Last Thursday I went to the Google offices in London Victoria to attend a bi-monthly unconference called Open Source Jam. I was running a bit on autopilot as I was in Leeds the day before talking about the YUI at the Geekup meeting and originally wanted to skip the session as I was pretty knackered. It was great though that I didn’t follow my instinct, but instead have a nice unconference with Pizza, Beer and lots of 5 minute+5 minute Q&A sessions revolving around creating interfaces for humans.

In comparison to other barcamps the Open Source Jam was a lot more technical and speakers were more coders than web developers. I’ve learnt about a chess program for the iPhone, how to write APIs to make them more accessible to humans, UXON - a User Interface Object Notation (more on this coming soon), Behaviour Driven Development, holes in the Flickr API and a lot of other things.

My initial idea of staying for an hour and then leaving for a speaker’s dinner of a company-internal conference was foiled and I took the last tube back from Victoria.

My own talk was a preview of a session I will give at the Abilitynet Accessibility conference in April, talking about how accessibility is not an extra task but – if taken into consideration from the beginning – an opportunity to build better products for everybody.

I want to thank the organizers and will very likely be there for the next jam.

Photo by Adewale Oshineye

The last few years we’ve become increasingly better in building applications that make our life easier. May that be collaboration, day-to-day tasks like writing, converting or just managing our tasklists – a web app to make it smoother for us as end-users was always available with a minimum search effort.

Meanwhile, in the real world, social problems became worse and worse. This becomes even more problematic as there is a distinct lack of forward thinkers providing easy to use and apply solutions to existing problems. This is where the Social Innovation Camp wants to bridge the gap.

In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems.
Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.

Until then, the organizers are calling out to you for ideas:

For the next month, we’ll be accepting applications to come to the event via the website – www.sicamp.org. The plan is that people will fill in our ideas submission form with details of an idea they have for socially-beneficial web tools. This process will close on 7th March 2008 and we’ll choose the best to come and join us in April.

I’ll be one of the technical advisors on the panel and I am very much looking forward to seeing what web geeks can do to change the world around us rather than just the virtual ones.

Going Solo, a conference for Freelancers and Small Business owners in Lausanne, Switzerland is going down on the 16th of May. It is organized by Stephanie Booth, a co-speaker at Paris Web this year and is aimed at providing freelancers and small business owners with viable information for their business:

skills a freelancer needs, fixing prices, closing deals, negotiating contracts, what kind of work freelancers in the 2.0 world do, marketing and taking care of one’s social capitall, tools of the trade, coworking and staying in touch with “colleagues”, challenges in making a passion into a job, dealing with the blurring of the life/work distinction, international clients, travel, different laws and tax rules, accounting and adapting to different kinds of clients (in particular, how do you deal with big corporations that you approach or who have approached you)

In addition to Stephanie and her endless enthusiasm you’ll get gems of information from Suw Charman, Stowe Boyd, and Martin Roell.

Early Bird is 300 CHF, which’ll go up to 400 this coming Monday.

I’ll still be in Paris, but were I here I’d be very interested to go. Sussex Folk who want to spend a Saturday developing some prototypes and bounce ideas of other developers can come to Brighton on the 17th of November to attend the Farm Hack Day.

From the horse’s (cow’s, chicken’s…) mouth:

Hack Day is a chance for web developers and designers to get together and work on small, fun projects, e.g. a new widget for their website. During the day people will learn from each other and show off their skills in a friendly, slightly geeky environment. This Hack Day is organised by members of the Brighton Farm freelancers group. The day will be free, supported by sponsors. Tickets will be allocated through EventWax. [...]. This is part of the Brighton Digital Festival

Darn, I should move to Brighton. Hack on!

Technorati Tags: farmhackday, brighton, unconference, sussex, brighton farm

Once in a while you realize that a lot of people are like you. When I joined a big internet corporation a lot of people asked me if I will shut up about bad things on my blog or if I will become a company drone now. The joke never gets old and I told some other people in the same situation about it. Well, we drank some beers, chatted and now it is time to take action:

PlugLondon is a meetup for developers in London in December sponsored by ebay, Yahoo, Skype and Paypal.

The catch? All of the people involved agreed on leaving both HR and PR out the door and do the thing ourselves. So on the 8th of December we want all the London people who drive software innovation to show up, chat with us about their products, how they use our APIs, get info from our experts and of course have several beers and food.

We are planning on repeating the exercise every half year and basically want to show that London can be as cool as the Valley but not as annoying to get to for UK folks.

The event has no branding yet and we invite people to give us logo ideas. The audience at the first meetup will choose which is the best and we go from there.

So come around, check out the different parts:

• PlugLondon web site
• PlugLondon wiki
• The Flickr Group to upload your logo design
• Upcoming site

See you there,

Chris

Technorati Tags: pluglondon, social, meetup, event, london, uk, newmedia, yahoo, skype, paypal, ebay