NorthPack appears to be causing a lot of discussion lately and I for one think its a great concept. My problem is even though its branded as a website to “unite the web professionals of the north” I’m finding there is north, then there is the north!

NorthPack itself is Leeds based and spreads out from there to other nearby large cities. Problem is I’m in Newcastle and its got a long way to before its community reaches me. Whilst I’m part of the North scene as a whole (I’ve been to OpenCoffee in Leeds, Barcamps in Leeds/Manchester) I can’t exactly pop down to GeekUp for a beer and chat on an evening. We have our own meetups such as Refresh and Think and a Drink but likewise 90% of the time they will be irrelevant or impractical to people in Leeds/Manchester. What I’d like to see is further regionalisation of NorthPack. It’s the local community that makes it work but if I can’t access that community on a regular basis I’m not getting as much out of it as I’d like.

Obviously there’s nothing stopping me setting up a similar website for the Newcastle region but that defeats the object in my opinion. Whilst the cities are important its still about the North as a whole. There is a need to group together to offer the North as a place to invest and compete not just with the South but worldwide. NorthCrew has unique opportunity to dictate how this could happen. I personally don’t think making it OpenSource will be particularly useful, there needs to be some form of control and direction otherwise we’ll end up with loads of similar groups. After all surely the point is to pull all the groups together in one community not create more of them.

What I’d like to see is some form of NorthPack API or SubPack with regional teams put together to head up each major city. So I’d love to see http://newcastle.northpack.co.uk, http://manchester.northpack.co.uk etc. I think its crucial if NorthPack aims to cover the whole of the North. I don’t believe this can happen from a central website as each region is different and to a degree needs its own regional face. If I ask people who Dom is in Newcastle you will get a lot of blank faces. Each region needs its own faces that are always in that community building it up. (Not sure I want to wear the flat cap though boys!).

So if we had http://newcastle.northpack.co.uk pulling in upcoming events from NorthPack that are region specific, RSS feeds that are region specific along with a mix of the featured items from the wider region, NorthSkills that pinpoint available skills in the region. You get the idea. The opportunities for building web communities and collaborative opportunities between these communities is huge. So then guys, any chance of it happening or further discussion on CityPacks?

Jen O’Grady from DemocracyPR did a really interesting talk on how to promote yourself/your business to effectively “become famous” in your arena. 

It was a really good session as BarCamps have a tendency to get geeky and whilst we all love this, geek ideas alone don’t pay the rent or buy you the latest techno toy. There are a number of small business/freelancers who regularly turn up to barcamps, are fantastic at what they do but have no idea about how to promote themselves and get more work. 

Making yourself famous is about creating a consistent message and putting it out there in all formats and avenues be they traditional PR or ones we may be more comfortable with revolving around technology/social media. The problem I feel most freelancers/small businesses have is actually creating that message in the first place. It’s a hard thing to do and you almost need an outside influence to help you define how you what it is you are offering customers. Jen help :) 

You catch her slides over at http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferogrady/how-to-be-famous/

Ian Forrester did a very thought provoking talk on Data Portability. In this social media age it is especially relevant and the question is raised who actually owns the data on these web pages? You may think you do, but it’s not quite as straight forwards as you may think.

We all know there is bad stuff in those terms & conditions that we scroll down to the bottom of and tick but you’d be shocked what some of the sites conditions actually say they can do with the information you give them. Facebook is one of the worst culprits. Bottom line, anything you upload to their site belongs to… Facebook, their policy says they can even relicense it! Scary stuff and whilst not all sites are this controlling of information you may still not own information even if the website itself doesn’t make claim to it.

Yes, you may own your own personal information such as name, email etc. You may possibly own the pictures you upload, but what about the people in the pictures… they have ownership rights; and who owns the comments made on pictures you upload? Its an interesting and complex area which is only going to get more complicated as more as more of us upload our personal information online.

Ian argues we should take control of our information. OpenID is a great starting point and we should be able to “take our personal data” and access it anywhere regardless of platfrom. We should also have the power to remove the content from the public domain. Something Facebook users have found a little more tricky than they may have thought.

Quetchup was a site claiming to be the next great social software platform is a great example of just how careful we need to be with our data. Upon getting your web hosted email address they would access all you address book and spam all your contacts. This highlights just how careful we need to be in giving away our personal information in this social age. Really interesting an thought provoking stuff. You can find more about it on Ian’s blog at www.cubicgarden.com

Shiraz did a really good intro talk to Microformats. I’ve heard the buzz about microformats but I’d never really understood exactly what they were. 

Microformats are based upon open data and adding of pre-defined classes to html markup. I’m sure there are uses more but as an introduction this is a concept I can understand. The purpose is to provide semantic meaning to xhtml content.

Examples are hCard & hCalendar which allows you with a few handily placed xhtml classes to provide iCard & iCal files to your users so they can for example add events to their calendar. 

Microformats are clearly something to keep an eye on with Firefox 3 due to fully support them I think they are akin to what RSS feeds were 4 or 5 years ago, once they move main stream they will find a usefulness but similarly with RSS they’re not for everyone. 

Further info:

microformats.org

suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/cheatsheet/

Ashamed to say this is my first blog post of 2008! It only took until the third month of the year sitting on the 6.48am train to BarCampManchester with a bit of spare time to get me going again

So what have I been doing for the past few months? Working, lots is the short of it. A few of the projects I’ve been working on recently are:

Readiness Tools for CSIP (Department of Health)

This one has kept me busy since the back end of 2007. It finally got soft launched in February. A suite of online tools for assessing whether organisations are meeting new guidelines the application allows managers to register with the site, choose the appropriate tool and send it out via email to all those required. Respondents then fill in the online survey and the manager gets real time analytics on those responses. It’s due for a full launch this month whilst a range of additional tools are due to be added to it through-out 2008.

www.readiness-tools.com 

Future & Co

One of my collaborators in the North East is Rich Maclean of Future & Co. We spent a few weeks sorting out his new website in February. A flash based website it was my first time on ActionScript3 which I have to say was a bit of a learning curve! A few desk bashing moments later though and I’m actually getting to like the new way of doing things. 

www.futureandco.com 

The Digital Co-op 

There are 5 or 6 other projects ongoing at the moment which I’ll post about later. Other than that I’ve mainly been mulling over collaboration with fellow BarCampers Ross Brown & Jen O’Grady 

Changing trains at York so thats it for now, I’ll post more from BarCampManchester!