[JISC] Weeknote 29/33
September 3rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I am on leave this week and next and for the first time in a long time have completely switched off my work email and am taking a proper break from the day job – before the day job takes a permanent break from me 
It hasn’t all been getting Mayorships of local pubs or going to the cinema though.
I’ve been pushing along with Bettr and am very pleased with how it is going. I have a pretty decent line-up of speakers already (with more to come) and have already sold one ticket despite not planning on announcing registration was open til Monday! There has even been a nibble around sponsorship despite me making no efforts in that direction up til now so that needs careful handling.
Evenstreams is very, very close to being opened up to a few friends to kick the tires a bit and see what they can break. Stef really has performed miracles with this app already and we are coming up with new features everyday – though being careful to stick to the mission that it should be as simple as possible and feel more like data entry than web design at the backend.
I’ve agreed to take on a weeks work for Jiva around the launch of Tutorhub as well which is nice as it means I was there at day one of initiating the project and then will be involved with the launch.
Well that is about it for this week – next week will be equally short and sweet before we start the final run-in..
What the hell do I do?
September 3rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
As the likelihood of a freelance future increases day by day I find myself in the rather difficult position of trying to articulate what it is I actually do. This is proving considerably more difficult than I had hoped and is giving me some significant cause for concern. After all if I can’t get it straight in my own head it is going to be a tad difficult to explain it to anyone else!
Part of my problem is that I associate in and out of work with people with actual, genuine, marketable skills and talent. They build and design websites – to some acclaim as well. Whereas I don’t. I work in the same space and can hold my own in most of the conversations, am aware of the same trends, standards and issues but I don’t make anything.
Over the years I seem to have had many jobs that started with P and ended with Manager – Project, Product, Production, Programme. I was pretty successful (I think) at the first three but less so at the fourth so I won’t be revisiting that option any time soon.
In many ways it was my Production Manager role at JISC that led to my mixed up career these days. Overseeing a mix of digital, print, events, strategy, project management, line management, internal communications, research and a hundred other things it left me with an eclectic, if not very focused, set of skills and a slight case of professional ADD.
These days I find myself running events, hacking about with WordPress, wire-framing new web apps, writing all manner of things including this blog, web copy, business plans and being a geek without portfolio in all sorts of meetings where I get to have my say without having to be about for the consequences
I’ve got no idea what this amounts to really. I miss the day-to-day involvement of working with the web – and working with web teams. I reckon I could be quite content if I returned to being a Web/Digital/eComms Manager of some sort again – though my experience only really suits jobs in the public sector and these days those posts are rarer than hens teeth.
I hear about this awful phrase ‘portfolio careers’ more and more these days and maybe I do have enough bits to make up a whole but my god it looks like hard work juggling all those things.
In many ways it would be an exciting change of pace – there is alot of amazing stuff being done in Bristol and further afield that I would like to be more involved with but I need to find a way to balance that with something that pays the bills!
Lanyrd Launches
August 31st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Lanyrd is a new ‘social conference directory’ that was released out into the wild this morning and has already been a big hit on Twitter – which to be fair is very much the target market for the site.
Lanyrd first and foremost is an events calendar that offers one place to find out what is going on in conference-land – as such it is really going to depend on take-up to be successful. It isn’t the first app to try and replace the extremely creaky Upcoming – there is a genuine use case for this service but so far noone has captured the imagination enough to really make a go of it.
Judging by the immediate buzz on Twitter Lanyrd has every chance of making it happen and it deserves it as well. It is an incredibly usable and slick app that integrates with Twitter extremely smoothly. The social elements with being able to ‘attend’, ‘track’ or ‘crew’ an event are also extremely useful – one of the best features of Eventbrite for me has also been the ability to see who has signed up and this takes it to another level.
Adding an event took no time at all – I was able to create a listing for Be Bettr in a couple of minutes including adding speakers. I do wonder whether there needs to be some kind of ‘verified’ option for event organisers as at the moment anyone can add themselves or anyone else which might be a problem (not sure why or how if I’m honest!)
I’m already wondering if they have an API and whether there are any opportunities for us to hook Eventstreams in somehow – the ability to automatically add one of our events as a listing in Lanyrd would be cool – we already collect all the right information and also some way of accessing the attendees stuff would be a real winner.
Anyway congrats to the husband and wife team of Natimon – very cool stuff..
Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival
August 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
So the Drumbeat Festival opened for booking this week. I have booked my flights to Barcelona and I think I have decided on a hostel/hotel – the Gat Xino – apparently it is in a slightly sketchy area but it doesn’t sound too bad (but what the hell do I know – I’ve never been to Barcelona). I haven’t booked my actual ticket for the event yet as I have volunteered to be a volunteer and I want to see if they take me up on that offer first. I always tend to end up pitching in on the logistics side of events anyway and I’d be blogging about it comprehensively anyway so it would be nice to do it n some kind of official capacity.
The festival is a mix of some pretty interesting unconferencey type activities – hackdays, labs, fishbowls, incubators, lounges, studios and classrooms. You name it they’ve got. There is also a ‘main stage’ with a pretty impressive line up of plenary speakers – I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Mitchell Baker and Joi Ito speak – also it should be interesting to see how Anya Kamenetz goes down with this crowd – her talk at a previous event certainly wound up one of my more ‘open web’ aware colleagues.
The OpenEd conference is on at the same time so hopefully there will be an opportunity to catch up with (by then) some former JISC colleagues and people I met at UKOER10 as well.
I did find the ‘Who should come..’ list interesting – it was like a description of a big part of my my Twitter community;
* Open textbook authors and remixers
* People teaching web development
* Edupunks
* Hackerspaces
* Creative Commoners
* Radical librarians
* Wikipedians
* Open education start ups
* And, of course, teachers and learners of all stripes
I can’t wait to make connections with more of these brilliant, mad people.
I’ve not given myself much extra time for tourist stuff and I won’t be there for a match which is a little disappointing but I am very much looking forward to visiting Barcelona for the first time. I’m going back in January – but that is for a stag-do which is likely to be a very different experience!
[JISC] Weeknote 28/33
August 27th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Another week flies by. The closer it gets to the end of my time at JISC the faster things seem to be moving.
The week was pretty good though – I spent alot of time in Balsamiq trying to find a way to make our team area on the JISC website a bit more useful & less muddled. This is a weird challenge really as alot of things I would do usually ‘break’ the automated aspects of the CMS as regards pulling content in from other areas and also there is little controls over the URL structure so me messing with things leads to broken links and random redirects.
I also got my hands dirty and actually dusted off my CMS skills in the Dev environment to see what I could and couldn’t get away with – despite the problems with the CMS (and there are a multitude) it isn’t quite as evil as it is sometimes portrayed and I enjoyed poking around in it again. I also find that my preference for writing all my WP posts in the code view means I have rediscovered my long lost HTML understanding – which helps.
I also wrote what can best be considered an ‘opinion piece’ that was strictly for internal circulation that was the sort of thing you can really only produce with one foot out of the door. I stand by what I wrote and it wasn’t a personal jibe at anyone but it certainly lacked subtlety.
Also had some fun building some basic forms using Google Forms – which is probably my favourite aspect of Google Docs these days. I just remember when even the most basic form was a royal pain to produce and form builders were expensive extras bolted on to your CMS – now you can knock something up in minutes and embed it anywhere..for free!
Something that has been happening alot lately is that I have been invited in to bits of meetings or for 1 on 1 chats just to give my unvarnished opinion on certain subjects. It is like being an internal consultant and I do enjoy it. This week I was harping on about the way the Bristol City Council is approaching the procurement of its new website as I think it is an impressively innovative idea.
Eventstreams is rocketing along – we are only 2 weeks or so from inviting ‘alpha’ testers. This is about a month further along than I was expecting and we’ll be offering more functionality as well. Stef really has outdone himself. I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks working up the business side in more detail.
Been a slow week for Bettr as I was pretty busy with the day job but I’ll give that a boost next week as well – it is further along than I expected but I do need to lock down some extra startup speakers quick smart.
I have now got one interview which has pleased me no end but I also was knocked back for two jobs I applied for without even getting an interview – one of which was no surprise but the other was a bit of a shock. Freelance life is looking more and more likely.
