events

Here are the dates for my next two Fruitful Seminars in September:

The Email Problem and How To Solve It
Wednesday 3rd September 2008

As we move towards a knowledge-based economy, email is becoming an unavoidable part of business life. But not only do some people have to deal with hundreds of emails a day, many of them unnecessary, the ‘always on’ culture of the Blackberry means they can never escape their inbox.

Reducing people’s dependence on email is easier said than done, however. Arbitrary rules like ‘No Email Days’ or tight inbox limits just add to people’s stress and don’t reduce the amount of email people send. This is because the problem with email is psychological, not technical, so such solutions treat only the symptoms and not the cause.

Social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson will take a look what’s at the root of the email problem, and how it can be solved using social tools. During the day you will hear an alternative view of email and will be able to discuss the issues you face in your own company. By the end of the seminar you will have a thorough understanding of the behavioural problems related to email and a clear set of next steps to take.

Who should come?

• CXO executives
• IT executives
• Managers
• Team leaders
• Decision makers
• Social media practitioners
• Social media vendors

Or anyone in situations similar to these:

• You are responsible for managing email infrastructure and have problems such as over-full inboxes or unnecessary file duplication across accounts.
• You have observed poor ‘email health’ amongst team members, perhaps including obsessive email checking coupled with delays in processing email.
• You are concerned about unhealthy patterns of email use across your business and related inefficient use of IT resources.
• You are an executive or manager who just can’t cope with all your email, much of which is a waste of your time, and you want a better way to work.

Making Social Tools Ubiquitous
Wednesday 10th September 2008

You may have heard that social tools - such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and social networking - can help you improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. And with open source tools, you can pilot projects easily and cheaply. But what do you do if people won’t use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?

Social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within your business. During the day you will create a scalable and practical social media adoption strategy and discuss your own specific issues with the group. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to apply to your own collaborative tools project.

Who should come?

• CXO executives
• managers
• team leaders
• decision makers
• social media practitioners
• social media vendors

Or anyone in situations similar to these:

• You have already installed some social tools for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for.
• You have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.
• You want to start using social tools and need a strategy for fostering adoption.
• You sell social software or services and want to understand how your clients can foster adoption of your tool.

If you want to be kept up to date with Fruitful Seminar news and discussion, then please do join our Google Group. And don’t forget to sign up to Lloyd Davis’ social media masterclass on 16 July!

I shall be reprising my talk on how to draw a healthy line between work and play at Steph Booth’s Going Solo conference in Leeds on 12 September. Registration is now open, but don’t delay - the first 25 tickets will be going at the early bird rate of £150, and some have already gone. Once they run out, the normal price is £220.

If you’re a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable - it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.

I blogged this on Strange Attractor before Kev and I went off on hols, but thought it was worth cross posting.

Lloyd Davis, Leisa Reichelt and I have been spending a lot of time plotting just lately, and the result of our machinations was the creation, at midnight in a semi-derelict Gothic mansion and with the help of a bolt of lightening, of Fruitful Seminars. The three of us will be putting on a number of day-long seminars on various Web 2.0 subjects over the next few months, starting on 27 June with my session, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous:

Many companies have heard that social tools, such as wikis and blogs, can help them improve communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. As the best of breed tools are often open source, it is easy and cheap to experiment with pilot projects. But what do you do if you don’t get the level of engagement you’d like? And how do you progress from a small-scale pilot to widespread adoption?

This seminar, run by social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson, will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within enterprise. During the day you will be lead through each stage of Suw’s renowned social media adoption strategy and will have the opportunity to discuss your own specific issues with the group. You will have access to one of the UK’s best known social media consultants in an intimate setting - with no more than 9 people attending - that will allow you to get the very most out of the day. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to take apply to your own blogs or wikis.

Perfect for CXO executives, managers, and social media practitioners who want to know how to foster widespread adoption of social tools in the enterprise. Perhaps you have already installed some blogs or wikis for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for; or have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.

We’re keeping the sessions very small, with a maximum of nine people attending each one, so that everyone has the opportunity to fully take part in discussions. Sessions will be quite practical and participants will be able to really get into the nitty gritty. I think that’s something that’s really missing from conferences and the bigger workshops - you don’t get the chance to really get down and dirty with what’s relevant to you. I want people to come away from my seminar with a really clear idea of what they are going to do next, and how they are going to do it.

Registration is already open - it’s very easy to sign up and payment can be made by PayPal or cheque/bank transfer. The fee includes lunch, tea and coffee.

We also now have a Fruitful Seminars mailing list on Google that is open to anyone to join, where we’ll keep you abreast of progress and you can let us know what you’re thinking.

Josh Sierres is giving a workshop on Ruby on Rails so I'm going to take notes more for my own benefit than for yours.
So, what's the big deal about Rails?
Most important point is that it gets out of your way. Lots of people refer to it as a boring framework because the people who start using it in real business apps find it gives them more time to focus on business logic and less time on implementation details.
Productivity. Gains are massive. Not necessary to put a number on it because it's not measurable.
Happiness. Productivity makes people happy, and happy people are productive. Very important point. Rails programmers have a little smirk on their face because things start working better.
Creativity. Lots of people from design and usability are now using rails as their gateway into implementing tings, getting things prototyped without depending on a programmers. Designers can do this, without knowing Ruby at all, and can build an entire app in a few weeks, and do the design themselves.
Lots of plug-ins, lots of people contributing, nice atmosphere in the community, and a lack of tension.
'Bad things', that stop people using it. Rails is not a silver bullet. Anyone who says one tools solves all problems is a salesman.
Ruby is a slow language. So people say 'does it scale?'. Yes. Share-nothing always scales, i.e. the type of architecture where you have no shared resources between instances of the application (see Cal's book about scaling Flickr). These always scale. But you have to have the right people to build them. So pointless to talk about scaling really.
Some e.g.s: 37 Signals, MOG, Robot Co-Op.
Few experts, but you only need one.
Rails is not ready for The Enterprise. It's missing internationalisation, composite foreign keys in the database natively, etc. But Ruby's a very powerful language and people can write plug-ins and add behaviour without getting in the way of the user, so there are plugins for both these and other issues.
But is The Enterprise ready for Rails? It comes with its own philosophy…
But…. all this doesn't matter. Rails is good for most web apps - most people most of the time will get what they need to get done quicker with Rails.
Risk. Use risk inherent in switching to a new technology, Rails, to make yourself more valuable. Can easily demonstrate new projects in Rails.
Opposite of risk is not safety, it's stagnation.
Rails is:
- a tool for getting stuff done faster
- maturing very quickly, more and more programmers using it
- sneaking its way into all types of businesses
- supportive of AJAX, Agile development, and other buzzwords
Rails has an edge because
- AJAX functionality is in Rails in a way that puts it into Ruby itself
- uses one language for everything
- gives you the ability to create natural language mini-framework on Ruby
And it creates happy programmers.
Rails does not stop you needing to understand HTML or SQL, but it reduces your dependance on repetition. So gives you tools to make your HTML cleaner, or writing SQL for basic queries.
It's not a high level set of components like user authentication or shopping carts. Push back against this type of components, because there are so many ways of implementing business logic, like log-in or shopping carts, that it is bad to force one way on people by creating these sorts of components.
It's not magic, but it feels like it for a while.
Power of Rails comes from the Ruby language.
More about rails…
It's an Models, Views and Controllers framework. The Model is how is should work, the View creates the thing you look at and the Controller joins those two together.
Can override conventions, but best not to otherwise you'll not get the productivity gains. Can automatically create views and controllers.
It lets you test everything inside your Rails app, with very few exceptions. Building these tests gives you a sense of security and a way to mitigate the risk in your app to prove that it works without troublesome too and fro with browser.
A few ways to get started. Can build out your database first, then build the app around it, or you can generate database files and create a 'migration' which controls the changes you make to the database.
(Had to break off here and go to a session I'd promised to be in.)

Last weekend I went to Brussels to take part in EuroFOO, a two day event held by O'Reilly to get together a diverse set of people so that cool and constructive conversations can happen. I have been publishing most of my notes over on Strange Attractor, but somehow it would seem wrong to publish these session notes there instead of here.
Because this session, run by Tor N??rretranders, was about chocolate. Here are my very rough notes taken during the session.
Chocolate is one of the few examples of a food whose full potential was first revealed in industrial manufacturing. Industrial age has resulted in a decline in food quality for most foodstuffs, except chocolate which was improved by better technology.
agriculture + industry = high glycemic index
Means converts to blood sugar very quickly. Problem is that it provokes hormone reactions, insulin, which removes blood sugar, so we eat and get hungry from eating. We now, on the whole, eat a lot of high GI food.
hi GI = metabolic syndrome
People becomes overweight, diabetes, high blood pressure, lots of problems particularly in the US are related to high GI food.
But chocolate is good for your health… even though chocolate is 'candy'.
Two studies published. Italians fed chocolate to people in labs and measured their insulin leavels. Dark chocolate makes your blood pressure go down and stabilises insulin levels. White chocolate does not.
Second study in Holland, free-living people (i.e. not in lab), one group didn't eat chocolate, one was normal, and the other had a high chocolate intake. High choc intake had half the mortality of the non-chocolate group.
The reason is that the chocolate bean is high in anti-oxidants, which are a self-defence mechanism for plants. 8% of cocoa powder is anti-oxidant. Good for blood vessels.
But bad for dogs and horses.
Choclate history (note: dates may be incorrect as I was hurriedly writing them down and I'm not good with numbers)
1000 - Mayans, use chocolate beans, to eat and as currency (cf gold chocolate coins!)
1528 - Introduced to Europe by Colombus, as a drink.
1815 - Changed it from a drink into a solid when the press was invented to create the coco mass, so that you can separate the butter and the powder.
1847 - Fry and Sons, discover that if you put more butter into the chocolate liquid it will becomes solid at room temperature.
1875 - Found you could add milk powder.
1878 - Lindt develops conching, which is a process of taking chocolate powder and mix it in the butter and the acids evaporate to increase quality.
1894 - Chocolate bar becomes commercial object.
Unusual edible substance: solid but will melt in the mouth. Never chew chocolate: Only amateurs chew. Storable yet edible, needs no preparation from the buyer, and can be stored at room temperature.
Has to do with anti-oxidants. Has shelf-life of a year.
Chocolate is a matrix of the butter and you can add othe rthings, i.e. small particles of cocoa and sugar or dried milk. So the butter will hold two or three other substances.
Cocoa powder expensive, sugar cheap, cocoa bitter, so… make it with lots of butter, or other vegetable fats, lots of sugar, not much chocolate powder, and it makes it cheap.
Can even make chocolate without cocoa powder - this is white chocolate. it has no powder at all, just butter. Low quality, no anti-oxidants because they are in the cocoa powder. don't want the sugar, don't have to worry about the fat because it's not bad for you.
1985 - a French company said there must be a market for quality chocolate.
1989 - Lindt introduced the percentage bar, 70% intro in 1989. Then the 85% and now even 99% (very bitter). So all companies are trying to put % signs, but others are trying to erode the meaning of the %.
Tor never eats lower than 85%, but found some of the 90% and 99% 'childishly easy to eat', but the % tells you how much is not sugar. So that doesn't tell you what the 85% is, so some companies are using cocoa butter, not cocoa powder, to fill in the 85%, and this results in lower quality chocolate.
So that corrupts the meaning of %.
You want a lot of powder, meaningful amount of fat, and something else than sugar. Can we put in something that's not sugar that we can put in chocolate? Stevia, perhaps, a mad sugary plant, can get it in powder. [Kevin says that Stevia behaves differently to sugar when it's cooked, so it's good for sweetening things like coffee, but it can't replace sugar in all circumstances.]
Bean types, and percentages of the bean crop:
1% Criollo - traditional cocoa bean, high quality
14% Trinitario - reasonable quality
85% Forastero - high yielding, stable, efficient crop that's not tasty, low quality.
Now you have chocolate snobbery.
But need to have better quality chocolate, and get more of the value chain happening in the producing countries, so that the producers make more money (currently the manufacturers in the West get most of the profit).
I have to say, I loved this session. Tor brought some different types of chocolate to taste, and it was amazing to tell the differences between the different brands and the different % chocolates. I don't think there was anyone who didn't enjoy the 85% Lindt, nor were there very many who liked the 99% because it was so bitter and, strangely, non-chocolatey. Fascinating stuff. I wish I had more time to investigate chocolate.
EuroFoo06

Like an idiot, I left my MacBook charger at the Corn Exchange in Brighton yesterday at d.Construct. If anyone picked it up, can you please email me?
UPDATE: I've been told that my charger was indeed found, and handed in. I shall ring the Corn Exchange tomorrow to see what I need to do next. Thanks for your help, everyone!
d.construct 2006, dconstruct06, idiot

I'm in San Francisco next week, and on Friday I am planning to go the Nova Bar at 555 2nd Street, to drink ludicrously large amounts of vodka. If you want to come, it's on Upcoming. See you there!
If anyone else wants to meet up pop me an email to the usual address.

I'm off to San Francisco at the end of August to attend the O'Reilly FooCamp - a weekend camp for geeks. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with some cool people, and getting to see San Francisco again. Due to peculiarities of flights, I'm going to be in town for a week and a half, so if you want to meet up, let me know.

Was the headline that I chose not to run with in today's Open Rights Group press release, despite the fact that's pretty much how I felt about it.
If you're a regular reader of either my or Neil's blog, you will of course already know that Neil's our Patron, but it's nice to finally fess up publicly about it. I'm pleased about it for a few reasons. Neil's very clued in when it comes to copyright, digital rights and authors' freedoms. He even won the Defender of Liberty Award* from the CBLDF in 97. It's wonderful to see someone whose creative processes are so very analogue - Neil writes his first drafts longhand with a nice pen and a Moleskine notebook - becoming so deeply immersed in the digital world.
It's also great because Neil and Cory Doctorow, who is on our Advisory Council, are the very people that the rights-grabbing publishing oligarchies claim that they are trying to 'protect' using that annoying DRM crap, plus they're the people that you are I are supposedly 'stealing' from every time we read their books more than once. I've always found Cory to be quite pleased to have his work downloaded, repurposed and redistributed (within the terms of his Creative Commons licence, of course). And I know for a fact, because he's said so on his blog, that Neil's very keen on people reading his works more than once, turning them into tattoos, and using them as inspiration for interpretative dance.
Plus, of course, and you know how much I love stating the blindingly obvious, I'm chuffed because I've been a huge fan of Neil's for a long time, and finally I have a good excuse to email him and ask for quotes. To wit:
“We're in a world in which digital rights, the world of the internet, and the exchange of information is getting more and more important and relevant to all our lives, wherever we are,” said my new friend Neil. “I'm delighted that there's now a group of people committed to preserving and extending civil liberties in a digital world and to being sane and sensible as we careen into a digital future. I was honoured to be asked to be Patron of the Open Rights Group, and I look forward to working with them for years to come.”
So, don't forget to sign up to support ORG, and especially don't forget that we have an evening of free drinks, nibbles and Cory Doctorow on Feb 7th.
* Hm… wonder if ORG should start a Defender of The Digital Realm awards…

The second Open Rights Group, featuring ubergeek Cory Doctorow, is set for the evening of Tuesday 7 Feb 2006.
Don't let Hollywood hijack your rights
Cory Doctorow
American entertainment companies say they're fighting piracy, but they're going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital television restrictions proposal will turn the studios from companies that can control copying of movies into companies that can control the design of all digital TV devices, that get to define how big your family is allowed to be, that get to take away all the rights you get under copyright law and sell them back to you, one painful, expensive dribble at a time. It's not really a business plan: more like a urinary tract infection. Europe's coming Broadcast Flag will ban open source for digital TV, break the devices in your living room, and turn you into a truly captive audience. Get your torch and pitchfork, for this genuinely sucks — and you shouldn't take it lying down!
This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do send this information to anyone you think may be interested.
Refreshments and nibbles will be provided free of charge.
When: Tuesday 7 February 2006, 6pm–9pm
Where: 01Zero-One Hopkins Street (corner of Peter Street), Soho, London, W1F 0HS
Map: http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/map.htm
Note: 01Zero-One is sometimes a difficult venue to find if you've never been there before. On the corner of Hopkins and Peter Street, you'll see a featureless brick wall, with nothing but a black door in it. That anonymous black door is the one you want — just ring the buzzer and it'll be opened for you, if it's not propped open with a brick, that is.
Only 100 people can attend, so please book your place by signing up on the Open Rights Group wiki.

And no, I don't mean the pretty-boy chick-stealing Trojan but the great and beautiful capital of France, where I shall be for Les Blogs 2, where I am going to be telling Marc Canter and Hugh McLeod to shut the fuck up so that Anina can get a word in edgeways to talk about socialising in the year 2055. Some call it moderating, but I prefer to think of it as an opportunity to practice my golf swing.
If you're in France and you want to come to lunch on Sunday 4 December, let me know. No idea yet where, but it'll be somewhere near wherever it is that Les Blogs is at.

The emergence of new communications technologies has radically changed the civil rights landscape in our society. Privacy, intellectual property, and access to knowledge are just some of the areas where digital rights are being eroded by government and big business.
The Open Rights Group (ORG) would like to invite you to an evening of digital rights discussion, networking and wine at 01Zero-One Hopkins Street on Tuesday 29 November at 6pm to debate these issues.
This inaugural ORG event will begin with a short presentation by special guest speaker Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. Lloyd Davis from Perfect Path will then moderate an open discussion, asking: Which issues are a priority for you? And where would coalitions strengthen your hand? There'll also be plenty of time to meet and talk with fellow organisers and activists.
To reserve your place, please email events@openrightsgroup.org now. There are only 100 places available, so be quick!
This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do forward this information to anyone you think may be interested.
Where: 01Zero-One Hopkins Street (corner of Peter Street), Soho, London, W1F 0HS
When: Tuesday 29 November, 6pm - 9pm
Guest Speaker: Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford University; Co-Founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
RSVP: events@openrightsgroup.org
Map: http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/map.htm
What is the Open Rights Group?
ORG is a new not-for-profit digital rights activist group, working to raise the profile of digital rights issues in the media and help other groups get their voices heard. For more information visit www.openrightsgroup.org or email Suw Charman, Executive Director, at suw@openrightsgroup.org.
This event is presented with the support of 01Zero-One's InSync Programme.

BlogOn 2005 is almost over. My talk went ok, I think, although I think maybe the pigeons went over people's heads. Pun intended. No apologies. I hope that the video will be put up online, and you can judge for yourself.
Have one last round-up panel to do, then it's all over.
I've had a really great time the last few days. The Guidewire Group guys and all the others organising this conference really pulled the rabbit out of the hat. I've had great feedback from the people in the audience, and I hope that they've enjoyed it half as much as I have.
Now I want to sleep for about a year. Maybe longer.

Ok, so I'm here at the Copa Copacabana, MC-ing the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit. I managed to get through my introduction without falling on my arse, freezing or swearing, so I am pretty happy that it's all going well here. Didn't feel at all nervous until I was actually there, ready to go on the stage, and then the dreaded iron-cold fist of fear gripped my belly.
Er, well, maybe not. I did get a few butterflies, but not as bad as orating at Speaker's Corner which routinely scares the crap out of me.
Really enjoying the conference, though. If you want, you can get into it all via the webcast or the IRC channel (freenode - #blogon).
I'm not taking a single note about any of the speakers, which is really weird for me because usually I am all over the collaborative note taking stuff, but I just have too much else to think about to even begin to try taking notes. I'm going to have to rely on someone else to do so.
blogon2005