Opentech 2008

06 July, 2008

It’s been a long, long day, but at least I got to watch the final episode of Dr Who when I got home.

I wasn’t as inspired by the talks as other people seem to have been – the ones I attended seemed reasonably prosaic, although I did make a couple of notes to follow up on later. I think this means I need to change the criteria I use for choosing which talks I go to.

The social aspect was great though; the attendees, both speakers and audience alike, were awesome – a real cream of the crop. It might always be like that at London gatherings, I don’t know but it seemed great to me! Of couse, my view is probably tainted by the fact that I got to shake hands with Ben Goldacre (as I simpered like a girl).

Things I learned:

phones are rubbish for quick twitter entry
the official opentech online schedule was rubbish. Everyone was using Jeremy Keith’s version
there appears to be a real change happening in the civil service wrt technology thanks to people like William Perrin, John Sheridan and many more
stopping people in corridors and introducing yourself works surprisingly well
confabb is a hosted multi-even ripplerap site
the BUG modules are surprisingly small and the touchscreen surprisingly temperamental, and the toolkit uses Eclipse

At the moment there are only two of the dozens of presentations on slideshare, but I hope they will be gathered together somewhere at some point soon.

Incidentally, Sir Bonar has written an excellent summary of the day.

See other posts tagged with general gov opentech opentech08 and all posts made in July 2008.

Comments

Jon Mandell

06 July, 2008 at 23:24

Phil,

Hoped you all enjoyed using the recent integration of ripplerap into Confabb. YOu mentioned the presentations on slideshare so I wanted to point out that we are pulling those in as well as blog mentions, photos and videos here

http://confabb.com/conferences/77260-open-tech-2008/media

Jon
confabb.com

Phil

06 July, 2008 at 23:36

Thanks Jon. Yes, I liked both confabb and ripplerap a lot, although it hadn’t actually occurred to me look up OpenTech on confabb! I’ll take a closer look tomorrow.

Sam

07 July, 2008 at 20:27

Hey Phil,

Could you elaborate on why you thought the layout of the schedule was rubbish? We can then look at fixing it for next year

Glad you enjoyed the day.

Cheers
Sam
(Opentech co-organiser)

Phil

07 July, 2008 at 23:10

Hi Sam, thanks for stopping by and many thanks for organising a really great day!

To be fair it got better before the event when the abstracts loaded underneath each section rather than by the side, but we’d have been better off had the abstracts been duplicated elsewhere and linked from the talk’s title, leaving the ajax out of the schedule altogether (I see from the source that they were actually separate files, included with jquery). I think having seen the side-loading version, the damage was done for me; first impressions and all that. I guess it didn’t help that abstracts varied from nothing to about three hundred words which, when dynamically loaded into the page meant that before clicking you didn’t know where the rest of the page was going to go.

You could also have done with a print stylesheet which disabled the sidebar and big heading.

Had Jeremy’s version had speaker names on it and linked through to the abstracts, it would have been perfect imho.