Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Happens in Italy: threatened for supporting a BarCamp

You see, yesterday we started this innocent initiative to create a BarCamp to provide a new, decent serious project for the italia.it website. Something Italy could be finally be proud of. And we’re not asking one dime out of those 40 millions of euros or so that have been already spent on the project.
In less than 24 hours, 50 people signed in, freely offering their knowledge, skills and time to help in the project. That is amazing!

Problem is, this is Italy.
And in Italy you don’t really want to go against “Big Guys”. Those with “Power 1.0″.
They’ll get pissed off, they’ll do nasty things, they’ll hit you hard.

C’mon, sounds like a b-movie synopsis, you’ll say.
Well, believe it or not, today we had the first (afaik) case of a man (happens to be also a blogger) threatened for supporting the rItaliaCamp.
You see, he proposed the Bicocca University (where he teaches) as a venue for the camp, and received this nice email in return:

Ucci, ucci si sente odor di blogger che saranno inculatucci per Italia.it. State accuorti a scrivere male di chi conta. Si possono perdere le cattedre all’università…………………………….

“Hey, there’s a smell of bloggers being assfucked in the air, about Italia.it. Beware of badmouthing the powers that be. You can quickly loose your nice University seat this way”


Nice, isn’t it?
The rItaliaCamp will happen, in one month time, venue to be defined.

a BarCamp for a better Italia.it

Its name is rItaliaCamp and it is the offspring of collective indignation of the Italian blogosphere following the release of italia.it, the shiny new portal for tourism that costed Italy more than 40 millions of euro.
Ever since I came back from LIFT where Mark Kuznicki, Michele Perras and Thomas Purves shared with me their enthusiasm for the recent TransitCamp (a BarCamp dedicated to help the city of Toronto by redesigning their transportation system’s website) I’ve been looking forward to a good cause where to apply this approach.

 

TorontoStar

The loud upheaval regarding the Italia.it affair was just the perfect signal to start this new game.

So here’s the challenge: the tentative date for the camp is the 31st of March, so we have just one month to organize the conversation and our ideas around this basic question: “What a portal like Italia.it should look like?”

Then the event itself will be a slightly modified version of a common BarCamp: we’ll still have the presentations and the conversations, but we could also try to assemble a mockup, or some prototypes for the hypothethic new portal.
At the end of the day, we’ll assemble a draft (that will probably still be edited by the community in the following days) that describes our proposed solution in as much detail as possible. The document will be freely available and of course we’ll invite the italia.it people to take full advantage of it :)

The process already started, so what are you waiting for? Join the conversation.

TransitCamp

Coworking in London meetup 28/02

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.Or, it’s like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes. ;)

This is the description given on the Coworking Wiki about what in my opinion is one of the most interesting emergent practices, together with BarCamps of course. Here on the left you can see Citizen Space (San Francisco), isn’t it lovely?
London has, of course, its own coworking spaces. One of the best presented being the hub (boy, look at those pictures!!!). Nevertheless, the activitiy and buzz around coworking here (and in the UK in general) is pretty much equal to zero (well at least to my limited knowledge).

So I thought to give a shout and see if anybody out there is interested in the topic… without further ado: let’s meet at the Market Porter (a nice pub, maybe just a little bit overcrowded) by the borough market at 6.30pm on wednesday (28/02).
Here is the Upcoming event, while this is the London page on the coworking wiki. Feel free to add yourself and your comments there.

Oh, and if you’re living somewhere else, but still interested on the subject, it may be a good idea to join the google group too…

P.S.: just to make things clear, I’m currently very happy with my office. But it’s getting a little bit tiny for us and we’ll have to make a move soon… who knows, coworking could be an option!

UPDATE: and look ma, coworking is on Businessweek too!

Ecto and WP2.1

Just for those of you who, like me, love to blog from Ecto and have to deal with wordpress 2.1 -> here’s how to fix the category stall

Bell Towers, Virtual Spaces and Hard Covers

Bell Towers
Yesterday… oh no, time is running, must have been the day before yesterday, while everybody in the so called two-point-o scene seemed to be able to spend the day at FOWA, I resorted to follow the event through the virtual echoes bounced via twitter.
In the end, that gave me a brand new perception/perspective of what was going on there: I knew for instance that Tom Coates was late in the morning, that Tara Hunt was cool enough to tweet even from the stage, while others were engaging conversation in the backchannel as it usually happens at such geeky conferences.
What also happened is that I got a pretty accurate “clock” of the event, as Pedro (among others) was promptly broadcasting as every new speaker conquered the stage.
What I didn’t get though was a proper summary of the “content” of the speeches (beyond the title, that is).

Now one could think that means that nothing useful was to be taken from this “ultra-light” form of remote lurking, but the funny thing is that even from these rarified bits of information, the very fact to be able to witness the reactions of those who were attending the conference was enough to give me a whole set of useful, if subtle, information, ranging the general mood to the pace of the day.

I ended up thinking of this disembodied echoes as a sort of sound of a virtual bell tower that, though apparently carrying a straightforward simple message, actually doubles as a powerful landmark in the four dimensions of time and space:
in the same way as you can use a belltower to pinpoint your position relative to a city and time of day, that background noise of fowa related chirps, twitters and screeches helped me to keep a share of attention on the event itself, on the themes that were discussed there, and on some of the reactions they generated.

Vir(tu)al Spaces
The second insight came a few hours later, as I dived in the digital world of Second Life to attend the MeetTheMediaGuru conference with John Maeda.
The meeting was happening in Milan (ironically at no more than a 5 minutes walk from my ex-flat), but has been extended to the Idearium island on Second Life by the brave Leeander & co.

It was the first time for me to be able to attend to an event on SL for its whole duration, and that gave me the opportunity to come up with some considerations on that type of experience:
. The quality of the audio/video stream from Milan was surprisingly much better than I expected. Sadly, it was still far too poor to let me appreciate it thoroughly. But hey, I’m the guy who hates talking at the phone because of its lo-fi… so probably it’s just me being fussy.
. the use of space in the virtual auditorium is still sub-optimal. I think this has to do with the inherited habit of replicating physical-life behaviour in SL, but the fact is that pretty much everybody was just standing in front of the virtual megascreen, with his avatar view zoomed on the videostream, without actually make any use of the Linden world (e.g. taking 3d notes on the fly, sharing resources or links on a potential parallel screen). Being that the case, a quicktime stream coupled with a chat and/or collaborative notetaking could have granted a higher-fi.
. On the other hand, there’s something wicked in being able to be there in a same place (even if, ok, it’s not anything physical) with other people to share an experience: you feel instantly part of a tribe, are more willing to collaborate, you start addressing yourself as “those from Second Life” and push all the group to achievement (in this case being noticed by Maeda and make him answer some of the questions coming from the second audience).
. Having the video embedded inside another complex environment had an interesting effect on my attention level: I was perceiving Maeda’s videostream as the second layer, and as such less urgent / meaningful than a bunch of other apps that were popping and flashing and making attention-magnetic noises.
Thus what happens usually is that the application that I have in the top window gathers most of my attention, and I can (hopefully) get things done at a decent rate.
What happened this time is that the signal was filtered by the layer effect I just described and therefore the noise more often broke the attention threshold and got me totally.

That said, I had a lot of fun and I hope more events like this will keep on coming, so that we’ll be able to explore properly how to make out the most of it.

Hard Covers
Last but not least, after Maeda’s talk I rushed to Amazon and bought books. Plenty of them. All sharing one characteristic: hard cover. Nice, tangible, beautiful hard covers.
The point is that I start feeling like if I love a given book as an artifact, if I appreciate its aesthethics and had to make an effort (i.e. invest a significative amount of money) to get it there’s a good chance that two things will happen:
1. I’ll definitely get to the end of it
2. I’ll learn more, as my experience will be more intense and therefore my attention much sharper.

I’m falling asleep now… better stop here and hit “publish”.

The over-friendly site, Trusted Places

Following that flawless 2.0 human radar that is Rik, I’m now trying Trusted Places, a new rounded-cornered web community site focusing on places (very London centric for the moment).

I’m jotting down these notes as I’m approaching the site, and the first impression I have is that the sign-up process makes use of some clever tricks: for example when it comes to inviting your friends over (often difficult since it clashes with people sense of privacy and etiquette) they provide a “real life story” explaining in a simple comic strip how fantastic and rewarding is to spread the word. Then the wizard takes you to a page that is a game about pinpointing your tastes: you’re given a list of food types (from African to English to Italian and so on) where you can declare wether if you like it or not.
From the interface point of view, there is an interesting use of the buttons here: the more you click on the positive or negative button, the more you go in that direction, on a scale from can’t stand it to love it!. A global “food score” chart is always available on the sidebar too.

Trusted Places Test

Same concept applies then to Music, People, Places, Drinks, Cities. Very cool concept in all, the problem being that no explanation is given beyond the picture, so it can be difficult to differentiate the various genres especially if you come from abroad.

The rest of the site is the usual ajaxy website. And still little buggy (was not able to change my picture at first for instance). Nice forms, I wonder if they will turn out usable.

The application itself is a glorified google maps mashup, where you can review places and search for suggestion. I’ll probably post more as I’ll find out how addictive it is. So far the featured review was ironically a sushi place I’ve been on sunday night, so I was amused and quickly typed in my own review… we’ll see.

Oh one last thing: I totally love the idea of using tag clouds above London skyline as a banner…

A new voice

After five years of blogging behind the codewitch mask, I eventually felt the need to detach from that character and start sketching on a new, empty canvas.

What will you read here will be the same man, but speaking with a new voice:
As five years ago, my main interest is still to get to know myself, explore how anybody could get the most out of oneself and which tools and technologies will make this process possible.

Unlike in the past though, a very small space will be given here to tech gadgets and coding applications, while you’ll notice more attention to media theory, mind hacks, social interaction design, and social media practices.

Finally, since most of my inspiration comes from everyday life and small innuendos, this will also be, once again, a place for storytelling.

That’s it for now.
But so much more to come…