It’s geek festival season, down here in Brighton. First up is dConstruct, a one-day conference on the cutting edge of interface design and user engagement.

And then it’s good old BarCamp Brighton, now into its fourth incarnation. BarCamp, always a favourite, is a handmade 2-day conference, pulled together by its community of participants. Everyone gives a talk on something they feel (geekily) passionate about, and they bring sleeping bags to spend the night at the donated event space. This time, we’ll be moving into the old Music Library for the weekend.

Dharmafly is again a proud sponsor of BarCamp. I had in mind a fun little game to give away to the attendees, but not quite had the time to pull it off. Next time, next time. (And no more crunchy spirulina, like last time). See our BarCamp archive for more.

If you’re at either of these events, do roll up and say hi.

Update: At BarCamp, I gave a talk called “Indestructible JavaScript Widgets“, about the pitfalls and solutions when developing widgets to embed in third-party websites (like our widget for BBC World Service). No pretty slides, but my notes are at: dharmafly.com/bcb4.

We want to spend a little time reminiscing about last month’s Brighton BarCamp, one of our favourite events of the year and a time when we get to roll up our sleeves and muck in with the community.

BarCamp is a self-organised gathering of New Media enthusiasts and an important opportunity to share knowledge with peer businesses and enthusiasts. Naturally, we were keen to get involved, and we found no less than four different ways to do so:

1. Mingling

The best thing about BarCamp is the opportunity to hang out and discuss technology and business with a great bunch of like-minded people. As ever, there was an eclectic mix of developers, designers, thinkers and doers – mainly Brighton-based, but the event attracted people from all over. Andy Mitchell, from Leeds, had this to say:

Coming down from the North I find it a real different culture, so mild-mannered and alternative (sessions on “GeekYoga”? “Getting Things Done” and “Meditation”?!) I must admit I’m somewhat fascinated with it.

2. Organising

In the run up to BarCamp Brighton3, we played a part in getting sponsors on board, as well as being mini-sponsors ourselves. BarCamp is entirely free and inclusive, and without the many sponsors and volunteers, it just wouldn’t have been possible.

One minor feature that was unexpectedly well received was the hand-crafted, recycled newspaper goodie bag given to each attendee on arrival at the event. The bags were made by a local greengrocer in Suffolk, and they’re so special that they now have their own mini-cult following.

3. Speaking

I gave two talks: one for BarCampers interested in business development and one for those curious about new methods for social media.

The First Talk: “Can Your Business be Franchised? (And Should It)?”

A little while back, we were considering what would happen if Dharmafly was a franchise – or, rather, not if it was a franchise, but if it was capable of being a franchise.

This is loosely inspired by the ideas of Michael Gerber in his book ‘The E-Myth‘. He suggests that if all the procedures of a business are clarified, systematised and documented as if the business was to be replicated to a different location, then the business will benefit, even if it isn’t actually replicated. (He also goes into a lot of other detail about other stuff that I didn’t connect with as much).

Think of something as efficient and repeatable as the McDonald’s experience, but with a focus on people, purpose and quality (and none of that meat, despondency or environmental destruction).

We discussed:

• The development of business goals
• Establishing consciously intended outcomes
• Developing a system to achieve them

Jonathan Markwell from Inuda raised an interesting question:

How would it be possible to systematise and franchise Dharmafly, when your business values require those working for the company to feel it and mean it, and not just follow a list of procedures?

That got me thinking. An ethical approach to business must surely be genuinely felt and not just acted out by rote. On the other hand, it is said that if a person wants to cultivate a particular habit or value, then he or she could start acting as if they already possess it and, one day, they actually will possess it. For example, cultivate generosity by giving to those in need, and cultivate honesty by being truthful.

Would a person following an ethical system for business be transformed by it? I wonder what the people at Actics would say.

The Second Talk: “What Planet are You On?”

Our enthusiasm for Planets hasn’t waned since the launch of Planet Crunchy, a site we built to demonstrate the virtuous role of Planets in social media campaigns. (Planet sites are ones that aggregate content on a particular theme from around the Web).

Apart from taking a look at how Planet Crunchy works, we looked at some examples of beneficial Planets around the web, including personal Lifestreams (e.g. David Cramer’s) and communities like Planet BNM and Planet Microformats.

4. Experimenting

The Planet Crunchy experiment was interesting. We had given everyone at the event a box of Dharmafly Crunchies and invited them to post their experiences online. Some people really liked it, while others really didn’t.

Twitter was the most popular social network that people used to report their stories, with Flickr close behind. Nobody ventured to post a video.

Thank you everyone who took part. We love you most greenly.

URL: dharmafly.com/crunchies

Planet what?

‘Planet‘ sites are a new and wonderful way to draw people with common interests together online… and today is the day we get to demonstrate how.

What’s all this green stuff?

This weekend, at Barcamp Brighton3, we’re giving Brighton’s best New Media pros some special treats, in the form of Dharmafly Crunchies; little boxes of spirulina (it’s like a tiny green seaweed), known for being a potent superfood.

The fancy boxes were designed along with the brilliant minds of John Cooper (Kapow.me) and Ellen de Vries.

Why?

We’re hoping that spirulina’s special powers will entice these social media buffs to go online and post tweets, blogs, photos and videos of themselves ‘doing stuff’ with their Dharmafly Crunchies.

What’s happening on Planet Crunchy right now? Take a look.

So what’s a Planet for?

A ‘Planet‘ site can draw people together online under one coherent, enthusiastic umbrella. So they’re particularly effective tools for social media campaigns where you want to get people discussing a hot topic, and find out who’s talking about you.

Lifestreams are another great use for Planet technologies. They can be used to round up all your online and offline activities to keep and share them in one place.

A Planet site for you?

If you want to find out more about using Planets for campaigns, for you as an individual, or you want to be involved in building one, get in contact and we can give you lots of enthusiastic help.

What’s under the bonnet?

It looks like magic, but in fact it uses a whole host of web technologies. It takes in RSS feeds from Technorati, Google blog search and a load of social networking and news sites, passes them through Yahoo Pipes and SimplePie and finally into WordPress, along with a smattering of jQuery, combining them together into one seamless package.

We’re proud to be a mini-sponsor of Brighton’s upcoming BarCamp, a revolutionary indoor-conference-camping-type event that’s enjoying growing cult status around the world.

What’s Barcamp?

Essentially it’s a philanthropic grassroots event, run by the community for the community (in this case, Brighton’s New Media and technology community). It’s an opportunity to share expertise, make contacts and learn lots of things that you never knew you wanted to know.

Every participant has to give a short session on a subject they care about. That way, everyone who attends gets to share their skills, talk about what inspires them and has the opportunity to learn a whole host of new things.

What did we do at past BarCamps? See our posts tagged ‘BarCamp’.

Something Green for Everyone

It’s great to be a part of Brighton’s local web development community and we want to give something back, not just as mini-sponsors, but by giving everyone a bit of empowering green goodness to take home with them.

What’s green and goes to BarCamp? Any ideas?

This weekend is BarcampBrighton2, a grassroots technology conference organised and run by the participants. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been piecing together a special Greasemonkey userscript for the conference, which enables Yahoo Live users to broadcast live video as a group. We call it YLiveGroups.

» Install the script

We first used Yahoo Live at last month’s SemanticCampLondon and there was a great buzz of conversation from people who were watching from other countries, discussing the topics of the talks, asking questions and learning about the subjects.

For BarcampBrighton2, we’ll help people get broadcasting and we’ll use YLiveGroups to bring them all together. Viewers from around the world will be able to tune in and keep track of the many talks taking place.

Yahoo Live

Yahoo Live is an interesting new experiment. It makes it possible for anyone to create their own live video channel, available to anyone who cares to watch. As has been pointed out before, there is plenty of scope to increase its potential for social networking. YLiveGroups is our attempt to do just that with some rudimentary group functionality.

YLiveGroups

To use YLiveGroups, you will need to use the Firefox web browser, along with the Greasemonkey add-on. Then, install YLiveGroups and head on over to Yahoo Live.

At the moment, the only group available is BarcampBrighton2. However, we intend to develop the code so that anyone can create their own group. These groups could be used to tie broadcasts together at events, connect people around a single topic or simply bring together a group of friends.

Techie Details

In case you were wondering…

The userscript interacts with both the Yahoo Live API and our own simple YLiveGroups API. Our API uses XOXO microformat HTML documents to exchange data (as opposed to standard XML or JSON). The script then uses JQuery to interract with the XOXO documents and the web page that the user is currently viewing. Premasagar will be talking more about this in his presentation at Barcamp.

We’d love to work with other developers to take this project forward. If you’d like to get involved, or have any feedback at all, then please leave a comment here.

This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) – a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.

Semantics is all about meaning – and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers – as well as humans – to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.

When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.

Tom Morris and Daniel Lewis did an excellent job of pulling the event together. It seemed to me that they acted as a bridge between developers who approach the Semantic Web from quite different angles. There was a spectrum of perspectives and some tangible synergy taking place…

Niche TV

On a whim, I started using Yahoo Live to stream live video of the conference from my webcam. The service launched last week and is so easy to use – just plug in the webcam and “Go Live”.

It was pretty effective. There were viewers from different parts of the world tuning in, asking questions and educating each other on the fine points of the technologies being presented. In this way, something of the event spread beyond the confines of London. I will try to encourage a handful of people to stream video from next month’s BarCampBrighton…

Compound Microformats

For my session, I put together an interactive demo of Compound Microformats – a way of combining simple building blocks of HTML, so that their combined semantic meaning becomes greater than the sum of their parts:

(Image from Microformats wiki)

We talked about people innovating on new patterns for combining microformats. We also discussed whether software that understand microformats should consider the configuration of compounds, to glean something more of the semantic meaning intended by the coder.

We gave a 30 minute session at BarCamp London called "Yoga and the Social Graph: from smoke-signals to self-realisation"…

We discussed the ever-increasing trend for expansion and connection within society. This is now stronger than ever with the progress from the Internet (a network of interconnected computers), to the Web (a network of interconnected documents), to the Social Graph (or more simply, ‘Social Network‘, a network of interconnected social relationships).

We considered this tendency in the light of the yogic concept of constant progress towards union – on both the individual and collective level.

The discussion was interesting – with everyone offering insights into the process that we see unfolding in the world today. We found it a refreshing chance to take a step back from technical details and consider the bigger picture.

BarCamp

BarCamp is a growing global movement of web technology conferences that follow a model of grassroots, collective participation. The latest camp was held at Google’s London offices.

[See our previous post from BarCamp Brighton]

Further Reading

Nothing here about yoga – but some interesting commentary on social networking issues…

• Social Graph basic concepts on Read Write Web
• Brad Fitzpatrick’s summary of the problems and issues
• Brian Oberkirch blue-skying the future of portable social networks
• ‘Move My Data‘, a campaign to make data easily portable between different social networks

We ran an interactive workshop at BarCamp Brighton: "How to Save the World and Succeed in Business". This is the perennial question for Dharmafly, and instead of telling anything, we wanted to get the answers from the crowd…

We split people into groups and got everyone mind-mapping. Each group had a sheet with ‘How to Save the World‘ written in the centre and another sheet with ‘How to Succeed in Business‘. On each sheet, with limited time, people wrote down related concepts and then connected them together…

There often seems to be a conflict between running a thriving business and working in an ethical way. Much of our society is cut-throat and ruthlessly capitalistic. But we found that many practices complement both needs and there is a common desire for collaboration, integrity and taking an ethical approach.

The future looks bright…