hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0729.txt

Episode: 729
Title: HPR0729: Syndicated Thursday: FSP Sam smith, Opentech Conference 2011
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0729/hpr0729.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:36:55

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The Fault Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio, in this episode, the Open Tech Conference.
Hello World and welcome to the Fault Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
This episode consists of our interview with Sam Smith, one of the organizers of the Open Tech Conference happening in London this May.
My co-host is Mr. Les Pounder.
The Fault Circle Podcast is the companion to Fault Circle Magazine, the independent magazine for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at www.faultcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
Fault Circle Interview
And this episode we have with us Sam Smith, who is part of the organizing team for the Open Tech Conference, which is happening 21st of May at University of London. Good evening Sam. Good evening.
What are we doing today?
It's just before a bank holiday weekend and I have a large amount of stuff today. So hopefully, while everyone else is watching the wedding tomorrow, I can make my to do this.
Probably be just longer than it was when I started. The conferences are starting to come together.
We'll talk about the conference schedule itself in a moment. Perhaps for the benefit of the listeners, you could just give us a quick thumbnail sketch of where Open Tech came from and what you're hoping to achieve out of this year's event.
2011 is the latest in a long series of events going back to the late 90s when there was a newsletter called NTK need to know which went out every Friday afternoon and had about 100%
and the ran a series of game and other technology events off the back of it in 2005 UK UG got involved to help organize it.
And that was the year that the open rights group was formed out of a session at home tech where some there was a session where is the British yet electronic frontier foundation and somebody basically from the audience.
I'd give some money to found it who else would and the rest as they say is history and it's a conference of people interested in doing things with technology that maybe it wasn't entirely designed to do but generally people who would like to make the world better.
And how long have you been involved in organizing the conference?
I joined helping organize 2005 and we took a couple of years off and I've run one in eight, nine, ten and that 2011 as well.
Each year has a very different theme which tends to be tied roughly to some of the talks.
This year the aim was to get something on travel and basically spaces so where people are.
What is it that you do in your day job and some of the other organizers?
The two organizers to whom I'm hugely indebted Anna and David who do all the really useful things that I keep forgetting to help with the program and make most of the whole thing happen.
And what is it that you do when you're not organizing the conference?
My day job is completely unrelated as a member of research group at a university doing technical stuff and has very little to do with open tech at all.
I'm just looking down schedule here at least the draft schedule because I can see there are a few slots yet to be filled and I'm guessing a few things will probably appear in that before you get to the event.
Yeah, there's the TBA which will hopefully be announced early next week which is after you hear this but it will be a great talk.
It's just like until I actually confirm I can't tell you who it is.
And there were a couple of empty two empty sessions which need things to come in because generally we get an email the week beforehand going, I'd love to do this really great talk on this thing.
And at that point it's a talk we really want and have nowhere to put it so that's what those empty gaps are for.
The thing about open tech is it's kind of three things.
The thing is that we talked about is low cost event in London on 21st of May.
It's the thing you get your tickets for UKG to August I show up in tech and that is the conference beyond that.
It's a day of great talk some all topics technical geeky and interesting relating to things in very very different and interesting ways.
And then the third thing it is is sort of a gathering of the 600 plus friends who guard that fine fine line between enthusiasm and wearing tinfoil hat.
I can't remember which of my friends said that is there how they describe open tech but I do really love the quote because that's pretty much what it is.
It's designed to be something where if you're interested in the couple of weird things you can be pretty sure that you'll show up and 60 150 people will also be interested in those.
So I dare I ask what kind of people attend the event a lot of our attendees.
These is for you to look at who attends is look at the talks and the people who attend the people who are interested in one or more topics of the talk and then people who came last year and coming back because it was interesting.
At this point we have 600 odd people plus who show up but this year we have talks on the inside story of the sciences vital campaign which was the campaign at the end of last year to not cut the science research budgets which was massively successful.
We've got talks on visualizing data from ito world who if you've seen the open street map videos of all the edits around the world which sort of flash and look pretty.
There the people who did that open street map themselves are talking the knowledge foundation talking about taking there where does my money go projects global newsworthy at the moment is sort of talks on location based services and privacy and we scheduled those before apple.
Started saving everything and sort of this talks on climate change this talks on some of the government data that's coming out things like on the organograms sounds really dull but it's the list of who works where what are the jobs in government which if you're trying to do any form of campaigning or lobbying or advocacy is information that the big lobbyists have.
But until very recently wasn't really publicly available so there's talk from the bits of the national archives that are involved involved in publishing that data and the people who come other people in the street in those things have got the one click on organizations group who have some infrastructure to let you build a legal organization without having to know lots of the legal process it talks you through it on the web and tells you that these decisions you need to make.
And it helps a small group of friends doing something make a legal organization out of it be it not profit be it for profit be whatever all the different settings are and makes that a nice smooth road rather than a dirt path full of pot holes at the end of the day.
We've got the two sessions in the main room which take 250 plus people talking about the interesting questions that a lot of people who are active in various ways like ask watching the press is all about the people who watch and knock the email some using search engine optimization for good not evil.
And the corporate project who are building a big web accessible database of every company in the world at which point you can start to do various things with that if because they have a lot of tax haven that links back to some of the anti cuts projects and some of the more political stuff and it all links together and then the where the where does my money go project came from which was asking what would seem to be an innocent question of.
What does the government spend money on which even after all the work that's happened all of the promises of new government you still can't answer and this is a bit about why and a bit about why Lisa thinks this is important and we've got Helen and then you can please state UK and a project on the law who are talking about we think that this is an important question the answers aren't there and the audience will have.
There's a lot of people who are just interested and some people who are thinking actually i'm interested in a very different but kind of similar in theoretical question and I could go off and start answering that because Lisa's enquiries got the government to release a huge amount of spending data not the bits she actually wanted but they're working on that a lot of it is talks from.
People who spent and the huge amount of time on very small things that together make a much make for more transparent world and there are a lot of other talks as well on hardware and software and meeting making musical instruments and measuring basically your entire life and a lot of other random box that make home tech what it is hardware and software and knitting I think that's our episode title right there.
And how's the attendance being is it in some ways it varies a little bit depending on what the talks are the weather and how close attention I spend I pay to the fire capacity which of course we never would never exceed.
Honestly University of London we do count everybody.
Yeah we do count everybody but it's a case of the talks are somewhere else we've added so people may just come in for the odd hours.
And given the entry fee is pretty much a Fiverr if you're a student and a Fiverr if you're anything else it's for some of the talks a Fiverr for the hour you get is a Fiverr just for an hour is incredibly good value.
Especially if it's one of the really interesting talks that you really want here and some of them will be which does make scheduling three streams of talks with around 650 people across the entire building.
It's somewhat interesting because if I get it wrong everyone gets quite cozy.
Well you're not going to please everybody all of the time.
And they will tell me about it on Twitter.
Yeah but a lot of the time the most interesting stuff happens from the floor 2008 was right at the start of the open data movement in the UK.
It had been going for many years but when it really exploded and there were some talks on that we thought they'd be great and somebody called John Sheridan from National Archives stood up from the floor and said
we announced this locking service yesterday which all things the rest of the audience saying would be nice and we like this.
You just fill in this form and we'll go and chase it for you.
This was the most wonderful thing at the conference. I have no idea what it was.
You and spends being you and if you go to YouTube look for iPod shuffle shuffle cause of the chaos and I'm not going to spoil the video but it's absolutely fantastic.
That link in the show notes.
Les I've been monopolising the questions anything you'd like to pitch in.
One thing I've heard is that students can go free of charge and it's a five on the door for everyone else.
I know when I signed up for this because I work for the government I got a free ticket as well.
Is that open to everyone who's got a government based email account?
Yes I say students in the UK because a lot of the things people are talking about would benefit from
knowing how things work internally.
If you have a good UK address it's a pretty good way of doing that.
They're pretty hard to get if you don't work for government.
Have you got many people from governments coming to the event?
I mean obviously we're not going to name drop any one big or anything but have you got any attendees who work in the government or local government?
There's about 20 UK addresses registered but looking at the list I know that a lot of people will register without using their government address
and there's about 35 UK addresses registered out of nearly 400 in total.
So it's not huge numbers but we do get occasionally some of the more techy MPs show up for a bit if there's a talk that they really want to hear
or they send sort of people who have some interest and it tends to get talked about on Twitter and pushed around a bit and people just show up and we don't particularly care where people come from.
If they come and get something out of it that's the main thing.
One of the things we actually don't usually find out about is what happened as a result of the talks or the conference.
Like open rights group we heard about it because if not wise the conference about 15 minutes after somebody has said this everybody was talking about it
but Emily James who runs the or is making the just do it documentary just hyphen do hyphen it or get UK.
She taught last year and she did a fantastic talk and the story once and tell about two months ago I tell about this was the talk was so good that she sort of said
we're looking for donations to help finish make the film and while she was changing chairs to get the next speaker set up somebody walked up and just handed her a check
what she was about to take question which is a nice story and sounds great but I got a message on Twitter about six weeks ago probably not even that
from two people at the conference call is he a Matt who were also in the audience for that talk and they've been thinking about cycling from Lanz and to Jon Agretto to Chase Spring
because they saw a tweet from Stevie Frye just a throw away tweet that said something on lines of it what takes three months to travel UK that's how long spring takes.
So they've got a project called Chasing Spring where they're making a documentary about taking three months cycle from Lanz and to Jon Agretto's and they're somewhere north and D at this point about two weeks left and you can follow their progress at Chasing Springe.co.uk
But the reason they decided to actually do this utterly insane thing is they were sitting on the audience and the name of Emily James this film is just do it and they decided to well just do it.
And it's that sort of thing that I'm sure there are three other stories like that that I'd never heard of from Ometech last year that I will find out about because they'll come and tell me about them at this point.
It's like you told me like a month ago I'd have put you on the schedule.
Sure we just wrap up with a quick reminder of when it is and where it is and we'll let you get back to finishing the organisation.
Ometech is at the University of London Union on the 21st of May. You can get your tickets in advance at UKG.org slash open tech.
And if you want to come along you probably should at least book a ticket in advance.
We usually for five capacity reasons have to close it if you're not pre-registered and it's again looking like one need to do that this year.
The schedule was also for the website at UKG.org slash open tech.
Marvelous. For those who don't know roughly where the union building is.
It's near Russell Square and there's a map on the website at UKG.org slash open tech.
Excellent there is. Well Les is going to come down and join you and we've just hatched a plot that he turns up with some audio recording equipment and will be our on the spot reporter.
Hopefully you've been volunteered so hopefully we'll get some more useful pieces when he comes back.
Best of luck for the event. Hope it all goes well. Maybe we can even do a little post-mortem after the event and you can let us know how it got on and what stunning surprises came from the floor this year.
Best of luck to everybody concerned.
Thank you. All right. Thanks very much. Cheers.
Bye.
What a nice man.
It was funny.
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