Dev8D

Dave and I are now back from Dev8D which was awesome, inspiring and exhausting. We asked the delegates to capture some of the outputs from the event on a wiki page and as you can see, the ideas had and projects started is pretty impressive. The wiki (plus some emotional blackmail on my part to make people update it) seemed to work pretty well.

The semantic nature of the wiki was not as successful as we hoped, but it did make it possible to pull out information on talks and things. We had real trouble working out how to link the programme data URIs to the wiki nodes. It got tricky when things moved around. In retrospect I would recommend making ID’s for programme sessions by day/timeslot and nodes on the wiki by content, eg. “Python_Lab”.

The community used the program data to produce a few fun tools before the event.

• Programme as ‘Only Connect’ wall (Rd palmer)
• Programme as Hypertree (Mikeb)
• Programme as Interactive Floor Plan (Marxjohnson) – Click on a room to see the programme and latest tweet!

I also realised that given the semantic data in the wiki I could add to the frontpage a “on now” for each location, and a current talk/next talk for the lightning talks room. It doesn’t work now as the event is over. But feel free to steal ideas from our rather scary semantic mediawiki templates.

@samscam asked me to add Lat/Long data to the programme per location (he had already worked them out) which was easy enough and @agdturner asked me to add geohashes, which were easy when I found a PHP lat/long to geohash library. They are quite interesting. A single value which describes a location on earth, the more characters the higher the resolution. Two locations with the same first 8 characters are near each other to a certain tolerance.

Anyhow that gave me an idea… (see next post)