NotCon

The best way I can describe NotCon is as a one-day informal convention on grass-roots computing technology and activism.

soubrette informed me on Friday that we knew one of the speakers and wanted to know if I was interested in going. I did have some other things to do and previous information about it hadn't grabbed my attention. However, the latest NTK gave more information and I found I knew not one but two of the speakers (Simon Cozens and slovakia) and there were various other speakers and topics that sounded interesting. So we ended up getting up amazingly early on a Sunday (well, 8:30) and heading into London to see and hear all this. We met up with dave_t_lurker along the way.

I could go into details but it's probably best if I describe and link to what I found most interesting. Suffice to say that a lot of it was very interesting!

General information

• Offical site
• Pictures (not very good but they show the venue reasonably well).
• SubEthaEdit notes on the sessions

The sessions

• OpenGuides is a Wiki variant for creating city guides
• Urban Tapestries is an experimental service for annotating places in the real world
• Will Davies talked about the downside of social networking
• Brewster Kahle of archive.org spoke about its work including software archiving (for which they now have an exemption from DMCA anti-circumvention provisions) and Internet Bookmobile, which enables printing and binding books anywhere on demand for about 1 cent per page, and their partnership with the new library of Alexandria
• AudioScrobbler is an audio recommendation system which works with a plugin for your music player to find out what you actually like listening to rather than asking you to rate things.
• Simon Cozens talked about how easy it was to knock up a piece of social networking software, the real point being that this was made possible by his Maypole framework. Sadly he was probably in the wrong place.
• Richard Holmes of the BBC spoke about the Island Blogging experiment with blogging among a small community.
• The group of people behind FaxYourMP launched They Work For You, a new service that adds hyperlinks to Hansard and combines it with other sources of information to help you find out what your MP is or isn't doing in Parliament.