Archive for the 'Conferences' Category

JANET CSIRT

Published by Mike Nolan on October 22, 2009 in Conferences and Security. 4 Comments Tags: csirt, janet, owasp, Security.

Today I was at the JANET CSIRT Conference, held at the International Coffee Organisation facility in London (I booked on before I knew where it was being held… honest!).

The conference covered a variety of security related issues and I’ll cover a brief summary below.

A shared approach to Information Security – Matthew Cook, Loughborough University

The EMMAN Shared Information Security Service (ESISS) can provide a complete portfolio of services to your organisation. These services are designed to reduce the risk of significant information security breaches and reduce the associated costs of prevention, management, remediation and audit activities.

Matthew Cook gave an overview of some of the services offered by a new shared service from EMMAN. Much of it was what you’d expect – consultancy, penetration testing, network health checks and so on but I was surprised by one of their new services.

Currently in development/testing and to launch in the new year, they’ll be offering reputation management to monitor the interwebs and send a weekly report to technical and PR/marketing teams to alert them of any problems with your site. It will check social networks like Twitter, blogs as well as more technical problems like spam comments on blogs linking to dodgy websites.

There are a number of companies that offer this type of service already and it will be interesting to see how they differentiate themselves. I’ve not looked at many other services but ESISS’ pricing doesn’t seem outlandish… as long as it’s of benefit!

The issue I have with it is the weekly nature of the email reporting. A week is a long time in Twitter. Recent examples of #janmoir and #carterruck have exploded in a matter of hours so waiting seven days before detecting and responding to criticisms online isn’t an option.

I do hope ESISS are successful with this service – there are far too many snake oil merchants in the reputation monitoring game and so an organisation without the commercial pressures would be welcome but whether they’re able to keep pace with the fast changing social media landscape – as well as provide their more traditional consultancy services – remains to be seen.

The Value of Security Testing – Rory McCune, NCC Group

A great Security Testing 101 session which really helped bring me up to speed with some of the terminology involved. Showed the different levels of testing that can be undertaken.

The big thing I took away from this session is not to trust third party vendors. They usually have no interest in security so either test software yourself, or as part of a consortium. Get security written into contracts to ensure that it’s the vendor’s responsibility to fix any problems.

Traffic monitoring and basic anomaly detection with Netflow – Nick Reynolds, ULCC

Using the NetFlow protocol built into Cisco and some other network kit, Nick showed how they are monitoring traffic at student residences and FE colleges in London. Building on basic MRTG charts they provide more advanced reporting for staff within colleges who may not have the time or skills to undertake regular monitoring. From there they have built pattern analysis software which can look for unusual traffic patterns passing through routers as a sign of breaches in security or usage policies. Still a little rough looking but it shows what’s possible using a few open source tools and a little development time.

SQL Injectors – Simon Baker, SEC-1

How to scare a web manager in 35 minutes…! Using Microsoft SQL Server and ASPX as examples – not tools we develop in directly, but we do have third party SQL Server/IIS systems – Simon demonstrated a few SQL injection attach vectors which seem alarmingly easy. Different attacks accomplish different things but with certain versions of SQL Server it’s even possible to execute commands!

If ever there was an argument for using an ORM to ensure all database interaction is correctly escaped then a session like this will prove it! Prize goes to this session for best use of an xkcd comic strip in a presentation:

Web Application Security, OWASP – Dinis Cruz, OWASP

Somehow Dinis managed to get through three presentations each with dozens of slides in his 40 minute slot! I must admit it was a little bit too much to take in, but the general gist was that OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) is great and that we should all get involved. It certainly seems to have a lot to offer. Their best known project is their Top Ten website vulnerabilities:

Cross Site Scripting
Injection Flaws
Malicious File Excecution
Insecure Direct Object Reference
Cross Site Request Forgery
Information Leakage and Improper Error Handling
Broken Authentication and Session Management
Insecure Cryptographic Storage
Insecure Communications
Failure to Restrict URL Access

The use of a mature web framework helps avoid many of these problems but it’s probably time for us to do a full audit.

OWASP also offer a huge amount of other material from books to approval processes and tools. One of their project strands concentrates on Education to get students trained up with the correct skills. Dinis said something along the lines of:

The majority of IT Security professionals are screwed because they don’t know how to code.

Computing students and developers alike are well placed to get the skills required to create intrinsically secure websites – so-called “security experts” will struggle to match them on the details.

P2P File-Sharing and Copyright Infringement – Morgan Doyle, NetFort Technologies

Final session of the day was an interesting review of some research undertaken at NetFort into use of peer-to-peer file sharing – specifically BitTorrent – in a university environment and how it can be detected, tracked and reported on. The reasons for wanting to do this were twofold – to be able to account for excessive bandwidth usage and to respond to DMCA notices.

I must stress that I Am Not A Lawyer, but I thought that DMCA was a American law so I’m not sure how it applies to UK file sharers, and that in most cases illegal filesharing was a civil offence. I’m not condoning breaking the law, but I do question whether it’s the job of universities to do the dirty work of rights holders.

Wrap Up

So on the whole a very interesting day. Not necessarily what I expected but very useful and it’s given me lots to think about. The International Coffee Organization is a great venue – where else can you find translation booths and flags on the wall?! I must admit I was slightly disappointed in the quality of the coffee. It was okay filter coffee but I would have expected something a bit more… gourmet?

Finally, it was interesting to note how little backchannel activity there was on The Twitter. A single post from someone saying they were at the conference with the rest posted by me with a few comments from my followers. What – if anything – does this say about networking or security professionals in Higher Education?

PHPNW09 Round Up

Published by Mike Nolan on October 14, 2009 in Conferences. 1 Comment Tags: conference, php, phpnw, phpnw09, phpnw2009.

Last weekend Janeth, Andy and Simon (from Business Systems Solutions) headed over to Manchester Conference Centre for the second Annual PHP North West Conference. Organised by volunteers from the PHPNW user group it has a great community feel to it yet has a great reputation.

A few thoughts about some of the sessions I attended…

The Uncertainty Principle – Kelvin Henney

Nice start to the conference and a well presented talk. Main thing I picked up was that when presented with a choice you may not have to make a decision immediately.

Passing the Joel Test in the PHP world – Lorna Mitchell

Lorna Mitchell’s talk looked at how relevant the Joel Test is to PHP development. We have some way to go before we pass completely and it’s something I’ll be looking at over the next few weeks.

Tools and Talent – Rowan Merewood

Plusnet’s Rowan Merewood gave a really good presentation about how they go about developing and deploying new tools. I was a little preoccupied finishing my own talk so I’ll be interested to take another look at the video.

Making your life easier: Xdebug – Derick Rethans

I’ve been aware of Xdebug for a long time, and I may have even tried it out but this talk showed some of the nice ways it can be used. Probably worth us having another look at deploying it on our development server.

Building an Anti-CMS – Michael Nolan

That’ll be me! Think it went okay – a few suggestions for improvements on joind.in but it could have gone much worse! You can see a slidecast of the talk on another post.

Integrating Zend Framework and symfony – Stefan Koopmanschap

Skoop’s talk covered how Zend and Symfony can be used together. We actually already do this – our search engine is powered by Zend Lucene – but there’s probably more components we can use, and some of the new Symfony components look like they have potential.

Everything you wanted to know about UTF-8 – Juliette Reinders Folmer

Maybe a little too detailed for 10am on a Sunday morning, but interesting to see how difficult this problem is to solve.

Intro to OOP with PHP – Rick Ogden

Pretty basic introduction to OOP but we often forget that not everyone learns this stuff so it was good to see.

PHP 5.3 – Hot or Not? – Sara Golemon

If PHP 4’s unwillingness to die is anything to go by then 5.3 may take a while to adopt widely. There’s some nice features though and if they’re required for a future version of symfony then it’s well worth us starting to make use of them.

jQuery – Michael Heap

We use jQuery pretty extensively as part of GO and our corporate website so I understood most of the code demonstrated but it was nice to see how to create plugins.

That’s all for my quick round up of PHP North West 2009. Overall a very good event. Thanks must go to Jeremy, his team at Solution Perspective Media and Lorna Mitchell, without whom the conference wouldn’t happen.

Building an Anti-CMS

Published by Mike Nolan on October 14, 2009 in Conferences, Development and Web Services. 3 Comments Tags: anti-cms, cms, conference, lucene, phpnw, phpnw09, presentation, symfony.

At last weekend’s PHP North West Conference I delivered a talk titled Building an Anti-CMS (and how it’s changed our web team). Feedback has generally been pretty positive so I thought I’d open it up to a bit of constructive criticism from inside the sector (because every web team reads our blog, right?!).

Video from the talk itself is due out within the next month but I re-recorded some audio to turn it into a slidecast to make it a bit more useful:

Building an Anti-CMS

View more presentations from Michael Nolan.

I’ve given a number of talks before at Edge Hill, at BarCamps and at IWMW but for PHPNW I’ve tried to further develop my style of presentation. Over the last 6 weeks I’ve watched quite a few “Lessig style” talks – making use of lots of short sentences and pictures and not being afraid to have nothing on the screen.

It leads to a massive slidedeck – 86 slides for 13 minutes – and there’s far less room to ad lib but it gets away from some of the things that annoy me about regular death by powerpoint. I’ll let you make up your own mind whether it’s worked!

PHP North West Conference 2009

Published by Mike Nolan on September 2, 2009 in Conferences. 0 Comments Tags: manchester, php, phpnw, phpnw09, phpnw2009.

Last year, Andy and I attended the first Annual PHP North West Conference. Well it’s back for PHPNW2009 next month – Saturday 10th October with extra stuff happening Friday evening and Sunday morning – at the Manchester Conference Centre. This year there will be a few of us attending from Web Services allowing us to cover more of the conference sessions in more detail.

I also found out a couple of weeks ago that my session proposal was accepted so I’ll be speaking about “Building an Anti-CMS (and how it’s changed our web team)”. What exactly this consists of will be decided on a two hour train journey to London next week but the abstract obviously sounded good!

As with last year, they’re offering concession tickets to students so I recommend anyone studying Web Systems Development or other Computing courses try to head over to Manchester and check it out – there’s a load of well known speakers (and me!) covering everything from PHP frameworks (Zend, Yii and Symfony all covered) to tools to programming best practices.

If you’re at Edge Hill and are going let me know and I’ll catch you in Manchester!

h ttp://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw09/

Belated IWMW 2009 wrap up

Published by Mike Nolan on August 25, 2009 in Conferences. 3 Comments Tags: bbc, boagworld, headscape, iwmw, iwmw2009, mashups, ouseful, scrum.

Once again I’ve broken my golden rule of blogging – “never leave a post in draft for more than 48 hours” – and so I’ve had to prune a few bits that I’d intended to write about. Some of these may – or more likely may not – be covered at a later date.

I’m writing this sat on a plane to Chicago at the start of my holiday – driving across America from San Francisco to New York. But I’m not here to gloat this time! For the last week I’ve been at the University of Essex in Colchester for the Institutional Web Management Workshop – an annual conference for people involved in the web in Higher Education. This was my third IWMW, following on from great events in Aberdeen and York.

This year I’d been asked by the conference chairs – Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly – to be part of the “organising team”. I’m still not entirely sure what this involved but I basically gave my opinions on various aspects of how the workshop runs. I was also asked to chair the Thursday morning session which seemed easy enough!

A few changes were made this year to the structure of the sessions. Following the introduction of “BarCamps” last year, these were expanded to three 30 minute sessions, replacing the discussion group (which never really worked for me). The Wednesday afternoon was split into front- and back-end “tracks”. While one track had a parallel workshop, the other was running a couple of plenary talks. The idea of this structure was to broaden the event to provide more technical and marketing/governance content to those that are interested. Additionally, there was an attempt to “amplify” the event through use of video streaming, a blog and live Twitter updates – I’ll discuss that some more later.

Parallel Session: Mashups Round the Edges – Tony Hirst and Mike Ellis

Mike Ellis from Eduserv and Tony Hirst from the Open University presented an introduction to mashups session. Anyone who follows Tony’s blog, OUseful will know that his work on mashing up various data sources can only be described as prolific. He’s been doing stuff in the HE sector for a while including a page showing how autodiscoverable RSS feeds on HEI websites. Released at last year’s IWMW, the number of sites with at least one feed has now increased to an underwhelming 33%.

Mike’s also been spreading the word recently, promoting linked data. Check out the slides from one of his recent talks to get an idea of some of the things he’s barking on about

Mashups are one of those things that I always intend to do more with especially when Tony Hirst makes it look so easy! I’m not going to write any more now but I’ll try to post some examples of what you can do with the data that we make available.

Making your killer applications… killer! – Paul Boag

A few weeks ago, Paul Boag’s slides for this plenary came up in my Google Reader feed of contacts’ presentations. I had a quick flick through, spotted a screenshot of one of Edge Hill’s course pages, and started to worry! As is the fashion with presentations these days, Paul’s slides contain very little text leaving me to think about all the possible faults he could be picking in our site. Fortunately he was quite positive.

I completely agree with him that the stuff we have in the online prospectus doesn’t go far enough in terms of engagement – there is much more we can do. I hope some of this will happen through the new department and faculty websites. These will provide pages where we can give a richer experience of what it’s like to study a particular subject, leaving course pages to describe the detail.

The main thrust of Paul’s presentation was that online systems – and course finders in particular – should become more like desktop applications. Using techniques such as Hijax (a method where a JavaScript Ajax call intercepts a regular link to remove page refresh while maintaining accessibility), web applications can provide detail without complexity.

Parallel Session: Scrum – Andrew Male

Andy Male from University of Bath Web Services ran a workshop in the back-end track about using Scrum techniques in a development team. I’ve spoken to several people from Bath about scrum before but haven’t had the time to invest in working through how it works. Andy’s session gave a very useful introduction to the terminology used and then went hands-on using an accelerated scrum cycle to build a LEGO house. It took our team a couple of cycles to get good at estimating workloads but after that we were knocking out tractor sheds, flowerbeds and lakes left, right and centre!

Seeing scrum in action has motivated me to try the technique at Edge Hill. With a smaller development team, it may not work for all our projects, but I can see it working really well for certain things.

How the BBC make websites – Michael Smethurst and Matthew Wood

Everybody knows the BBC makes good websites. Some may point to the amount of money Auntie receives through the licence fee to explain this but just throwing money at a problem doesn’t make things perfect. I’m sure that every web developer in the country has at some point cited the BBC as a reason for doing something. The day they introduced their first pages designed for 1024 pixel screens I rejoiced as it meant we could finally start thinking about developing fixed with sites that looked good at higher resolutions.

There’s lots I’d like to know more about at the BBC – the development of iPlayer, how they do mobile websites, their decision to write their own JavaScript library – but one of the best new developments at the BBC for many years is /programmes and Michael and Matthew were at IWMW to talk about exactly that. If you’ve not seen it before, go and have a look around. At first glance it might not look like much – it’s just a schedules website similar to the ones that have been around for years – but closer inspection reveals something much bigger.

In /programmes, the BBC Audio and Music team have created something capable of scaling to record every TV and radio programme ever broadcast by the BBC. The plenary talk was about “designing and building data driven dynamic web applications the one web, domain driven, RESTful, open, linked data way”. Bit of a mouthful! What I took this to mean was a real interest in the data that they wish to publish well before they look at designs. I suspect a few people in the audience were shocked at their opposition to “PhotoShop mockups” but we’ve sometimes had problems with sites when we’ve designed first, coded second resulting in spaghetti PHP.

I blogged about the BBC’s beautiful URLs last year and since then they’ve implemented the functionality promised and much more. Hackable URLs mean websites work for their users, not forcing users to to work to the website.

Probably the thing that stuck out most for me was their approach isn’t to build content management systems, but to create systems to manage data. You’ll hear me talking about this again.

The Mike and Mike Show – Mike Ellis and Mike Nolan

I mentioned earlier that I’d been asked by Brian and Marieke to chair the Thursday pre-coffee session. I perhaps didn’t fully understand that this also involved co-presenting the 45 minute session following the chaps from the Beeb. The schedule had “Developers Lounge Show and Tell” pencilled in for the slot but the outputs from the developers lounge were – how can I put it – limited! A quick chat with Mike Ellis over a beer at the drinks reception led to a rough plan – we’d talk about some stuff and it’d all be fine.

Mike went for the Just In Time approach to preparing slides and delivered a great talk about becoming more than a day coder. I wholeheartedly agree with this – in the IT industry, and for web professionals in particular, it’s vital to stay current and engaging with the geek community or attending BarCamps or hacking on your own projects in the evening is a great way to do that. I approached my 10-ish minutes like a teacher at the end of term and played a couple of videos. We finished up with debate answering important questions such as “are design agencies a waste of money?” (Paul Boag seemed to think so!) and “is Web 2.0 ‘where it’s at’?”

I’ll let others be the judge of how the session went, but I was glad when it was over!

Conclusions

During his wrap-up session, Brian Kelly mooted the idea of an Institutional Web Management Community – a way for Higher Education web people to continue the conversations that go on at IWMW. Like the JISCmail lists, but better.

After last year’s IWMW I asked why so few web teams have a blog. Twelve months on and what’s the situation now? It appears a couple more have popped up; I’ve heard there are others but limited to internal viewers but should we do more? Brian suggested an aggregator similar to the predominantly US-based BlogHighEd.org and while this may provide some focus it’s not the whole answer. Clearly the US has many more colleges so we’ll never match them in number of active blogs but it could form part of the IWMC. What needs to be done for this to happen? Maybe in the spirit of mashups, all we need is a Google Spreadsheet and a bit of Yahoo! Pipes magic?

I saw one comment on the Twitter stream along the lines of “this year seemed very developer-focused – where was all the discussion about governance?” I was following the backend track so it was likely to be more technical than previous years, but is this a bad thing? If we get too bogged down in policies and strategies then we run the real risk of failing to innovate.

Tom Scott on graphs, Hans Zimmer, Eurovision and tea cosies

Published by Mike Nolan on July 9, 2009 in Conferences and We're looking at. 1 Comment Tags: awesome, thinking digital, tom scott, video.

I’ve seen Tom Scott do presentations before at various BarCamps and they’re always pretty fun. He’s just published this video from Thinking Digital in May where he makes great use of graphs to get his points across. I’ve mentioned it before, but I love the last slide – it’s how I try to live my life.

SOLSTICE Conference 2009

Published by Mike Nolan on June 9, 2009 in Conferences. 0 Comments Tags: conference, solstice, solstice2009, twitter.

Last Thursday was SOLSTICE’s fourth – and my third – Annual Conference, held here in Edge Hill University’s Faculty of Education. Following last year’s epic failure at live blogging, this year I was determined to do things right.

Live blogging the event means I don’t have to write up anything – you can just read the transcript, right? Unfortunately not. While all the twittering gives you a nice insight into the event, 140 characters isn’t enough to draw meaningful conclusions from the topics discussed, so I’ll have to give some follow up. I’ll cover a little about each of the sessions I attended followed by some more general thoughts about the event and covering it live online.

The Impact of Learner Experience Research Dr Rhona Sharpe, Oxford Brookes University

First keynote from Rhona was about researching the learner experience. Very interesting talk including a couple of video clips of students. Two really interesting points were the methods of evaluating learner experiences – things like talking walls, audio logs and telephone interviewing – and the access enablers and barriers – things like single sign on and restrictions on access to social networks. We do pretty well for some of these, but always more work to do.

The Use of Social Networking Sites: two practical examples, Anthony Wall, University of Ulster

Our Hi applicant website has been running for over two years now and I think it’s been pretty successful. When it launched it was pretty unique in the UK but the growth of social networks within universities has led others to look at what they offer. The University of Ulster have adopted third party social networks – in this case Bebo – to engage students before they come to university. The two examples were at a department level which meant fewer users but I imagine it’s easier to provide targeted information. There was an 11-32% engagement level.

One of the more surprising comments from Anthony was that students aren’t interested in “talking heads” videos. This has been something we’ve been keen to do more of on our corporate website, and something I think prospective students get a lot out of. My suspicion is that Ulster’s social networks were aimed at people at a different point in the application cycle and that since they’ve already applied they are less interested in the “sales pitch” type videos that are better sited along side course information.

The session ended with a couple of predictions for the future: Mobile and real Networking. I think both are correct – an increasing amount of casual browsing of sites like Facebook is happening on mobile phones – I know of many people who mainly use the mobile versions – and better quality mobile browsers combined with affordable data packages means this is a real growth area.

Reflections on Using the Blackboard E-portfolio, Alex Spiers, Liverpool John Moores University

Standing room only for the chaired panel session I attended. Arriving late, I was stood at the front to one side trying not to be noticed while blogging and taking the odd photo.

ePortfolios “take the CV into the modern era”, apparently. They’re not something I’ve had too much to do with but I can see their potential. Liverpool John Moores are using the one built into Blackboard. Users had a range of experience levels but it was generally found to be easy to use. Unsurprisingly, when marks are awarded, uptake is increased.

Loaded question of the day came from Phil Christopher:

PC: Have you seen Blackboard 9?
AS: Yes.
PC: Does the word “clunky” still apply?
AS: It’s no Facebook, but it’s pretty slick.

From the little I’ve seen of BB9/NG, it’s much improved but it still wouldn’t hurt for Blackboard to hire a few more UI designers!

Higher Education Study Skills – Delivering and supporting HE Study Skills across a dispersed partnership, Julie Swain, Claire Gray, University of Plymouth & Hazel English, City of Bristol College

Interesting and quite different setup compared to most HEIs. They’re delivering information through Sharepoint to a number of partner colleges. Staff development for remote sites is increasingly through the VLE or video conferencing.

Bending the Blend: re-creating good practice in an online induction, Denise Turner & Sue Myer, University of Teesside

Final talk in the chaired panel session gave me another quote likely-to-get-me-into-trouble:

Librarians are not natural risk takers

A few bullet points taken from my Twitter feed:

Visual context is important, e.g. compare ebooks to a physical library
Use a tripod when recording video
Camtasia for online induction materials
Contemplated using Netvibes but decided against it

We’ve Spent Too Much Money To Go Back Now Professor Tara Brabazon, University of Brighton

I went to Tara Brabazon’s session at the CASE Europe Annual Conference last year so I had an idea what to expect (don’t sit at the front; don’t make eye contact!) and looking through the tweets, her talk was for many the highlight of the conference. The OHP was out and the visualizer was in – there was even ghetto blaster for pumping out some tunes. The topic of the keynote was about student literacy.

With biting attacks on Marc Prensky’s digital immigrant/digital native terms, the Daily Mail, Baroness Greenfield (oh dear, my Dad will be disappointed!) and of course Wikipedia, I can’t really do the talk justice so I hope that video will be made available soon.

Connecting Transitions and Independent Learning: an evaluation of read/write web approach, Dr Richard Hall, De Montfort University

For me, a session of two halves with Richard first setting a series of questions to discuss in groups. A little too academic-focused for me, or maybe I was just slow understanding what was being asked for. Picked up during the second half of the session with some Richard explaining some of the experiences of peer mentoring at De Montfort.

Learning 2.0@JMU, Leo Appleton & Alex Spiers, Liverpool John Moores University

My second session from Alex Spiers of the day, this time joined by Leo Appleton (formerly of this Parish) to talk about introducing a range of Web 2.0 sites and services to Learning Services staff. Staff were split into groups and set tasks through the VLE over a period of 12 weeks. The aim was to get staff up to speed to allow them to support students in using the VLE and other technologies they might encounter.

Lots of Common Craft videos were used to demonstrate principles of services such as blogs, social networks and Delicious social bookmarks. Range of feedback from “I’m not joining moron Facebook” and “I can’t see what this has got to do with my job” to “great opportunity – wouldn’t have learned it otherwise”.

To finish off there was a battle of the Web 2.0 geeks with myself, AM_Doherty and one other person lasting until the last question – “are you active in Second Life” – I’m glad I got knocked out at that point!

Close facilitated by Professor Peter Hartley, University of Bradford

A short summary session covering some of the key topics discussed during the conference finished things off. I suspect Peter was on commission for Flip Cameras – he seemed quite taken to them (I really must put an order in for one).

Finished off with a vote for what topics should be covered in the next conference. Mobile technologies, student use of technology and the changing role of lecturers came high.

Conclusions

A few final points from me before I call time on SOLSTICE 2009. Live tweeting was fun and gets easier the more you practice. I used Twitterfall to monitor tweets from other people using the #solstice2009 hashtag. This is really really easy to follow in one browser tab and because it automatically refreshes you don’t need to pay too much attention to it. It would also have been nice to have some screens up showing live tweets, either in the lecture theatre, or possible in the reception or Water’s Edge. I used my dedicated @MikeNolanLive account for posts to keep it away from my main account. I also had the online conference schedule loaded up so that I could copy and paste the session titles into Twitter.

Twitter seemed to work well as a backchannel. Over 30 people tweeted using #solstice2009 throughout the conference – some more than others – including a few that didn’t attend IRL. Twitter Search appeared to fail for about an hour between 12:40 and 13:59 where messages weren’t being indexed and still aren’t available through search. People were tweeting however and messages are available through individual users’ timelines. There’s also the question of preserving tweets long term as Twitter Search only makes messages available for a month or so (anyone know exact details of this – some seem to say you can search back further using the API).

So inspired by Tony Hirst, I’ve munged tweets into a spreadsheet on Google Docs. I’ve attempted to add in which session each tweet relates to. If you know any that are missing, contact me and I’ll give you edit access. It would also be nice to add in missing messages from lunchtime.

One possible use for this data is to combine timestamped tweets with audio/video streams to subtitle a talk with the live tweets. Probably not something I’ve got the time to do but let me know if you try it!

I took photos using two cameras – high(er) quality pics using my digital SLR and some using my iPhone for direct upload to Twitpic. I’ve subsequently uploaded all my photos to Flickr and tagged them solstice2009. No one else has yet uploaded photos from the conference to Flickr, but there are some from another “solstice2009″!

That’s all for this time. I’ll leave you with a picture of some ducklings. See you next year!

Live Tweeting Events

Published by Mike Nolan on June 3, 2009 in Conferences. 0 Comments Tags: barcampleeds, bcleeds09, solstice, solstice2009, twitter.

Last weekend I attended BarCamp Leeds at Old Broadcasting House. I’m not going to talk about the sessions – I hope to cover that on my personal blog sometime this week, but I was trying out a new Twittering technique.

I’ve said before that one of the best uses of microblogging services like Twitter is at conferences and I’ve got quite a few on this year so I’ve been thinking about how best to use the service during live events. I have quite a varied set of followers – everything from geeks to journalists (who I’ve come to realise are actually just another set of geeks!) – so a large proportion of what I tweet about won’t be of interest to everybody.

The solution I tried out last weekend, and plan to continue is to split my Twitter accounts. Many people separate their professional and personal lives, but I’ve not been keen on doing that. My work influences who I am and vice versa. I came across an alternative solution employed by Martin Belam where he maintains two accounts – @currybet for regular use and @currybet_live for use during events. It seems to have worked well – one place to see everything about an event without annoying followers who aren’t interested.

So for BarCamp Leeds I created @MikeNolanLive and used it to post messages, photos and video from the event. I mentioned it a couple of times throughout the day from my main account to remind people where I was and at the end of the day I signed off and pointed people back to @MikeNolan:

It seemed to go pretty well so I plan to repeat the exercise at tomorrow’s SOLSTICE Conference and other conferences during the summer.

EdWeb 2009 at Headscape

Published by Mike Nolan on May 19, 2009 in Conferences. 2 Comments Tags: boagworld, edweb, edweb09 edweb2009, headscape.

Last week I was down at Headscape’s offices for EdWeb 2009 – a small workshop aimed at University web people. There were just 12 people representing ten Universities from across the country ranging from St John’s College, Oxford (under 600 students) to the Open University (180k+ students!).

The workshop covered four broad topics – writing effective content, managing content, becoming a user-centric institution and pragmatic accessibility – but the discussion went much further than that. I’m not going to say much more than that right now but I’ll be following up with a series of posts clarifying some of my thoughts and explaining how they might affect Edge Hill.

You’d never know it was Headscape’s first time running a workshop of their own – Paul, Chris and Marcus did an excellent job of looking after everyone (and thank you to Paul’s folks for lunch and coffee!).

Question time with Dan

Published by Steve Daniels on January 6, 2009 in Conferences. 0 Comments Tags: adaptavist, atlassian, confluence, wiki.

[Note: this was written way back on the 5th of December but has been stuck in perpetual draft status till I could find a decent picture. Oh well, I couldn't. So here it is ]

So yesterday was a long day indeed. But it was quite worthwhile and I’ve managed to glean a few tips, tricks and directions to go with for our Confluence install. Yesterday was the Atlassian User Group Workshop down in London town. Mike Nolan and myself made trip down courtesy of Virgin Trains, arriving just in time for a spot of lunch and then to the Bonnington on Bloomsbury Square.

The event started with the usual meet and greet where I got the opportunity to match a few faces to the names and websites that I’ve been conversing with on Twitter, JIRA and and mining for knowledge on wiki adoption. Emma Wallace from Social8 made an immediate impression on me, talking briefly about asking users the right questions and about getting the user to see that this knew way of working (on a wiki) is going to be beneficial for them, so encouraging their uptake. I received a very knowing look when I said we were working on the implementation first, and thinking more about user uptake afterwards.. this is a common mistake, a situation we hope to rectify.

I also got a chance to chat to Boo Armstrong from Get Well UK who was looking to implement Confluence, she was after peoples opinions, pitfalls and views. When I was asked what my favourite bit of Confluence was, I thought for just a moment, and then it hit me – WebDav. In a project where your taking the unwieldy jungle of a shared network drive and trying to convert people to the wonders of wiki collaboration and benefits of sexy search, giving them the ability to drag and drop their existing file structure into the wiki and build around it is a very nice feature indeed. It was also nice to chat to the Adaptavist folks since they’re only from down the road from us and they’re who we bought our Confluence from.

After the meet and greet first up was Josh Wold from Atlassian who gave a full run down of the past 6 months progress of the company and where their products where going in the future. It was quite an interesting round up and well presented.

Next was Alex Lotoczko from NYK Europe who talked about the use of their wiki’s particularly when working with the BBC on “The Box” project. My main interest was admittedly the box.. I feel more detail could have been gotten into regarding the usage of the wiki, perhaps some statistics and screenshots from the wiki itself. I got more from Stewart Mader’s post on the subject of NYK’s Confluence intranet project.

The people and personalities using the wiki are the most important aspect. Without getting them on board it’s all pointless really. Emma Wallace talked to us in great detail about people and the right questions to ask them. Are you asking the right questions? I most certainly wasn’t, but I hope to in the future. You need ask people the right questions to help them learn and understand that (hopefully) the ways of the wiki and collaboration is good for them, will enable them to work more efficiently, and win the lottery. Well maybe not the last bit, but you get the point.

Next up was what I found the most useful, and so named my blog post such! Question time with Dan was effectively what it was. It was meant to be a more open discussion, customer to customer, user to user I believe but by and large it was an open floor to ask Dan questions and tap his knowledge. I’d had a question or two answered during the meet and great about reporting and stats which I was greatly interested in so I didn’t really actively take part in this session. I was being a sponge and soaking up all the knowledge that flowed over me. There were some interesting questions being asked and some even more in the spirit of the session were asked openly to the group. All 70-80ish of us where sat around the outer edges of the room. I don’t really feel this was all that ideal and left some people not asking questions that they might have asked in a more cosy environment. The open talking was good, I just think some nice 20 people round tables would have been more conducive to open chatter about our problems and triumphs with the software.

All in all it was quite a good day and I’ll be improving our Confluence install and uptake because of it, and would definitely recommend any Atlassian products users to go along in the future.

I’ll quickly add a thank you to Oleg from Cisco who introduced me to Asahi beer after the conference.. thanks! Also that we missed the last Liverpool – London train home due to trusting the more sensibly sounding directions of a couple of local southern boys and walking quite a way away from Euston before realising in our peril we were about 250 yards from it when we asked! Getting home at 2:10 am, and into work at 8:50 show’s my dedication to the job

Steve Daniels