues.

Here is my take on Flash. (This could become an article in its own right.)

Whenever the issues of accessibility and search engine indexability with Flash are raised, there are always some Flash developers who say that it is possible to make accessible websites in Flash. While this may be possible in some distant galaxy, it certainly is nowhere near common practice and as long as that is the case Flash programmers need to be called on their bullshit.
It clearly is not easy enough for your common Flash developer to create an accessible Flash site. This lack of interest and capability within the Flash platform to play nice with others makes me think that there is too much work to be done to clean Flash up before it deserves an equal place in a standards based movement.

Right now Flash is only justified when used for complex visuals, animation and/or media. I have yet to see media poor Flash sites which provide the user with a decent experience. A notable exception for this argument is I’m In Like With You which had some very nice Flash integration in its previous version, and where they are pulling off some truly virtuoso work in the current.

Flash sites do not even adhere to the most basic tenets of usability. Usability dictates that people spend more time on other sites than they do on your site. Therefore your site should look and act similar to other sites.
This does not stop common Flash developers from re-inventing user interface, interaction and controls time and time again. In almost all cases they reinvent all of these paradigms very very poorly, rendering a grave disservice to their users. Every button in every Flash site is different (because it is skinned) but a button may seem like an easy control to implement, it definitely is not.
Add to this the impossibility of altering text sizes (which always seem to be too small) or to apply user style sheets for other special needs and you have a usability disaster.

Finally Flash is not a part of the Open Web. Web standards are open technology to promote an inclusive and open web on which everybody can participate. Flash is a closed proprietary technology which locks in both authors and consumers to a single vendor. For only this reason alone Flash should be avoided like the plague and handled with extreme care in the rare circumstances where the benefits outweigh the multitude of cons.

Constitutive Meeting

After the conference everybody went somewhere to get some dinner and prepare for the final constitutive meeting. I could not attend this meeting, but we should have blog posts summarizing the events of the night and the outcome of the elections some time soon.

Update: PPK himself has a post on the meeting and it seems that the differences have been solved amicably and the guild is off to a good start.