Last Friday and Saturday I visited the fair city of Sheffield for a marvellous nerdy conference: unsheffield or #uns1 to its friends, subtitled “Future users of cool technology”. For those who aren’t familiar with the format, according to wikipedia an unconference is “a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose.” So to join the amplification here are my thoughts on the facilitative structures used and my own experiences and exploits.
On the opening evening a series of lightening talks were held. The presenters (including myself and my friend Dave Mee) delivered short presentations in the 20/20 format which had been submitted a week in advance to the organisers. 20/20 translates to 20 slides which automatically change every 20 seconds - thus limiting the length of each talk to around 6-and-a-half minutes. The constraint of the format had interesting effects on the presentation style, particularly as most of us are accustomed to much longer shows. Most of us found ourselves struggling to keep up with our own bullet points and illustrations, realising that no-sooner had we started talking about something that the slide had changed and it was time to move on to the next thing. Much hilarity and muttered cursing ensued but in the end I’d say that the ideas and arguments were generally thought provoking - particularly Helen Milner of UK Online Centres on her ideas for creating “Swapshops” in ill-used buildings and Chris Dymond on Ubiquity. Myself I rambled on somewhat trying to cover slightly too many things and could really have been much more coherent in what I was saying, but I felt very energised and rather pleased with myself for going with the zero-bullet-points approach, illustrating the whole thing purely with photographs. The real lesson for me here which I only half-achieved is that less is (of course) more. Next time I do such a thing I’ll try and stick with a single argument and remember to get the punch-line in at the end, which I of course forgot.
My slides are available in Keynote or Flash format. If you want to know roughly what I said take a look at the liveblog here or just watch the video courtesy of Tim Dobson’s blog.
What other wonders were on offer? Friday evening saw much networking and catching up with a few old friends, talking at length about old-tech music production techniques with the guy who produced Lamb back in the day, discussing ideas for alternate ways of promoting artists and musicians online and a wee bit of talk of vocal pattern recognition and machine-interpretation of human language.
The second day I was perhaps a little slow in starting - not really through overdoing it on the booze tokens but because I was feeling rather buzzy and took ages to get off to sleep. This was made up for greatly by a lovely breakfast and catch up with my friends Rob, Rosie and Freddie. By the time I got to the showroom there was no shortage of buzzing either and sessions were being stuck up by participants, ad-hoc and possibly invented-on-the-spot on a big blue noticeboard.
There were any number of interesting sessions on subverting domestic routers (and other devices) to make them do more interesting/useful stuff (oooh you mean I can let my router do my torrenting for me? And hack it so it shapes my traffic the way I want it shaped rather than the way Plusnet wants it shaped? awesome!). A nice session which ended up being about the barriers for disenfranchised users and the potential conflicts between those who get the paradigms of technology and those who don't.
Dan Donald led an good discussion on Context and how we are living in an era of accellerating connections between peoples real (geographical, temporal, proximal and so forth) contexts and computer-based collection and use of such data. This area is only going to grow in terms of how it affects our day-to-day activities - some noddy examples in my mind being able to ambiently locate your mates at a music festival or having (evil) highly targeted adverts beamed onto surfaces as you walk round tescos (a-la minority report) because the system has picked up the rfid in your clubcard, but there are a gazillion applications. Contextual data is quietly permeating our society an essential place to be having crazy ideas if you ask me...
Then there was the Mobile Graveyard Assault Course - this was a bit of fun that I cooked up over lunchtime with the help of @sjamesu and @hereinthehive. It was basically a treasure hunt twitter game. Twenty-two index cards (each with a word and associated score written on them) were hidden around the Showroom bar and meeting rooms and participants were sent off to find as many as they could and tweet the words and a nominated hashtag. A hastily mashed-up bit of code scraped the twitter stream and tabulated the scores in (nearly) real-time. There were seven players though also some degree of pairing-up and non-participating observers. Next time I run such a thing it should really operate by DM so as not to annoy peoples followers!
All in all a lovely and sucessful event - and I think a good first outing for me in my new (and imminently full-time) guise of the Spotlight Kid, uber-geek for hire.
