A dissenting voice on OpenTech 2005
Yesterday I went to Open Tech 2005, one of the few conferences where you could reasonably expect the queue for the gents’ to be longer than that for the women’s.
The general opinion seems to be that it was a terrific event. (See here, here and here — though three of those are from participants.)
Well, I’m sorry, but it really didn’t do it for me. It was fine, it was okay, it had its moments, but what I got out of it you could have compressed into about 30 minutes.
I judge these things by what I learn, so those people who wanted to spend a day in the company of fellow tech-heads will have had a ball. And none of this is to say a word against anyone there, or those organising it; partly because everyone was lovely and it was organised well, but mostly because I’m liable to meet them again.
I came away thinking that if you’re the kind of person who’d give up their Saturday to attend a tech conference then you’ll have already known most things about everything that was presented. But if you the kind of person who isn’t likely to have attended, then you’d have learnt an awful lot.
Officially there were two parallel stands to the day: lectures and seminars. But for me almost every session fell into one of two other camps: practical hacking of hardware and software, or concepts and theories.
I must confess also to embarrassingly taking no notes. I left my notebook in the office; my laptop failed to resume after I suspended just before the first session; and my camera’s memory card developed a fault which required me to reformat it. (This isn’t the first time it’s done that — I think it’s okay now, but I’m not entirely sure.) Others have at least posted their pictures onto Flickr — also here.
So here is a blunt summary from memory of those sessions I attended (exactly half of them), including notable highlights…
Practical Open Content, chaired by Suw Charman
Paula Le Dieu said they’re setting up Science Commons, which is access to data and materials for scientists with the ethos of Creative Commons. The first requirement was to set up a database of what data and material is available where.
Tom Chance talked about Remix Reading, an activist group dedicated to raising the conscious of the people of Reading to understand Creative Commons and the value of content being in the public domain. They’re doing it by allowing people to create and remix content to produce new artistic endeavours. His strong message (and lesson) was that people are really confused by the legalese involved in all of this, and if you introduce them to this early on it’s just going to turn them away. The rest of the panel strongly agreed with this.
Steve Coast introduced OpenStreetMap (new to me), an Internet map in the public domain. This was started partly because almost all UK maps are copyright Ordance Survey.
Rufus Pollock, also of Creative Commons, announced Free Culture UK, a movement to extend the public domain; their first campaign is called 14+14, to secure a reduction in copyright duration.
Media Hacking, chaired by Ewan Spence
Ewan gave a terrific demonstration of mixing music: from the audience pull out five people with a 512MB iShuffle; get them to each put their iShuffle in a box; shake the box with disturbing vigour; get each participant to choose an iShuffle. Voila! Easy music mixing to much laughter and applause. (In retrospect it wasn’t such a great idea with the annoucement later that if you’re someone who had your iShuffle shuffled, and you want it unshuffled, then please go to the downstairs reception desk…).
Matt Westcott showed Linux on an iPod. As Ewan explained succinctly — he’s taken an MP3 player, and put Linux on it, so that he can, er, play MP3s on it. It does have some advantages over the original: it also plays Ogg Vorbis format music, the menus can have speech added (fantastic for blind and partiall-sighted people), and it plays simple videos. On the other hand, as we saw live, it isn’t stable and can crash. Much laughter over the story of how Nils Schneider extracted Apple’s firmware after they encrypted the chip — he installed a program to tap out the contents in binary, one bit at a time. The “download” took 20 hours in a soundproofed box.
Paul Mison discussed hacking iTunes. In a nutshell: you can do it with AppleScript or Windows COM, but not every function is available to script. Hey.
Mike Ryan discussed MythTV, the mythical entertainment box that realises the convergence of music, TV, DVDs, PVR, the web and so on. It’s here, it’s now, and it runs on Linux. He trailed the forthcoming feature which allows you to play a program at 1.5x speed — surprisingly useful, he says, because on documentaries these days they speak v-e-r-y… v-e-r-y… s-l-o-w-l-y… t-o… m-a-k-e… s-u-r-e… y-o-u… c-a-n… u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d… t-h-e-m. Mike also explained how he forgot to set the video for Extras while he was on holiday in Spain. So he went to an Internet cafe, logged on to his MythTV box, and presto! Amazingly, today’s Observer carries a wish fantasy gadget wish list, including this from someone called Jon:
I’ve always wanted a video recorder that you could phone up and ask to record something that you’re about to miss when you’re out. No more calling your mum (who’s the only person you know who will be in on a Friday night, but the one person least likely to be able to tape anything).
Well, Jon, your wish has come true.
Finally, Michael Sparks of BBC R&D talked about the fascinating project Kamaelia — a collection of multimedia software components you can wire together simply to create new multimedia services.
Launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk, chaired by Ben Hammersley
This was presented by Ben Metcalfe, Project Lead of that project at the Beeb. In a nutshell: we’re putting out some data for public reuse; we’re doing it because it’s in our remit. He presented a few interesting demos of what people have done with it.
The Future is Open (or should be), again chaired by Ben Hammersley
This was presented by Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo!. In a nutshell: we have lots of stuff; of all those things we have some more than others; and by the way we’re opening up some of our data for public use.
Blogs and Social Software, chaired by Gia Milinovich
Tom Reynolds, celebrity blogger (now there’s a phrase that didn’t exist five years ago) spoke about “Blogging without losing your job”, based on his experiences writing the widely-acclaimed Random Acts of Reality blog. Most enjoyable because it was a talk by genuinely decent non-geeky bloke, punctuated by lots of pictures of kittens. But did you want some real advice on this topic? Well, in case you couldn’t have guessed it, Tom has this golden rule for you: be sensible. I suspect that if you’re not the kind of person to have guessed that yourself, then perhaps you’re not the kind of person who would heed it anyway.
Paul Mutton talked about a chatroom robot which monitored discussion of Big Brother 6 and draw a graph of the relationships between the inhabitants. Pretty pictures and quite entertaining, but not more earth-shattering than a good final year computer science degree project. He did observe, though, that you could run this over the text of a Shakespeare play and get a good visualisation of the characters’ relationships inside two minutes, without having to read the thing.
Paul Lenz spoke of his next project after Who should you vote for? It’s a site called What should I read next? You can guess what it does.
Web services, chaired by Steve Bowbrick
Don Young has the title of Evangelist at Amazon, and talked about their web services. In a nutshell: we have some web services; here’s a diagram of them; some librarians have used it to sell their old books for more than they might get otherwise.
Gavin Bell discussed how no-one was really interested in annotating (Wikipedia-like) the proposed EU Constitution, and so he’s now creating some generic software to annotate documents, and he’s starting on some social documents of the Victorian era.
Lee Bryant talked about taking BBC News and adding tags — a terrific use of BBC Backstage.
Then Simon Willison said “This is Greasemonkey“, followed by a presentation by Rob McKinnon who said “This is Greasemonkey”.
A big thumbs-up to James Larsson who entertained us during the breaks with “Motherboard Kerplunk and other games for geeks”. Essentially a discussion and video of hilariously stupid and dangerous things you can do with old gadgets. Motherboard Kerplunk, in case you’re interested, involves pulling out components of a motherboard — running a live PC — and seeing how much you can remove until the machine crashes. PSU Buckaroo was also mentioned, which involves doing unspeakable things to a live power supply unit before it overloads.
In conclusion…
How long did that take you to read? 30 minutes? Told you. You could have learnt all of that from the net. Most notably what the big corporations (the BBC, Amazon, Yahoo!) said was only what you’d have known from a cursory glance at the related areas of their sites — or just from heresay, because they promote their work so well.
As someone who spends a lot time talking about blogging and social software — whilst always feeling that everyone else is more informed than I am — I went expecting to learn something new and exciting. Instead I concluded there is no magic; as William Goldman said about the truth behind the magic of Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything”. What was missing was any kind of synergy. Putting all these people in one place didn’t generate anything new or exciting; it just generated one place with a bunch of people.
The sessions I did find most enlightening were those about hacking iPods and building video entertainment boxes — things I would never do myself, which therefore shed light on something of (passing) interest.
But of those topics I went in knowing a little about, I came away thinking… well, there was only a little to know after all.
