Greenbelt

Great to be back at the Greenbelt Festival again a couple of weeks ago. I’m often involved behind the scenes at the festival, but this year Kester invited Hannah and I to join him for an AI-inspired panel. His write-up was: In the late 1950s, Marv Minsky, one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, excitedly turned to a colleague and gushed, “We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!”“You’re going to do all that for the machines?” his colleague replied. “What are you going to do for the people? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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? ...

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. ...

For this year’s Greenbelt a group of us decided it was time to beef up the festival’s ‘social media’ output. With approval from the powers-that-be, the help of some phones from Nokia and the energy that comes from a festival’s buzz, we built up a twitter community, streamed plenty of content live to qik, and enjoyed the fact that the festival’s flickr presence now has a momentum all its own (the official photos had over 100,000 views in the past week and there are over 3600 photos tagged greenbelt2008 as I write this). ...

I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium. ...

One of the numerous projects I’ve been juggling over the past few months has been a redesign of the Greenbelt Festival website. That redesign went live late last night. Working from Wilf’s designs I initially built new HTML and CSS templates and began to establish some rules for how we’d handle the new image management requirements for a site that is now very photo-heavy. When it came time to apply the new designs to the CMS, however, it became apparent that there was a much bigger job ahead. ...

Last year I posted a few times about the aggregation code I wrote to allow Greenbelt to collect festival-related content scattered around the web and republish it. What I may not have gone into was how frustrating that code tended to be to work with, written in a rush before the festival and heavily patched while on site. This year, with longer to prepare, I decided to throw that one away and start again. I chose python as the language again, partly because I wanted to use some python libraries and partly because it seemed time to get some more python practice in. I also decided that rather than have the parsers for each service (currently technorati, del.icio.us, flickr, pubsub, and magnolia) each update the database, it was time for some abstraction and layering. ...