Entries by Kathryn Corrick

Alexandra Palace was an inspired venue choice for the first Hack Day outside of the US, organised by BBC Backstage and the Yahoo! Developer Network. As the place where the first television transmissions were made in 1936 it seemed appropriate just over 80 years later to be hosting a weekend (16-17 June) for 500 hackers to play with the latest APIs and muck around with hardware, oh and play with Nabaztag bunnies.

The bunnies weren't the only fun to be had, with 400 Flickr balls on the loose a game called Faceball gathered popularity, and even got its own hack. Strictly played it involves two people sitting exactly 10 feet apart facing each other and attempting to hit their opponent's head with a ball to score points. To the uninitiated it seems that players (well geeks) have a really bad aim and really should get out more - until you discover that the ball is extremely lightweight and almost acts like a balloon.

The results of all this fun, frolicking and hacking (with a bit of Dr Who thrown in) were that on Sunday afternoon 73 hacks were presented to the audience and Hack Day London judges - no mean feat.

The hacks varied hugely:
Fun
The Beagle 3 attempt at launching (and filming) a rocket into space using mentos and coke as fuel.
The Helium Hackers of Bli.mp let loose their mini internet-user-controlled airships.

Scary
Flickr user face recognition... by Team Steve.

Socially conscientious
The MySociety crew added mobile functionality to FixMyStreet and gave a glimpse into their latest project, UN Democracy.

Very clever
Meteor - real time, event driven statistics.

Why didn't I think of that?
Flickr Tunes - a Mac widget that associates songs with appropriate images in Flickr and puts the results into a slideshow.

Matthew Cashmore, one of the BBC organisers, said he was "blown away" by the imagination and variety of hacks that were presented. Tom Coates, from Yahoo, is also extremely happy in how the two days went. Stating that his favourite period of the weekend was on Saturday night and early Sunday morning:

"Where the lighting was atmospheric, where the coding was focused and everyone seemed to flow, where the room was gently buzzing with key-strokes. And the experience of all of those people turning around to the stage and running like kids to watch Doctor Who on a huge screen with a hundred of their peers and friends for one of the most extraordinary cliff-hanging episodes of the series was just amazing."

If there are any criticisms to be made then it was the lack of women - although there were far more at the Hack Day than at similar meetings - but this is a reflection on the industry rather than the event itself, whose demographics were otherwise extremely mixed.

Notes and links:
A full list of all the hacks and associated URLs can be found here.
Photos of the day can be found on Flickr
HackDayLondon tagged pages on Del.icio.us
More associated links.

Things are brewing in the European non-profit/social change space on the web.

In the US the organisation NetSquared - whose strapline is "re-mixing the web for social change" - has been showcasing, supporting and discussing issues within the non-profit/digital arena successfully for quite some time. Their mixed mode methodolodgy has meant that people and organisations have been able to get involved at a level of their choosing - be it simply to receive their regular emails to blogging voluntarily under the NetSquared banner, like the UK's Steve Bridger who blogs under nfp2.0 and NetSquared.

Dan McQuillan over at Internet.Artizans is wondering if Europe needs something similar. The digital media work he heads up at Amnesty International is just some of the fantastic stuff that non-profits, charities and social/political change organisations are doing in the UK, much of which in silos where there is little cross fertilization.

To be really effective anything that gets organised needs the input and collaboration from as many different sectors and interests as possible - from developers to those in marketing and advertising. As Dan writes:

"The success of a project like Netsquared Europe will depend on the collaboration of organisations and networks that already reflect facets of its goals. Take the original Californian tech-visionaries of Netsquared and remix with the professsionalism of the eCampaigning Forum, the European activist focus of Total Tactics, the open source know-how of the Tactical Technology Collective and the enterprise of The School for Social Entrepreneurs and what do you get....?"

A number of people in this field have already given their support but it would be good to ensure a really wide ground of participants. Those who are interested in this area, or who feel they can give some positive feedback please read and comment on Dan's blog post.

Continuing on from the last post, readers of this site might be interested in Reporters sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders).

It's a French organisation but the site can also be read in English, Spanish and I think Arabic, and has an international outlook. They descibe the organisation thus:

"In some countries a journalist can be thrown in prison for years for a single offending word or photo. Jailing or killing a journalist removes a vital witness to events and threatens the right of us all to be informed. Reporters Without Borders has fought for press freedom on a daily basis since it was founded in 1985."

And their main aims are that it:

defends journalists and media assistants imprisoned or persecuted for doing their job and exposes the mistreatment and torture of them in many countries.
fights against censorship and laws that undermine press freedom.
gives financial aid each year to 100 or so journalists or media outlets in difficulty (to pay for lawyers, medical care and equipment) as well to the families of imprisoned journalists.
works to improve the safety of journalists, especially those reporting in war zones.

They are doing some particularly interesting work tracking international journalism and blogging on the internet - and have got some very interesting analysis of where the internet black holes (as they describe them) across the globe exist. See here, for example, about Belarus.

Most interesting, considering the Bloggers Code of Conduct debacle/debate, is a joint declaration that Reporters sans Frontiere put together with the OSCE back in 2005 on guaranteeing media freedom on the internet. There are just six points and takes up less than a side of A4, but I think they make for interesting reading, including:

"2. In a democratic and open society it is up to the citizens to decide what they wish to access and view on the Internet. Filtering or rating of online content by governments is unacceptable. Filters should only be installed by Internet users themselves. Any policy of filtering, be it at a national or local level, conflicts with the principle of free flow of information."

Over the last month much discussion has been taking place over conduct within and around blogging. Days after Tim O’Reilly suggested his Draft Code of Conduct with Jimmy Wales he pretty much knocked it on the head in an interview with Wired and wondered if it was not such a good idea after all. But by then it was too late. The idea was out.

Unfortunately no one told Tessa Jowell MP (UK Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media & Sport), who this week decided to put her two penneths worth into the debate over at the Guardian firstly in a Comment is Free posting where she “welcomed and supported the initiative by web pioneer Tim O'Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales”, and secondly in a live online chat.

Adding insult to injury (considering the topic), the Guardian had to close comments on the Comment is Free posting completely, and one can only presume (judging by the comments left on the live chat page, where Jeff Jarvis steps into the ring at one point) that this was because they were too rude, and did not abide by the standards that Jowell was advocating.

But I digress, and I promised Alan that I wouldn’t get too political.

So even though O’Reilly has pretty much retracted his ideas we are still left with a muddle of a debate, some of which is down to a misunderstanding about blogging as a medium.

When I first came across blogs, and specifically Blogger, back in 2002 (the blogging bronze age) I and my colleague looked at it and went “it’s just a CMS innit”. Back then using blogging software to put up regular content easily onto the web was still only being done by a few tens of thousands of people, if that, and Technorati was still a twinkle in David Sifry’s eye. My colleague and I launched our own corporate ‘blog’, using our in-house CMS (originally developed around 1998/9) and it looked and felt (we thought) just like a blog. There were a few little features it didn’t have, such as pingbacks, but back then this wasn’t really a problem. We were simply putting up regular content that people could easily comment on.

But what was different, of course, about blogging software was that it was free, or really cheap, available to everyone, instantly gave you a web presence and enabled you to put up indexed content, with a separate page/URL per entry, plus an automatically created archive, all without the need to know any php, mysql or any other languages. In fact, Blogger's strapline was "push-button publishing for the people". But basically, it was all very exciting and a great improvement on Geocities.

But, blogging software is not much different to a printing press. It is a tool. A mighty popular tool, but it is still a tool, much in the way that pen and paper is mighty popular and used to all sorts of devastating and mundane effects.

Therefore when people talk about Blogging Codes of Conduct they are actually talking about People Codes of Conduct - sometimes also known as ‘manners’ or ‘etiquette’ or ‘law’ or ‘commandments’. These codes of conduct are usually highly complex systems enforced by great aunts, teachers, religious leaders, policemen, governments, regulation bodies and the like. And such enforcers come in a range of colours from liberal to dictator, radical to conservative, democrat to authoritarian.

Bloggers in the west take for granted that the place where they put their ramblings using blogging software is theirs, to do with as they will (including what comments they do or don’t allow). Whilst on the surface this may be true – other than ensuring that the content stays within the law and within the terms and conditions of the host – it should not be presumed that this will always be the case.

The Chinese and Iranian governments have become notorious for clamping down on bloggers - not only through arrests but also by blocking access to specific websites and services by controlling of the telecommunications networks and backbone. [Note: for people interested in blogs focussing on China in the English language there is a great list here.]

But nearer to home, in the US, Josh Wolf (an independent journalist and blogger) was recently released after being arrested for refusing to comply with a subpoena on journalistic principles. He was held on a charge of civil contempt in an effort to coerce him to testify and turn over video out-takes to a federal grand jury investigating a July, 2005 anti-G8 demonstration.

On 16 April a party was held to celebrate his release “in solidarity with all others who remain imprisoned and oppressed” and also as a benefit for Prisonblogs.net and Free the Media.

As support of this last organisation indicates, blogging isn’t a stand alone agenda requiring its own codes of conduct it is (for good or ill) part of the bigger world of the media, which in itself is part of how communications occur within society.

Since his release Josh has questioned whether bloggers are journalists. Similarly, I'd like to ask, how and what might people who use blogging software learn from – for want of a better term – the mainstream media?