re: iain simons

Jimmy and I are talking at the Bridport* page to Screen festival next month delivering “..a cocktail of music, action and cultural
theory.”

Details can be found here.

*Long time followers of poorly attended fringe theatre may recall my last performance at the Bridport Arts Centre back in the late 90′s. This time, no-one will be dressed as a dog.

Getting very excited about being able to get on with the first monthly event out of GCHQ, and particularly excited that the brilliant Hello Games are coming up to launch the season with us. I think this series of shows is going to act as a really useful prototyping ground for some of the things that we want to try out at the festival later this year, and also at other events throughout the year. We’ve been threatening to roll these out for years now, every autumn they’re written into the plan and invariably by new year we’re already too suffocated in festival detail to actually deliver them. It’s nice that as well as being able to get them up and running, they kind of also act as a marker that we’re getting a little more formalised (and possibly even better?) at rolling the work out. It’s a big transitional year ahead, which is already moving ahead quicker than we’d planned, so having a monthly public pulse to the development will really help to keep the festival moving. We’re really going to need it this year.

Ace.

Notes:

You only really need one camera.

I just watched the keynote for the global game jam event for 2010, which was delivered by my friend Ste. It’s disarming, lyrical, courageous, vulnerable and not really what you might expect from a videogame event keynote, which I why I think it’s brilliant.

Global Game Jam ’10 Keynote from Ste Curran on Vimeo.

We’ve been having lots of meeting about the show. I mean, lots. I’m not really a big meeting lover so usually this would be particularly difficult. This last few weeks though, have been fantastic as a whole lot of new names have entered my address book. This week alone there’s been stadiums, olympics, design, editors and much fun. One of the recurrent questions in the conversations about the show however, and often posed by people on a first meeting, has been, “what are you going to do for the anniversary?”

Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me.

The project is going to be five years old this year. Just thinking of the stress, new friends, risks, amazing talks, stupid mistakes and general adventure makes me come over a little nostalgic and slightly sick. I think what’s surprising me most is that it doesn’t feel five years old at all – not just in a “we’re so young and fresh” kind of way – but in a “we still don’t really understand *exactly* what it is” kind of way. We’re getting a lot closer, but there are still a lot of elements of the show that remain wilfully, stubbornly obscure and long may they remain so. Which isn’t to say we’re not trying to formulate parts of it…
I sat down with Allen this morning for breakfast to start to try and model what a more robust, transferable foundation for the show might be. Not terms of the spirit & feelings it might inspire, I think we more or less have that down, but in terms of how we make the right structure to allow others to play too. Every year the event has grown more and more complex, and whilst it hasn’t felt especially bigger in scale (from my perspective, anyway) the challenges have kept shifting with every new invention.
So, over coffee we started sketching out how we could best create easier ways for third parties to use the show if they wanted to – be they audience, developers, students, parents, whoever… What would an a.p.i. for a festival look like?

Notes.

T-shirts are interesting.

Don’t ever, ever, ever write work emails late at night.

2010.

Despite the snow, something of a frenzy so far this year.

All machines flattened and formatted with Snow Leopard, all archive data properly organised, active dropbox folder wholly ordered, omnifocus engaged and even occasionally used, iPhoto library de-duped even DevonThink working nicely and syncing across machines. I’m now diving down into a frenzied few weeks of planning and writing, there’s lots that needs to be done by the end of the month.

A real, concerted attempt to slim down and focus with a clear distinction between the ‘car’ and the ‘bike’. @DrJimmy was telling reading someone using this analogy earlier last year for describing different machines having clear, focussed purposes and capabilities accordingly. This really helps with planning work.

Inventory in brief.

Home.

Mac Pro -
writing / audio / video – any heavy lifting.

Mobile – In my bag always…
MacBook Air
BB Curve 3900
iPod Touch
Zoom  H2

Software

email
browser based gApps / Mailplane on the mba for offline (gears still sporadically ropey under Snow Leopard)

Scheduling
gApps / gCal (synced locally via Busysync / tight task link from Omnifocus)

Docs / groupware -
OpenAtrium (GameCity / Takahashi Playground)

Writing/ Notetaking
Scrivener (synced via Dropbox)
Nottingham (synced via MobileMe)

Browsing
Safari (but edging toward Chrome which I’m really enjoying)

Presentation
Keynote

Research
DevonThink

Notes

Install less.

Your mobile computer should be mobile, but that doesn’t mean you want a Netbook.

More lists, less GTD, more stuff done.

Make lists into time in iCal, otherwise they’re useless.

Lee has pretty much captured the key tapes from GC4 now, and there now resides hours – possibly even days – of footage from the show on the studio drobo. One of the plans we’ve been chipping away at for months now is the gradual release of all of the archive material, and it seems like we’re finally about to make some real progress with it. More about this at gchq in the next few days, but it does seem like we’re suddenly able to move. We’ve got to find better, clearer, easier ways of thinking and talking about the show to others – and hopefully engaging them in it.

Meanwhile, things are progressing at an inspirationally swift pace with my favourite project. We’re assembling an amazing team for this, and to be honest I’m staggered that they’re being as generous as they are. Last Monday we met and looked through the new design work that Keita had dropboxed – with a view to feedback on feasibilities for potential build. Tomorrow morning, we’re meeting again to explore when such a potential build might be – sooner, rather than later it seems…
After the meeting, as usual, I wrote up progress and sent it over to Namco (with a gTranslated set of minutes to Keita, who can seems to be amused by translation…) who fed back again with wholly positive and supportive comments. I need to make more detailed notes about this, as it’s the minutiae of the thing that I forget – but the optimism being shown by Namco Bandai in this is just amazing.

Anyway. Christmas.

Notes:

You know more about building playgrounds than you think you do.

Plan overdubs at least a little before recording.

Ask nicely.

Things are suddenly, rapidly coming into focus. Following the show, we spend a lot of time gathering feedback, anecdote, praise, complaint – and then try and order it into something we can learn from. More often than not, the complaints tend to be the same ones that we would levy against ourselves. This year in particular, some of the operational challenges were a bit *too* challenging – but these are of course the easiest things to fix too. These complaints are really helpful elements of audit, but I guess the things I’m find most challenging and exciting are the broader kinds of feedback

One of the biggest problems we have with the interrogation any feedback data associated with something like a festival, is the absence of data about the user themselves. GameCity this year was a number of different events, and criticism about Wednesday may be entirely irrelevant to Saturday etc.. Depending on where you stood, and who you were – this was either one of its greatest charms, or its biggest problem.

Just sitting down to start work on the planning for what might become GCV, ploughing through spreadsheets, recollections, anecdotes, reviews and trying to make some sense of it all…

Notes:

Feedback needs *much* more information on context & provider at the point of capture

Opinions mature, develop, change. Need to differentiate methodologies. Snapshots and conversations require different efforts and analysis.

A strange meeting yesterday, in which some Consultants presented their findings from an initial research exercise examining the state of Digital Inclusion in Nottingham and how it can be improved.

To begin with, they presented a context statement laying the a broad definition of Digital Inclusion / exclusion and what it could mean to the national / regional / local economy were people more engaged. Hmmm. This was all robust, if unsurprising stuff, streams of various percentages flew by causing eyebrows to raise and small amounts of breath to be inhaled sharply. Things began to get more difficult, as they usually do, when the infographics were broken out. A breathtakingly confusing diagram hurt many of us bad. Extraordinary, malformed, mis-shapen rectangles (and hexagons, stars, triangles…) circled the screen with small title text placed within them. The consultant apologised that the big arrow, which he implied would instantly decode the crazy paving of his boxes, was missing from the centre of the screen for some – probably technical – reason. I’m working really hard to understand this but it’s in vain, I’m hopelessly excluded. Writing this now, I remember that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to use the word ‘befuddled’, which Margaret used in conversation a few months ago. I’m momentarily elated to be able to do that now. I was brutally befuddled.

Having presented their feedback and observations, some of which was very supportive, some of which critical, none of which was particularly insightful – there was time for questions. My mate D, called out the lead researcher on his criticism of the social media strategies used by the Council. This rapidly escalated into a questioning of the veracity of the research itself, which the presenter roundly failed to defend. Largely it seemed, the results were coming from the ‘toolkit’. The ‘toolkit’, I believe, is some software into which the interview results were fed. The ‘toolkit’, by an undisclosed metric, then spits out its findings over which the experts ‘overlay their experience’. It’s like NHS direct but without the promise of feeling better by the end of the process.

Whilst National policy clearly drives mass-awareness of this issue and one would hope will illuminate awareness of the opportunities on a mass level, Digital Inclusion is surely a local issue, contingent on local cultures, behaviours and community groups. What was great and encouraging about the meeting was meeting lot of groups together in a room and engaged in discussing this stuff. From a festival point of view, meeting the people involved who can really help give some meaning to technology in peoples lives was incredibly helpful.

Digital Inclusion clearly and obviously makes fiscal sense from a public spend perspective, but needs to make social / cultural sense for the citizen user – some tangible translation. E-Government might be successful in reducing transaction costs for people paying their council tax, parking fines or other punitive costs – but clearly needs to amount to something richer than simply streamlining a payment process. Running up to a general election this is surely a great opportunity to engage folks – and more specifically to not just measure their engagement, but to understand and codify it – and as a result rethink what Digital Inclusion actually means. It’s not just access and education we all need to become included, it’s meaning – and through that, motivation.

Notes.

There is a toolkit somewhere.

There’s a Central Government initiative called ‘Total Place’. Liverpool is becoming one.

Someone asked for the contact address of a friend yesterday as they wanted to talk to him about his new company. After a few minutes searching I realised that I knew where his office was, and his phone number – but the only other ways I’d talked to him were in person, on Twitter and inside Facebook.

Happily, his fb chat popped up on Adium which I had on in the background, so I requisitioned his email address and forwarded it to the gentlemen in question – who had no interest in Twitter, although he might well have a Facebook profile. It simply didn’t occur to me to ask.

After I’d done that, I had some lunch.

I might email the bloke and ask how they got on. I have all his contact details on the card he gave me when we first met at an event I was talking at. I hope they manage to talk to each other.