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!

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;

• Where would you expect to hear about this event?
• What mailing lists are you already on?
• What user groups are you a member of?
• Where did you hear about your first BarCamp Melbourne or StixCamp?
• If you work for an IT organisation or study at a university, what’ s the best way for us to spread the word?

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.

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:

• Bezier curves
• Stroke and fill options

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gian Wild works in accessibility at Monash University and has been heavily involved in web and accessibility standards development, including the eGovernment web accessibility toolkit for Victorian Government. The point of adhering to accessibility standards is to ensure that people with disabilities are able to achieve the same objective with a website as a person without a disability. This requirement is embodied in the 1992 Disability Discrimination Act (C’th), with which Australian organisations must comply.

At first the need to make websites, applications and user interfaces is not obvious – why spend so much effort catering for a small percentage of the population? However, as Gian highlighted, approximately 19% of the Australian population has some form of disability – including cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia, and excluding those with a minor vision impairments – such as those people who wear glasses or contact lenses.

The enforcement of the Act is done by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Their most famous enforcement act is that initiated by Bruce Maguire, who is visually impaired. During run up to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, SOCOG (the organising body for the Games) released a website that was inaccessible to those using a screen reader (such as Bruce). HREOC requested that SOCOG take remedial action to bring the site up to standard. They did not, and were fined $20,000 (with around $500,000 in legal costs). Not being accessibility standards compliant can cost you dearly – financially and in terms of reputation. It is not just the fear of legal action however that should drive accessibility compliant websites and applications – making a website accessible and easy to use means that people will want to use it – increasing the chances that the site will meet the objectives it was created for.

One question from the audience was whether open source CMS applications were WCAG accessibility compliant. Gian indicated that generally they weren’t but that WordPress was reasonable, and that she would like to investigate this further. This got me thinking whether or not this work had been previously attempted – so headed on over to check out http://cmsmatrix.org/. I’m  not sure how deep CMS Matrix checks in terms of accessibility, however none of the top CMSs stack up very wel…

Gian went on to discuss the differences between WCAG Version 1 and the newly released Version 2 – essentially Version 2 attempts to be technology agnostic and provide general guidance.

When questions about effective ways to promote accessibility practices, Gian responded

“If you already adhere to best practices – you’re 80% of the way there. If people know what they’re doing, then it shouldn’t cost any more to develop a standards compliant website”

Along with Ben Balbo, Dave Hall (aka ’skwashd’), Donna Benjamin (aka ‘KatteKrab’) and Joshua May (aka ‘notjosh’) I’ve been helping to organise a BarCamp in central Victoria, known as StixCamp. The location for this year’s StixCamp is Welshman’s Reef Vineyard, near Newstead. After swapping cars with my sister, who has a large station wagon that drives smoothly up treacherous hills and handles curves better than my buzzbox, I was off to pick up my passenger, Jackson. All was rosy. Half way to Waurn Ponds and stuck at traffic lights, a stranger came up to me in traffic to let me know that my tyre was flat! Grr! Well, Jackson was very adept at changing tyres and earnt his ride . Soon we were on the road again.

I choose to go through Ballan, Daylesford, Hepburn Springs then Newstead to Welshmans Reef because if anything else went wrong with the car at least it would be in a populated area. These towns are simply beautiful – the scenary is amazing. One shudders to think how close they all came to being destroyed in the recent Black Saturday bushfires.

Finally, we arrived at Welshmans Reef Vineyard where I met the lovely Julia and Ron (Jackson’s parents). The vineyard building itself is pretty amazing – hand built by Ron from mudbrick and timber, with a cellar cut into the ground that has a drive in entrance on the opposite side of the building.

Dave had pitched a tent for me so that I wouldn’t have to pitch one in the dark (thanks Dave) and needless to say I slept like a baby.

Note to self: next time zip up the flyscreen on the tent to stop mozzies biting you.

You’ve probably heard of the BarCamp phenomenom which brings together technically minded folks in a forum to share, innovate, learn and collaborate. Victoria has now had two BarCamps, both organised by Ben Balbo. The first, in rural Victoria was held in 2007 with a very successful city based event in 2008.

This year, a rural based BarCamp event, StixCamp, will be hosted in Newstead, central Victoria.

We’re now putting out the call for sponsors – whether it be $$$, products for prizes, in kind sponsorship such as catering or anything else you can think of. So if you or a business you know of is keen about technology and wants to assist in growing and nurturing the bright young sparks of Victoria, then please get in contact. In return, we can offer the following;

Sponsors will have their logo on the http://vic.au.stixcamp.org/ website and the http://barcampmelbourne.org/ web site, linked to a URL of
their choosing. These logos will be on the main page until the nextBarCampMelbourne or Victorian StixCamp are announced, at which time they will be available in archives within those two sites.

Sponsors will also receive verbal thanks and recognition during the opening and closing speeches, and in any communication with reporters.
Press releases will also name all confirmed sponsors at the time of release.