The Detail Department

You are here: Home / Archives for be2camp

Slidesharing

by

Just a blog post to document some presentations I gave recently at Be2camp in London. The first one was on Enterprise 2.0 – it’s about the People, not the Technology – this is based on my previous blog post and it’s also a presentation I did at the BarCamp Sydney 3. Similarly to the presentation at BarCamp, this one was rushed and not presented well, but unfortunately this one has Video too 🙁

The second one was much more fun – it was a Pecha Kucha session at Be2camp and it was about what bought me to being in London – about My Architecture Inspired Travels. Again there is video for this one too. Pecha Kucha sessions are meant to be 20 slides of 20 seconds duration, my slide deck was close to 40 slides and I hope I got it done near to the 6mins 40 seconds. 

I had prepared a third presentation – a case study about the use of RFID tags on a construction site, but that can wait for another day.

I need to do a blog post about how fantastic Be2Camp was as an event, but that will be a bit later.

Live Blogging Tools

by

I’m researching how we will be doing Live Blogging for Be2Camp coming up in London in October so I did a bit of hunting around for tools.

This may be a bit ambitious but this is what we want to do:

  • Have people participate live in the room and have a twitter backchannel (hopefully up on the screen)
  • Have people participate virtually via streaming video and live blogging and be able to contribute to the discussions
  • Have people participate virtually via SecondLife and be able to contribute and have discussions
  • Have people present to all audiences from SecondLife
  • Maybe have people present to all audiences from the web (we haven’t had a specific request for this yet, but it would be good to offer it).

So here is some of the products and services I found.

Live Blogging

  • CoverItLive – this one looks really good and really polished – and it can go on our website and it can have multiple people commenting . Not sure if you have to log in to comment however.
  • Tangler is an Aussie Startup from here in Sydney and they have quite a mature product, but it’s a pain that you have to log in. Here is a look at a Tangler discussion embedded in a website

However, one advantage of twitter is that people can join in the discussion via text (CoverItLive has a mobile site), so I think it’s still good to have a twitter back channel and to promote upcoming sessions on twitter (and maybe via CoverItLive also).
For the twitter feed Hashtags is great as you need to opt in, and it tracks private accounts like mine but it doesn’t work at the moment due to issues with the Twitter API, so I’m not sure if it will work for us. Of course you can follow any hashtag or word via Summize (aka search.twitter.com) but for me that is useless as there is no way for me to join in as it does not track private accounts (I would love a twitter escape code that if this character was in the tweet then that tweet will join the main twitter stream).

One simple way would be to just show the @be2camp twitter stream up on a screen with an auto refresh using TwitRefresh and people just reply to @be2camp to join in the discussion – but, Like CoverItLive this requires someone to drive it, so not sure if it’s worth having both, but as this unconference was born from twitter, it would be a shame to not use twitter as part of the event.

Video

  • One of our unorganisers mentioned on twitter a few days ago that she successfully managed to import Veodia video into Second Life – this is great. See it in action here http://www.veodia.com/solutions_sl.html
  • Video updates from Mobile phones or camera’s on laptops can be done via Qik and 12 Seconds and both will autopost a link to twitter.
  • Live streaming can be done via UStream it works quite well and there is Mogulus which is much more polished and can be embedded on your site – but it also looks like it’s much more work than just set and forget.

Ustream is interesting – here is a link to a previous 2 web crew podcast that was recorded live and had a chat in Tangler and Ustream at the same time – it was a bit of a test and it’s a pain to log into either Tangler or Ustream or both, but if people are keen to contribute it works.

Suggestions

So right now my suggestion would be to use CoverItLive for text and hopefully Veodia can be used for both Live Streaming into SecondLife plus onto the website… it would be good if we can get a page with both of them together on one page for people not at the event and a page with just the text for people at the event.

Does anyone else have any ideas for Live Blogging and Live Streaming from our event?

Be2Camp is Confirmed

by

Thanks to the Be2Camp unorganisers, the date and venue for the Be2Camp is now confirmed. It is now on Friday October 10 at the London Building Centre.

Be2Camp is an unconference about the use of Web 2.0 tools in the Built Environment industries such as Architecture, Construction and Engineering. With a bit of Sustainability and Virtual Worlds stuff (eg building in Second Life) stuff thrown in.

We also now have a new Website at http://be2camp.ning.com. So now we need Sponsors, and Agenda, Speakers etc… lots of work to do in the 2 months we have left to go…

I’m very exited about this and even though I will be very jetlaged as it is the day after I get to London, I would like to present on some topic around this subject.

Please come and join our Ning site and come to the Unconference when it’s on. We are even hoping to have virtual participation at the conference, so you don’t even have to be in London.

be2camp coming up in London in October, hopefully

by

I’m really excited about the possibility of going to be2camp in London in October. It’s only an idea at this stage, but I would love to see it happen and it would be even better if it can happen whilst I’m in London as I would love to be involved and even speak at this event.

Be2camp is about Web 2.0 in the Built Environment, that is using the latest internet tools and technologies for the construction (and related) industries. I have posted here previously about Enterprise 2.0 (using Web 2.0 technologies behind the corporate firewall) and how it’s about the people not the technology, and I’ve also posted here previously about ProjectCentre, the internet based construction collaboration software that I work on. I believe all construction collaboration tools are by their very nature, web 2.0 tools.

Unconferences such as this are great and are about getting the community involved and talking (and a lot of drinking too) and sharing ideas. The construction industry needs to start getting an handle on this Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 stuff and as my background is in both Construction and IT and I’m passionate about all things Web 2.0 this is a fantastic melding of everything I do.

Educating the construction industry about the new ways of working on the internet (or even just using computers) is a big task but we have to do it otherwise the industry will be left behind. The days of a fax machine and a mobile phone being the main technology in the site office are long gone. However, in Australia we are still just struggling with the basics of getting a decent broadband connection on site, especially in regional areas. Then there is educating people that when you are uploading or downloading 100’s of drawing’s it’s not cool to also be listening to streaming radio or watching YouTube on a max 512k down / 128k up connection, whilst 6 other people in the site office are trying to work too. (Sorry, I could go on about this stuff for a while).

So it’s going to be an interesting ride ahead, and it’s something that I am very passionate about and I’m going to start hassling a few of my excellent geek friends over the coming weeks to get some great stuff together for a presentation at be2camp. And I hope I will blog about it a bit more over the coming weeks too.