Posts tagged greenbelt
Week 131
Mar 28th
I’m never quite sure how to start these things. When (as this week) I’m catching up from having missed a week I’m inclined to say something about how the situation is an indication of how the past fortnight has been. But that’s already feeling a little tired. I need to get into the habit of just writing something quick if in the midst of a specially busy/fractured week, and probably just dive in the rest of the time.
The big news of the past week is that the refresh of the Greenbelt website that we’ve been working on for the past few weeks went live on Friday. As I mentioned last time, it feels like an important step (even though much of the structure is unchanged). The festival’s really been realising over the past couple of years the volume and value of content produced and captured over that one weekend each August, and the appetite among festivalgoers for more regular content, and the prominence of the blog and the new ‘media’ section are a reflection of that. We’re also really pushing the Dispatches newsletter and have reworked the design of that, moved it to Campaign Monitor, and extended its reach to about 10x the previous subscriber list. I’m very hopeful that this work will provide a really strong base for ongoing growth.
That’s my second site launch of the month; I think I may have forgotten to mention that the Street Action site was also relaunched a few weeks back. We’re bringing news to the fore, with a stronger emphasis on photos and videos. That was particularly important as the organisation presented their key research project in parliament and was deeply involved in the highly successful Street Child World Cup over the past few weeks. There’s a lot more we want to do, but again it feels like a good step forward.
Other than those two there have been some odds and ends for Generous and a couple of other clients, but the real emphasis has continued to be on Justinian. It’s coming together as we enter the final week, and we’ve been working very successfully with SVG to lay out a relatively complex set of data in a cleanly scalable manner. Having kept half-an-eye on SVG for years it’s been refreshing to see how smoothly it’s worked in modern browsers. (We’re generating the SVG using a Rails 3 backend). It was specially good to have Ben Griffiths join us for a few days – his experience running a software team was really helpful, and he challenged a few assumptions in a manner that set us on a much more fruitful path.
So the coming week will hopefully see us wrapping up Justinian, a little more work on DAPI, and then a few days’ break. This past week I was supposed to attend the Ecampaigning Forum in Oxford, but I didn’t make it as I’d worn myself out with work (and the effects of a toddler who decided to take a few days off from sleeping). The idea of a long weekend off is very attractive.
Week 129
Mar 13th
So. No week notes again last week. It was a week of juggling numerous projects, trying to get the month’s job list under control before diving into the project that is to dominate March. Writing here was the ball that got dropped.
One of the big jobs on the agenda has been implementing a redesign of various parts of the Greenbelt website. It was important to get it under way as it was one of those pieces which are easiest to get a feel for once you’ve made a start. It’s also quite satisfying to work on as it pulls together a number of strands that represent how the organisation has been changing and growing, but which the current site doesn’t really allow for.
Another is codenamed DAPI and is my first deployment on Rails 3. It’s a funny project in that we hope it’ll have a very short life. It’s all about transforming data that’s been stored with very little structure. Once the structured form of the data has been signed off it’ll be time to retire DAPI and build something new focussed on actually using that data. For now, it’s great to have something taking shape and to have a Rails 3 project under my belt.
The scramble has all been to make way for a larger project that dominates this month. We’re calling it Justinian and it’s been fun so far. The core team beside myself is Matt (whose project it is), Ben, James and Jenny and we’ve spent most of the week gathered around a whiteboard (aside from a field trip to the British Museum) figuring out how to represent a fairly complex set of calendar-ish data in a way that encourages both exploration and utilisation. I think we’re moving towards a good product, but it’s going to be a busy couple of weeks trying to translate it all into a functional prototype.
There’s also been a reminder this week that I need to step up the suite of monitoring tools at my disposal. god’s generally doing a good job of keeping processes up and running. Munin lets me see if servers are over capacity. But there are a lot of more fine-grained details (are search indexes updating as expected, are emails going out smoothly) that aren’t well covered by those tools or by my automated testing stack. I’m hoping that somewhere along the line there’ll be time to find a solution for that, perhaps something presenting a status dashboard?
Week 118
Dec 21st
In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have expected to hit the ground running when travelling with a one year old. Dealing with one’s own jetlag can be bad enough, but dealing with another person’s increases it all exponentially. I’m quite pleased, then, that I got as much done as I did last week. I’m particularly grateful to the proprietors of Sparrows and Madcap for their tolerance of my hours of wifi usage.
The main phase of the big wordpress/government consultation project for Digital Public is wrapped for now. There’ll be a little more work on that after Christmas once it’s been fully put through its paces, but for now it’s good to have that off my plate. Work on the Greenbelt management system is settling down to just tidying up a few loose ends. Drapno launched with a party I sadly had to miss. And I can finally stop and think a bit and do some much needed admin.
That’s why this afternoon involved many console windows. Over the years I’ve become responsible for a lot of servers and I’ve been working hard to reduce the amount of time it takes to manage them. I’ve got a loose assembly of parts that (munin for activity monitoring, god for process monitoring, pingdom for a few key sites, capistrano shell for applying updates, apticron to keep on top of package upgrades) that are working pretty well, but a good chunk of today was spent bringing a few configurations in line and upgrading some packages to make the system hang together better.
The other big activity at the moment is business planning. I’ve never really done much of that, but after a hectic year it seemed sensible to look back through the past months’ projects and accounts and get a better sense of where the work’s coming from, what areas I want to be focussing on, and how best to grow things in 2010. I’ve got some vague ideas but looking at the data may reveal some things I’ve missed.
So between that and some much needed cleaning up of side projects (it’d be good to get on top of all the wordpress plugins I’ve released this year, really put my Palm Pre through its paces, etc) this won’t really be a week off. But it’ll be enough of a change of pace that there won’t be a weekly update next week. Maybe the week after.
Greenbelt Social Media: What was different this year?
Sep 3rd
Yesterday, responding to a post Steve wrote on our Social Media efforts at Greenbelt I noted that it’s important to remember that this wasn’t the first year we’d worked with social media at the festival. Flickr has been our most prominent outlet, with the festival’s tags being some of the most visible in the week following the festival for several years now. But as I’ve written about here in the past (from a fairly techie perspective), we’ve made efforts to aggregate content from multiple blogs, social bookmarking services, and the like a few times previously. So what was different this year?
As Steve points out, video is a significantly different medium to photos or text and it has its own set of hooks. This wasn’t the first festival video to be posted online—a few videos had snuck onto youtube in previous years—but it was the first time tools like qik were available to allow live streaming. As I noted a few days ago live streaming currently benefits from its novelty: “this is streaming live on the internet” is a great hook for drawing in guests and viewers. That may well not last, just as blogging has lost much of its mystique over the past six years, but this year it served us well.
The “embeddability” of the content is a very important factor. We’re all pretty used to embedded youtube videos at this point, but it’s only been in the past few months that its become the majority of media storage sites that have offered facilities along the lines of what Dan Hill dubbed ‘tear-off’ content. That’s significant in a number of ways. We didn’t have time to really develop the platform for what we were doing (we’d wondered about using Alfie‘s moblog platform but ran out of time) but we knew that if we used qik we could not only export the video later, but we could very quickly embed widgets into blogs and other sites to promote the content. That freedom from worrying too much about platform is liberating, but for achieving attention in a festival environment it’s the ease of embedding that’s key.
Twitter was, of course, a vital component of our strategy. Just as there was no time to build up a platform for aggregating the content, we didn’t have time or budget to do any real promotion, and since this was a very experimental approach we didn’t even have time to build it into the editorial content of the festival’s own website. But we’ve all got relatively large personal networks on twitter (and for some of us our twitter posts are syndicated into facebook) and we’ve been cultivating a Greenbelt twitter account and it was easy enough to post notes there. Whether posting automatically (“I’m streaming live on qik …”) or personally, we saw a very good response and were able to receive some quick feedback. Twitter works really well as a glue between pieces of content you’re generating around the web, acting as a hub for a network that will follow link and engage with content hosted in a variety of locations.
Perhaps the key non-techie reason that things felt different this year was that there was concerted effort from a team. The real turning point for our flickr presence was when we started posting the festival’s official photos there—it gave it a certain kudos for those festivalgoers who may have been reticent and meant we were promoting flickr heavily in our editorial—and similarly having a group of people establishing a body of content provided something resembling a critical mass. Since our online networks intersect fairly heavily there was some reinforcement (“oh, X and Y have both mentioned this, I should check it out…”) but there’s enough distinction that the message went wider than any one of our personal networks. As a team we were also able to exchange skills and discoveries through the weekend which helped enormously when we had so little time to get up and running.
In purely numeric terms flickr is still where the vast majority of social media attention around the festival rests, with views of the photos being an order of magnitude greater than of the videos. Much of the conversation is taking place among blogs, with many scattered posts picking up a few comments. It’ll be interesting to see whether video capture at the festival follows in the footsteps of flickr and attracts a much larger group of producers or whether it remains an activity of a fairly small group. Either way, we’re very pleased with how it worked out this year.
(photo above is by Jon McKay, from his ‘So What Do You Think?‘ project)
Lessons from the Greenbelt Social Media project
Sep 2nd
This post is a follow-up to my initial thoughts on our Social Media efforts at this year’s Greenbelt.
Going into Greenbelt I’d made some fairly naive assumptions, primarily that it would be easy enough to just capture conversations we were having anyway and events we were attending. For people whose sole responsibility at the festival was reporting that might have been possible, but for those of us who were already deeply committed to other activities it’s not quite that simple. While Steve, Lisa and Mike were able to gather a lot of great material, and made the capture their primary focus, I was more distracted and my efforts are much thinner on the ground, and decidedly patchier.
Steve was using a Nokia N95 and the rest of us had N82s. We’d heard good things about the N82, and I like the form factor of it quite a bit, but for live streaming the N95 was far and away the better device. It seemed to get stronger 3G signals and had considerably better battery life. Both devices took quite a while to get set up, given that we only received them the day the festival started, and so we went into it cold. If we were to repeat the project with current technology we’d definitely push to get N95s for everyone and more time beforehand to set up, learn the tools, etc.
So, a few lessons for next time:
- Have one team member whose primary role is logistics, not reporting. While it was possible for all of us to get some content, and one properly prepared person could get a lot of content, if there’s any chance of having someone who can manage liaison with the rest of the event, and other logistics, that’s ideal. That person may be able to do some reporting, but don’t count on it. If time allows, that person could also manage aggregation and promotion of your content.
- Get to know the tools in advance. By the end of the festival we all knew our way around the phones, but there were settings we hadn’t had a chance to explore that could have affected quality. Getting off to a quick start is important for confidence, and promotion. I suspect that the sketchy quality of some of my early videos may have put some people off from watching the others, particularly viewers who didn’t know what we were doing.
- Phone companies don’t make your lives easy. I bought a new Orange pay-as-you-go SIM for the festival and ended up spending 40 minutes on the phone getting it activated, and used over four pounds of credit on the call. Once that was done, their “7 days’ unlimited data for £5″ deal worked out well, but these things always take longer than you’d like.
- Build in time to review the material you’re gathering. This is particularly important if you haven’t produced content in this way before, but is good practice either way. Reviewing the content is the only way to work out how to improve, and the review process is another chance to identify particularly successful videos and promote them. Steve did a good job of watching his and other videos and blogging about them as the event went on, which significantly increased his audience. In many festival programmes there will be lulls at certain points in the day and that can be a good chance to find a quiet spot with wifi.
- Talk about what you’re doing. For now, the idea of live streaming to the web is novel and is a strong hook to get people engaged and start conversations. That led to some good interviews, to other people joining in and to ongoing conversations that have spilled outside of the festival.
(photo above is by Jon McKay, from his ‘So What Do You Think?‘ project)