Back in 2004, this blog went to the European Social Forum – we weren’t that impressed, but we did call it “the Caesar’s Palace of Ranting”. I’m not sure what the equivalent for the UKUUG’s OpenTech 2008 would be; there was plenty of ranting, but a sight less committee wank, more practicality, even if no-one can answer the question of what any of this stuff stands for. I ran into, among others, Liz Henry, most of MySociety, the author of Spyblog (who has some damn good war stories), various readers including Duane Griffin, and a small galaxy of assorted hackers, militants, gawpers, freaks and mutants. Good People, as the Doctor would say.
And they are, too; even if the live demonstration of the ViktorFeed didn’t happen due to the lack of a routable IP address (or even working connectivity for that matter), there was the loan of another laptop when OpenSUSE didn’t want to speak to the projector. When I’d finished the show and dealt with all the questions, I was faced with at least two offers of colocated server capacity, and the services of at least three professional software developers, as well as an interview for the BBC World Service, a spare USB key, and a pint of lager. All of which would have come in handy the night before, when I foolishly attempted to change something in the code after midnight and borked the whole thing, forcing me to get up at six the next morning to fix it.
As it turns out, having met Francis Irving, I’m probably going to be assimilated by MySociety, or at least my project is. I was also very interested in some of the green/geek crossover projects – I missed the session on solar power and IT, but I did get to the AMEE presentation on their automated carbon dioxide profiler and Hotmapping’s show of their IR surveying work, intended to classify buildings by the rate at which they lose heat. Apparently they’d already found one urban cannabis farm.
And BT Osmosoft’s TiddlyWiki – a wiki in a single file – may not sound all that much; but I really liked the idea of a zoomable, pseudo 3D interface for wikis. I’m quite keen on the idea of using this to organise contacts – who puts their friends in alphabetical order after all?
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