Posted on February 24th, 2010
My last post outlined plans for the next StixCamp… unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, we’ve had to postpone this event – to give us time to plan, find sponsors and generally bring together an awesome BarCamp. Stay tuned for more information!
Posted on February 12th, 2010
The inaugural StixCamp was held at Newstead, central Victoria in March 2009. Based on the success of this event, it will be run again over the ANZAC day long weekend, 24-26th April, with thanks to our hosts Ron and Julia from Welshmens Reef Vineyard. The feedback from the last event suggested that we needed to get the word out about the event a lot earlier – so we’re trying to spread the word! In case you’re in doubt about how awesome StixCamp was, you can check out some of these great photos 
If we can better promote StixCamp Newstead 2010 then we’d love to hear from you! Just let us know at
organisers at barcampmelbourne dot org
(In case you didn’t know, StixCamp is run in BarCamp style and was started by the crew who’ve helped put together BarCampMelbourne)
In particular, we’d love to know;
We’d warmly welcome any other ideas you might have, and if you’d like to get involved, just send a blank email to;
organisers-join@barcampmelbourne.org
You can also follow us @StixCampVicAu on Twitter/Identi.ca or @BarCampMelb for more information.
Posted on September 27th, 2009
BarCampMelbourne 2009 was, in a nutshell, awesome!
The event generated ideas, promoted discussion and got people thinking about what’s possible with technology, why it’s possible and how to make things happen.
BarCampMelbourne was held at UrbanCamp, a facility designed primarily for school groups located in Parkville, next to the State Hockey and Netball Centre. UrbanCamp was chosen for the presentation spaces it offered, along with its close proximity to public transport, and the fact that it offered hostel-style accommodation.
Around 50-60 people participated in BarCampMelbourne – from all facets of the technology industry. There was strong representation from the open source community, and several attendees were heavily into Arduino, many of whom attend the Community Connected Hackerspace group.
The presentations ranged from entertaining and comedic, to downright scary. My personal favourites included;
Paul Fenwick’s talk on Facebook privacy: Paul demonstrated, using the Perl Facebook API, how you could ‘dark stalk’ someone even if their privacy settings were set very strictly – by following the activity of their friends to find gaps in information. He used a number of Facebook Query Language examples to illustrate the incredible amount of information held on individuals within Facebook. Incredibly informative and incredibly scary – and if you haven’t tightened up your Facebook privacy settings – do it now!
Tara’s talk on what technology means to her: One of the most inspiring talks was from Tara – at just thirteen she was by far the youngest presenter at BarCamp. Her presentation was on what technology means to her – how it is now an embedded, expected part of everything she does – her hobbies, education and relationships. While listening to Tara, I imagined her in 15 years, running her own BarCamp (or whatever BarCamp evolves into in the future), and wondered whether she would have a generally positive or negative view of technology; whether she would simply accept the value that it adds to everyday life or wonder about the implications of humankind becoming so dependent upon it.
Donna’s talk on Zing collaboration: Donna Benjamin, executive director of Creative Contingencies, showcased the Zing collaboration software, and facilitated a discussion on how technology could be harnessed to aid journalistic reporting of natural disasters such as bushfires. This allowed us to elaborate on a number of the themes raised in Wolf Cocklin’s presentation. Everyone contributed to Zing through the use of wirelessly connected keyboards, so the collaboration occurred in real-time.
Wolf’s talk on Social Media for Disasters: Wolf Cocklin, from the ABC, shared with us his experience in using social media such as Twitter with the ABC to provide coverage of natural disasters, such as the Black Saturday bushfires. He illustrated the ethical dilemma of broadcasters such as the ABC receiving information from listeners, and being torn between re-broadcasting the info via tweets, thus helping people to make evacuation decisions, and finding a method to verify the information.
Josh Stewart’s discussion on home automation: Josh Stewart led a discussion on home automation – a topic close to my heart at the moment because I’m doing a lot of work with the Audio-Visual and Videoconferencing team at work, and part of their responsibility includes automation through things such as room control panels. Josh demonstrated some of the available equipment for home automation, such as Arduino. The key hold up to this taking off is the lack of available standards, and the lack of compliance to existing standards from manufacturers. I would love to be able to control my air conditioning remotely, or send an SMS signal to the garden to water the plants during a hot summer day. My assessment at this stage is that home automation is in its infancy; however there exists a strong set of requirements that will only grow stronger as more electronic devices are added to homes – this is definitely a growth area.
Many of the talks (those given in the main presentation hall) were recorded on video and are available (with many thanks to the champion efforts of Avi Miller) here:
http://barcampmelbourne.blip.tv/
BarCampMelbourne would not have been made possible without these kind sponsors. Their generous assistance meant that BarCampMelbourne was free for all attendees.
My own talks were on;
We also managed to capture a number of photos of both BarCampMelbourne and the UrbanCamp venue – they’re mostly up on Flickr;
So, when will the next BarCamp be? It’s likely to be a StixCamp style event, but the location has not yet been decided.
Wolf Cocklin presenting on social media in disasters
Richard Jones, Melbourne Python User Group
Posted on August 31st, 2009
BarCampMelbourne 2009 is nearly upon us, and Ben and I have been madly getting stuff organised for 12th-13th September. We have an amazing venue at UrbanCamp Royal Park, with photos thanks to Donna Benjamin. The sponsorship has been a little slow in coming but we’re hoping to source some addiional funding to ensure the event is as affordable as possible for participants. The ideas are coming in thick and fast for presentation topics, and there are even some spots left – so register now!
Posted on August 9th, 2009
The BarCampMelbourne organisers have been hard at it again – this time putting together an event at Royal Park, Melbourne at UrbanCamp, set to take place over the weekend of 12th-13th September. So, we’re putting out the call for sponsors to help support the event. So, if you know a company who might be willing to offer financial or in kind assistance to help support a group of enthusiastic people passionate about technology, let us know!
Posted on March 22nd, 2009
Donna Benjamin is President of Linux Users’ Victoria and is quite influential in the open source community. Her talk at StixCampNewstead was on the open source product ‘Inkscape‘ – which provides a free alternative to programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Fireworks.
Most people at the presentation had had some exposure to Inkscape which made Donna’s presentation all the more interesting. She demonstrated a number of the features of Inkscape including:
Inkscape produces scalable vector graphics – as opposed to the raster images produced by the likes of Photoshop. This makes it quite a useful tool for large format printing, such as for banners. It can also be scripted, for instance by taking XML input and using it to have dynamic text represented in an image.
Inkscape provides very fine grained controlled over stroke and fill options – I was very impressed by the stroke options available. Often in graphics programs the stroke options go to a minimum of .5pt for stroke – but Inkscape can go much finer which is useful for line art based designs.
The creation above is my first attempt at using Inkscape (keep in mind I’m fluent with Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop) and generally it is very easy to use. The interfaces are a little foreign at first, but then any graphics application that’s reasonably mature usually is. The only real difficulty I had was that it does not output PNG natively – it has to first be converted to a raster image. When importing between Inkscape and GIMP, there were also some parts of the image that were not correctly converted.
Posted on March 22nd, 2009
Zach Miller is based in Chicago and works as a developer. His presentation was on the separation of model, view and controller layers in application design – otherwise known as MVC architecture. He introduced the topic by explaining that programmers and designers have different skillbases – which often conflict. MVC architecture is a method of separating the control logic of an application from the presentation layer so that the developer can be coding and the graphics guru designing the interface without their work conflicting.
Zach provided an overview of MVC architecture and then articulated a little known technology that can be used with MVC – Template Attribute Language or TAL for short. This was originally written for the Zope Content Management System in Python, but is now being more widely applied. A document type definition has not yet been written for TAL, but this is on the development roadmap.
Using TAL means that you can easily prototype the interface of an application to get design approval, before doing the bulk of the work in writing the functionality.
Zach provided examples of TAL.
Personally, I’ve seen MVC work very well in PHP using Smarty.
Posted on March 21st, 2009
Paul Fenwick, a consummate and hilarious presenter at past BarCampMelbourne events, lived up to his reputation and had the audience in stitches with his talk on ‘Hacking other peoples’ brains’. The entire premise of his talk is that as geeks, we need to translate inter human communications to some form of protocol – like TCP for Humanz
Using The Sims as an example, he explained how to get better outcomes when communicating with people, we need to understand how they think and feel – what their ’status bars’ are and how people are motiviated. As Paul explains – happy people are more likely to give us what we want. This is why people are more likely to say ‘yes’ when you buy then a coffee or bring them chocolate A lot of the content in Paul’s presentation boils down to common sense – such as trying to create a win-win situation – if you are helping people fulfill their goals and desires, then they are more likely to assist you in return.
A key point of the presentation was that people are more willing to help if they are made to feel that what they’re doing – and hence themselves – are important and valued – which is why recognition should never be overlooked. If this means telling their manager’s manager about what a great job they’ve done – then do it!
Paul recommended HiveMinder.com as a great tool for collaborative to do lists.
Posted on March 21st, 2009
Brianna Laugher, the President of WikiMedia Australia – a not for profit organisation dedicated to promoting access to and participation in free cultural networks, presented on ‘So we ruined the encyclopaedia – now what?’. Her talk first posed the question of whether the encyclopaedia really was dead, and concluded that printed forms of this media are not dead, but are now a niche market rather than a mainstream method of accessing information. The Wikimedia model of user-submitted and user-reviewed content had caused a paradigm shift in the industry – with encyclopadia manufacturers such as Brittanica now moving to a model of reader contributed content. Brianna questioned how long the current business model of enclyclopaedia producers such as Brittanica and Funk & Wagnall would be sustainable given that their product now has only a niche market.
Brianna then explored what had really been ruined with the introduction of Wikipedia and user-contributed content. In short, the quality of content had been diminished – the ‘brilliant prose’ of thick tomes replaced with brief, to the point articles on a much wider range of topics. But, Laugher posed, “is that enough”? Do people still need (or even want) the long-winded entries of Brittanica? In our just-in-time, instant gratification society, a two paragraph overview may be enough to answer somebody’s question.
Brianna went on to outline how the quality control standards at Wikipedia are tightening over time – with the marking of articles as requiring citations, introducing cross-linking so that articles are hyperlinked, and the introduction of ‘featured articles‘ which provide exemplars of the content standard that should be aspired to by budding Wiki-authors.
Challenges with the editing community that supports Wikipedia were also addressed in Brianna’s presentation – such as the high turnover of good editors, and the need to train and attract high calibre volunteers to the project. These are hurdles faced not just in the open source community, but also in the corporate and government sectors.
Brianna’s talk is available online.
Posted on March 14th, 2009
Jodi, who has recently completed her Masters in interactive gaming, started her discussion by exploring what pervasive gaming meant to different people. It was clear that while there several gamers (both hobbyists and hardcore) in the audience, there weren’t a lot of people with a lot of experience in this field. From the discussions it was also apparent that the phenomenon had a larger following in Europe and UK rather than in Australia. It is not currently clear whether this is a cultural issue – or driven by the physical environment. For instance, it is a lot easier to undertake pervasive gaming in a built up area as there are more people and locations to interact with.
Part of the discussion focussed on an emerging trend whereby the traditional boundary between ‘game play’ and ‘real life’ is blurring so that real life and in-world activities may be undertaken at the same time. A similar parallel is that of work and leisure time becoming more blended – this just takes it one step further.
One of the challenges Jodi mentioned preventing wider uptake of this hobby is reliability of technology – many games are GPS or mobile depdendent and if there are reception issues gameplay is inhibited.
