The last couple of days had a pair of geek-friendly events, with quite a lot of common attendance between the two. Firstly on Sunday 19 September 2010, Software Freedom Day in Wellington was held for the day at the Victoria University Pipitea Campus (very conveniently located to public transport). Then the following evening, on Monday 20 September 2010, the second Nerdnite in Wellington was held at Betty's, a bar in Blair Street.

Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day is an annual day held world wide to promote Free Software (with the event name chosen to promote the libre nature of the software over the low cost). Officially Software Freedom Day 2010 was Saturday 18th September, but due to a combination of New Zealand's timezone being ahead of the rest of the world and availability of venues in Wellington it was held on Sunday 19th September (so that the actual event overlapped with events in the USA). In addition to Wellington there were events in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Christchurch and Otago, organised around the same weekend.

In Wellington the event was held primarily as an "unconference", which is basically an on-the-day participant-organised conference. The conveeners provide the venue, and some services (coffee and Internet connectivity being traditional), and a large blank schedule on a wall (or whiteboard or similar) listing times and presentation areas (eg, rooms). Then at the start of the event people can propose topics by writing them in (writing titles on sticky notepaper is common). After a bit of time and some rearrangement of proposed topics an agenda for the day emerges. It tends to work best for presentations that don't require a lot of up front preparation, and particularly for BoF) ("Birds of a Feather") style presentations. ("Birds of a Feather" style presentations have been a traditional alternate stream of talks at most computing conferences for decades; in a sense unconferences are the logical conclusion of "imagine if that was all we had".) Unconferences have become very popular over the last 5 years or so.

Some presentations, particularly those requiring more setup, had been arranged in advance with the conveeners and pre-scheduled. That approach seems to help with kickstarting the event, as it helps give people a reason to turn up -- and while they're there, they can do other things too. (It also avoids the "blank slate" problem, of not knowing where to start, and prompts people to "fill in the gaps".)

In addition to the presentations the event also had several OLPC XO-1 computers for people to try out, and a Makerbot 3D printer on display (alas they seemed to have technical issues preventing it from working reliably -- but that did mean that we got to see it field stripped a few times). The Makerbot is effectively a commercialised version of the RepRap (on Wikipedia), which is an open source, open hardware, 3D printer (designed so that it can produce many of its own custom parts -- most of the rest being easily obtainable standard parts -- and thus be used to produce another version of itself). An "InstallFest" is also traditional at Software Freedom Day events, but it wasn't an active focus of the Wellington event this year.

Of the presentations that I went to these ones were most interesting or useful:

  • Danyl Strype talking about the intersection of Free Software, Free Culture (on Wikipedia), Permaculture, and Disaster Relief efforts (particularly relevant after the recent Christchurch earthquakes). As he points out the aims of many of these movements have several things in common, and the availability of Free Software (particularly web site building/collaboration tools) can help all these largely volunteer-driven events. Rapidly being able to set up collaboration tools (eg, wiki) can help respond to specific events.

  • Rainer Spittle (currently of Silverstripe) talking about GIS systems and standards, and particularly open source software available for mapping. The WMS (web map service) and WFS (web feature service) protocols particularly tie the various bits of software together. Both protocol standards come from the OGC (Open Geo-spatial Consortium), and are now widely implemented in both free software and proprietary products; and both products are REST style web APIs. He suggested free tools including GeoServer (written in Java) and MapServer, as well as OpenLayers and QGIS, a visualisation tool which can pull data from WMS/WFS servers as well as local files. OS Geo is the umbrella project site for most Open Source GIS tools and libraries.

  • Joel Pitt talking about OpenCOG (on Wikipedia), an open source project to build an AGI, an Artificial General Intelligence (something that has been attempted virtually every decade since computing began, although the "G" in AGI is relatively new -- now that computer programs are exhibiting some degree of intelligence in limited domains).

  • Nic Cave-Lynch of Tymar about a lighting control system based on open source, called Hooloovoo. It was an interesting primer to how lighting systems work, how they're programmed, and what's needed to build one. And featured stylish slides thanks to console presenter.

Over all it seemed a reasonably popular event, even given that it was one of the first sunny days in spring. One of the mayorial candidates, Jack Yan even put in an appearance. (Unsurprising given that Free Wifi in the CBD is one of his main platforms.)

NerdNite Wellington #2

NerdNite is an informal set of presentations generally held in a bar about topics of interest to geeks (or nerds; they don't make a distinction, and "nerd" has the advantage of alliteration). There have have been NerdNite events in a number of USA tech cities as well as Munich, Germany and Wellington, New Zealand. The first Nerdnite Wellington was held while I was away so I missed it; I was persuaded to skip the Film Society Screening and go to the second Nerdnite Wellington, and I'm glad I did.

The event was held at Betty's, a bar in Blair Street which features front projection of images onto its walls for decoration. While we were there, they were projecting aerial photographs of various parts of the world (similar to the Robert Cameron photographs I saw in San Francisco, but clearly by a different photographer). As a venue it had the advantage that showing a slide presentation was fairly easy (it was just fed into two of the projectors, and thus visible from most places in the bar), but the seating was fairly limited (and crowded) compared with the number of attendees. (And unfortunately whoever was doing the audio mixing appeared not to understand the causes of audio feedback, or to be missing the equipment necessary to avoid it, as there were frequent instances of loud feedback as the presenters moved around or even slightly increased their speaking volume -- despite the use of a label microphone. Curiously having listened to the recordings from the first Nerdnite Wellington that doesn't seem have been a problem at the previous event, also held in the same venue, so I'm left wondering what they did differently.)

The second Wellington Nerdnite had four presenters with wide variety of topics:

  • Jez Weston speaking about Geoengineering, and how we might control the planets temperature without, you know, giving up any of the things we like to do which are bad for the environment. He discussed a range of impractical ideas including the popular-with-the-audience idea of painting Australia white to reflect the energy away from the earth. The general theme was that you needed to be particularly drunk, or on good drugs, to think there was a "quick fix" to allow us to keep up our bad ways and not pay the consequences. (No recording?)

  • Leonie Reynolds talking about the traditional Hollywood 3-act structure, illustrated by comparing the structure of "The Sound of Music" with "Alien". Despite the disparate topics if you squint right you can see a similar structure to the two films -- although the earlier "A Sound of Music" follows the template less well, and includes what is in effect an "and then there's more" section on the end, effectively unrelated to the story that started the film. A lot has been written in recent decades about movie story structure, including Blake Snyder's "Save The Cat", and I think at least partly as a result the story structure has become more easily identified in more recent movies. (Leonie Reynolds' talk on ustream.tv)

  • Polly Lind of Urban Witchery spoke about the origins of modern witchcraft, based on the research for her Master's thesis. Despite the "discovered ancient wisdom" way that much of it was originally described in the early books, it appears that it was mostly created out of whole cloth after World War II. And unsurprisingly much of it originated in England with people of independant means who had the time to explore things rather than work for a living. As it spread around the world particularly to the USA, the audience changed especially as it interacted with things like the Goddess Movement (a part of second-wave feminism). As with many social phenomenon the popularity seems to have come in several waves (the most recent being in the 1990s and spawning a lot of books aimed at younger beginners). (Polly Lind's talk on ustream.tv, another bit of the talk)

  • Mike Eastwood spoke about Tuesday Night Dinners, a weekly event in Wellington that has followed him around for over a decade. Like many things what was dinner with friends became a habit ("but it's always on Tuesday!") and snowballed to the point where the event has birthday parties. Everyone was invited to dinner the next night, which I expect was even larger than normal (normal being 20-40 people, from what I can tell). (Mike Eastwood's talk on ustream.tv)

As Brian Calhoun observed at the event, Wellington in 2010 is starting to get the excitement and intermingling of tech culture that the San Francisco Bay Area had in the 1980s and 1990s (leading to the tech boom there). I'm quite proud of what my city is turning into.

Videos from the first Nerdnite Wellington are available on Vimeo, and worth watching: