OpenTech
September 5, 2015 1:39 PM Subscribe
Growing out of the 2002 NTK Festival of Inappropriate Technology, Opentech is a one-day conference in London on the topic of open source and open data in its broadest sense. Speakers have included Danny O’Brien (of NTK fame), Bill Thompson, Suw Charman-Anderson and many others, and the conference has launched or promoted several important UK tech organisations and campaigns including the Open Rights Group and Ada Lovelace Day.
Here's the the schedules from every year OpenTech has run with some interesting talks highlighted. Most talks have audio at least linked via the schedule, with some having video or slides too.2005 – [schedule]. Here's the panel that led to the creation of the Open Rights Group
2008 - [schedule]
2009 - [schedule]
2010 – [schedule]. Launch of data.gov.uk
2011 - [schedule]
2013 – [schedule]
2015 – [schedule]. 10 years of the Open Rights Group (audio link)
Here's the the schedules from every year OpenTech has run with some interesting talks highlighted. Most talks have audio at least linked via the schedule, with some having video or slides too.
- 2004 – NotCon [schedule]
- Danny O’Brien on Tech Secrets of the Alpha Geeks, from which Lifehacks emerged
- Brewter Kahle on Universal Access to All Human Knowledge (sorry couldn't find a link to the talk on the day)
- Intercept Modernisation Programme (with a not to be missed visit from a senior civil servant)
- Heather Brooke on using freedom of information requests to investigate MPs expenses (audio link). This became a major political scandal
- Suw Charman-Anderson and others on a panel on the first Ada Lovelace Day
- some great talks by women in technology on how to improve diversity in STEM (audio link)
- background to creation of gov.uk - the UK Government online service
I think that the Notcon session was my recap of the original life hacks talk, rather than the inspiration for it.
Oddly enough I was vaguely prodding around the Internet last night to see if there's any video record of either of them. Both were taped, but the files seem to have crumbled away.
Thank you for reminding me of the Festival of Inappropriate Technology. My favourite memory of that was Dave Green stumbling on the fact that you can get a much higher standard of famous person to come to your mad event if they are on a local book tour. He spent a day peering at all the catalogs of upcoming books, and through this managed to summon Freeman Dyson. This was mind-boggling as the other guests were just our friends who did vaguely interesting stuff.
Dave really did organize everything on our side of the Festival. The other half was done by the Mute Magazine folks, who were lovely cyber-artists who wanted to create a vibrant and challenging artistic environment just as much as we wanted a room to show dumb TV shows eat sandwiches and play with ZX Spectrums. Still we always self-destructively loved some chaotic culture clash and it worked out very well, kind of like the annual fete in an art colony being besieged by the Eltingville Club.
I think my only real job was to make sure Freeman Dyson was okay. He was quite old and frail, and turned up far earlier than we thought he would, and I think mostly sat watching us shambolically try to derive how to run and event from first principles. About thirty minutes just before his talk he vanished. I was convinced I was going to find out he'd stormed off to complain about this fiasco to his book agent, or alternatively down the bottom of a lift shaft. Instead I found he'd slid off to hang out under some giant silk drapes to sit in a circle and have tea and listen intensely to a group of young artists in a chill out room.
I was peering out for all of this old stuff, because my cat died last week, and I needed to update my home page to say so. Her name is Dyson because she was named after Freeman, George, and Esther. So there's closure for you.
I totally recommend starting insane conferences and inviting your heroes to them. The organizational costs have dropped through the floor, and whether they're a disaster or a success you have something to bore people about for years. These days, I've noticed a trend for people just organizing conferences around themselves and their friends, like birthdays but with lanyards and an excuse for everyone you love to talk about something they love.
posted by ntk at 2:30 PM on September 5, 2015 [17 favorites]
Oddly enough I was vaguely prodding around the Internet last night to see if there's any video record of either of them. Both were taped, but the files seem to have crumbled away.
Thank you for reminding me of the Festival of Inappropriate Technology. My favourite memory of that was Dave Green stumbling on the fact that you can get a much higher standard of famous person to come to your mad event if they are on a local book tour. He spent a day peering at all the catalogs of upcoming books, and through this managed to summon Freeman Dyson. This was mind-boggling as the other guests were just our friends who did vaguely interesting stuff.
Dave really did organize everything on our side of the Festival. The other half was done by the Mute Magazine folks, who were lovely cyber-artists who wanted to create a vibrant and challenging artistic environment just as much as we wanted a room to show dumb TV shows eat sandwiches and play with ZX Spectrums. Still we always self-destructively loved some chaotic culture clash and it worked out very well, kind of like the annual fete in an art colony being besieged by the Eltingville Club.
I think my only real job was to make sure Freeman Dyson was okay. He was quite old and frail, and turned up far earlier than we thought he would, and I think mostly sat watching us shambolically try to derive how to run and event from first principles. About thirty minutes just before his talk he vanished. I was convinced I was going to find out he'd stormed off to complain about this fiasco to his book agent, or alternatively down the bottom of a lift shaft. Instead I found he'd slid off to hang out under some giant silk drapes to sit in a circle and have tea and listen intensely to a group of young artists in a chill out room.
I was peering out for all of this old stuff, because my cat died last week, and I needed to update my home page to say so. Her name is Dyson because she was named after Freeman, George, and Esther. So there's closure for you.
I totally recommend starting insane conferences and inviting your heroes to them. The organizational costs have dropped through the floor, and whether they're a disaster or a success you have something to bore people about for years. These days, I've noticed a trend for people just organizing conferences around themselves and their friends, like birthdays but with lanyards and an excuse for everyone you love to talk about something they love.
posted by ntk at 2:30 PM on September 5, 2015 [17 favorites]
Oh man. I'm one of the founders of Webstock and:
"I totally recommend starting insane conferences and inviting your heroes to them."
is pretty much exactly how we started!
And:
"I've noticed a trend for people just organising conferences around themselves and their friends, like birthdays but with lanyards and an excuse for everyone you love to talk about something they love."
is pretty much my ideal conference! Nice memories, ntk.
posted by maupuia at 3:00 PM on September 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
"I totally recommend starting insane conferences and inviting your heroes to them."
is pretty much exactly how we started!
And:
"I've noticed a trend for people just organising conferences around themselves and their friends, like birthdays but with lanyards and an excuse for everyone you love to talk about something they love."
is pretty much my ideal conference! Nice memories, ntk.
posted by maupuia at 3:00 PM on September 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
NTKnow, suck.com and someone here mentioned fuckedcompany.com the other day. Now all we need to make my noughties nostalgia complete is some crackmonkey.
posted by nickzoic at 5:15 AM on September 6, 2015
posted by nickzoic at 5:15 AM on September 6, 2015
Ah yes, OpenTech 2005, when my chairing of a panel called "Media Hacking" included my five minute demonstration of "The iPod Shuffle Shuffle" where I got people in the room to put their new iPod Shuflles in a box, I closed the lid, shook them about, and handed them a random iPod Shuffle back.
'Hilarity' ensued as one person tried desperately to get their PGP-Private Key back (More details here).
After that I was there in the conversation that started ORG UK. What a day, what a day.
posted by ewan at 5:18 PM on September 6, 2015
'Hilarity' ensued as one person tried desperately to get their PGP-Private Key back (More details here).
After that I was there in the conversation that started ORG UK. What a day, what a day.
posted by ewan at 5:18 PM on September 6, 2015
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