Episode: 864
Title: HPR0864: Opentech Conference 2011: Glen Mehn, SI Camp
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0864/hpr0864.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:44:23

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The Fault Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio in this episode, Open Tech and Social
Innovation Can.
Hello World, and welcome to the Fault Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
With Mr. Les Pounder, Good evening Les, Good evening, brief hesitation while I switch gear
and short what number are we up to? I'm glad you know.
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.
The entire subject of this side pod is your report back from the front line, the Open
Tech Conference, which was actually quite a while ago. Now, when was it 26th of May?
21st of May. 21st of May. I've not even got the date right, brilliant. Tell us how did
it go? How was the day? It was a fantastic day. It was extremely busy. I mean, we're
lucky to have such a massive venue, which was the University of London Union Building.
Massive building, lots of people there. It was a really hot day in London and just some
great talks were going on. I mean, there was talks going on from all various subjects.
I mean, going from some crazy subjects, such as the Dockbott team, building robots out
of mishmatched pieces of technology, all the way to people talk about digital cities
and open data. It was just a massive event and it was lots for everyone. Very good. So what
was the turnout like? Was it as busy as predicted? I believe so, yeah. I know it was busy at
the bar when I went left. I wish I could have been there. I was actually in London that
day working on something for Ford and we were dragging ourselves around the city of
London from place to place in the heat with all the helicopters, barracks, Marine One helicopter
when flying past over St Paul's at one stage at lunchtime. And I thought, yes, you've
probably broken for lunch and you're sitting in the Union bar somewhere. Yeah, you'd be
right, yeah. And it was a very hot day that day. Oh, very hot. So you've mentioned Dockbott
and digital cities, any highlights of any particular talks.
A gentleman called Jagan, a can't remember his surname, but he did a fantastic talk called
Din is Noise. That's D-I-N is Noise and it's basically a way to mix Morse code into electronic
music. So all the dots and the dashes for the Morse code is fed through this open source
program and then you can alter the waveform slightly to produce some really ethereal noises.
It was fantastic, but you could also translate so you could type in words and it could translate
the words into Morse code, then play it as music and you can mess around with it. His choice
of words on the day shall we say was eclectic and is not for repeat on this podcast.
Okay, but it was very funny talk. It was taking it a serious subject and just making it
very funny so everyone was engaged and listening to it a great talk. There's another one as
well. A gentleman called Terence Eden who's a specialist in the quick response code,
the QR code, so you see dotted around and he was really telling us how to use QR code
effectively in different types of media. So for printed posters such as bush shelters,
that sort of thing. So you can donate to a good cause just by taking a picture of this
QR code all the way to train timetables or how to actually, it didn't do it maliciously,
but how to use a QR code maliciously if you wanted to. So he's showing you the pitfalls
of these codes, which was printed. It is surprising. With these codes, you could, if you wanted
to basically create a way of texting a number, which would then charge to the person's
bank account, so the person's phone bill, a certain amount of money, like you see these
texts, you know, text 100 to this number and you'll donate a pound. So it was scary
what you can do, but it was also fascinating what you could do with these QR codes.
It's like any piece of technology, I guess. Every leap forward has its dark side and I think
we're, I'm surprised we haven't had more bad news about QR codes and their misuse already,
but I'm guessing that as soon as the scammers and the criminals latch onto this and watch out
for their headlines.
You've got three interviews as a result of various people that you spoke to, one which was
recorded on the day. That's right. Yeah. That was speaking to Glenn Maine from the social
innovation camp. Basically, social innovation camp is a way of designing applications for
social aspects. So rather than designing the graphic design application for, I want to
create a Twitter app. It's using data that's out there in the cloud, in the internet, where
we want to come from for a social task, such as helping people who are lonely, using application
that can find friends to talk to, or using data to find whereabouts is my nearest chemist,
that sort of thing. It's just 48 hour events, building applications to tackle social problems,
really interesting stuff. I mean, the guy was extremely clever in how he was describing the
subject matter. It was things that never even fought off before in how to use applications.
So it is a really good project, what they do. And I think you demonstrated the patience
of a saint because although it was only a very short interview, people may, like me, get slightly
wound up by the lady in the background, having her mobile phone conversation completely oblivious
of the fact that there were other people in the building. I think if it had been me, I might
well have stood up at one point and told her to f*** off. I was very tempted to do that,
in the fact that I made it very clear that we were there recording by pointing to the mic while
she was looking at me, but I don't think she got the hint slightly. Clearly not. Anyway, I'm glad
that her conversation can be broadcast to the listeners and they can listen to what's going on.
I think it was a bit of a conversation with the husband. Yes, very domestic mundane stuff,
fortunately. We'll try not to let that distract us from what Glenn was saying and it's a quite
a short but focused conversation, so we'll play that in and see you on the other side.
Full Circle Interview
Okay, here I am at OpenTech 2011 with Glenn May from SciCamp. Social Innovation Camp.
So tell me about Social Innovation Camp, what is it? Yep, we bring together kind of technical
people, so designers and developers, together into the same room with people who understand
social problems. We spend quite a lot of time sourcing ideas over about an eight-week period and
then we bring them together for a hack weekend with the idea that it's usually just six teams
of the hack weekend and it's with the idea of actually building, not just doing an interesting
project for the weekend, but building a sustainable social venture, something. So something using
the web, mobile phones, internet of things, we're very, very excited about the potential of kind of 3D
printing and so many things to kind of use the internet to address social issues.
Have you got any examples that we could see on the web now?
Yeah, definitely. So we've been running for about three and a half years, we've run four social
innovation camps that's far. So one of our groups is called My Belize and they are,
currently they were the winners of Sexual Innovation Camp in 2009, they're MyPolice.org
and they are currently piloting with Taze Eye Police stuff in Scotland and they are essentially
a third party feedback system for the police, so it's a space where the public and the police
can have a constructive conversation about experiences with a positive or negative,
and they also manage to then also gather aggregate data that the police service can use to
improve their policing powers. So it's a data stream one way from the police or is it from the
users creating something using? It's by directionals, so it's a place where an open conversation happens
between essentially the public and the police. So what data you get from places is open data
that's free available to anyone to use? I actually, because we're essentially the enablers,
so we do kind of mentorship and things. I don't actually have tremendously detailed information
about kind of all of, we have about 13 social ventures that have started up based on,
you know, we've come through one or more of our programs. Another one of our successful programs
is this guy called Will Brain, who started a thing called working title is Homeless SMS,
and he had looked and seen how SMS was being used pretty heavily in the developed world,
and there was a lot of, in the developing world, with projects like Ushahidi in front line SMS.
What he was noticing was that that hadn't really come yet to the developed world,
and he and had a friend who had experienced homelessness. So he began, he's in the middle of
working out how he can try to deliver services and information kind of to homeless people,
people that sleep rough here in the UK. So you've got quite a wide range there,
don't you, of the products or applications that are built out of these camps. It isn't just
the standards, oh, it's a Twitter feed that does X. It's something actually helps someone in a
social capacity. Everything that comes through our caps has to address a social issue,
and we do, sometimes we pick themes that we think are interesting, but we wouldn't pick, say,
open data as a theme, but we, you know, we might pick something like, well, we did a,
we did a whole social innovation camp last year, in 2010 here at London, on reducing youth
offending. We're doing one in Scotland, and one of the themes, the film that's in Scotland,
this June is kind of social isolation, it's kind of chronic loneliness, which is actually
very serious mental and actually physical disabilities, and we've got some tremendous physical
effects, and we've got some really, really interesting ideas. I'm still processing and getting
to put up on the website there at SiCamp.org. We're about, so I can't tell. I mean, I'm in the North
West of England, I haven't seen one there yet, so, we've not done one there yet. So we've been pretty,
we've just been doing it for kind of the last three years, three and a half years,
and we've got down now, this year, we're trying to kind of regularize it and get a bit of,
get a bit of kind of core funding in, and so the intention is to have run two rounds of SiCamp
each year, so one will be in London, and then one will be somewhere else in the UK.
So that, so we've done one in Glasgow before, we're doing one in Edinburgh, we're hoping,
I think, well, I've had some very, very early discussions with some guys at Manchester City Council,
about coming to Manchester next year, and I think that's a really interesting space to go,
particularly with the, it's the event that's just finished there.
I think of as South West for Manchester, it's, what is it? Future City, future, everything, that's it.
Well, it will be good if we get some of that missing Manchester. There are now a lot more events
in Manchester used to be. It was... It's a great time, we're very, we're very interested, I think,
to, it's a very higher list for the next, for one of the kind of upcoming camps. The only thing is
that we, when we do it, it takes about four months to run one of these, so we, we spend an awful
lot of time, and I've literally just been eight weeks, I've been up and back to Scotland, and
Scotland's five-large cities all the other times, just meeting people and talk to people, and
finding out, you know, finding out who's, who's there, and trying to meet interesting people,
to come up with interesting ideas. So how is it people can get in contact with you to actually
get into this and do something with you? Yeah, you can definitely, you can sign up on our
mailing list, which is you just email, subscribe at SI Campedork, you can look on the website,
there's a blog, you can follow the blog, follow us on Twitter, we're at SI Camp, and we will be
launching, there's a page, it's linked off the, in the top left-hand corner of our website, there's
a page that's, that's, that's all about the, the, the sort of next upcoming event, so which,
in, in, in, in as soon as the Edinburgh event on the 17th to 19th of June, and we'll be, we, we,
we'll be posting a sort of call to volunteers shortly. We normally get about, for, for the six
ideas, we normally get about 100 people at the weekend. One of the things that we're really
interested, that, that we've had really good luck with in the past, is actually getting, when we get,
getting developers, not just getting, you know, if you put five room in Rails developers in a room,
that's great, but if you put five room in Rails developers in a room, who know how to work
together, who've already worked together, so they know that they want to use a version or a CVS
or whatever it is, you know, that, that just buys them four hours, and, and since they build,
kind of a proof of concept in 48, in less than 48 hours, it's actually very important that they,
and they've learned how to work together very, very quickly. Very true.
And well, thank you very much. Thanks very much for having me.
And so that was Glen Main from the social innovation camp, really, really good,
intelligent, focused guy. He has, I mean, as you heard in the piece, he was actually in Scotland,
previously, working on, another event he's working on, a social innovation camp in Scotland,
which has come and gone now, who's in June, I do believe, and they had lots of ideas submitted
at that event. And the first one I found is an application called 10,000 Conversations,
and this is an application which is there to tackle social isolation. Basically, what the app
does, it identifies local people, you may be interested in a conversation with, and then puts you
up to meet them online. So that's great. I mean, it's, it's a way of these people of reaching out,
someone's taught someone about a problem that they've got, and it's all been made possible by
this 48 hour sprint. I just hope it's better than ChatRulet. I'm proud to say I'm never used
ChatRulet.
Feedback. You can post comments and feedback on the podcast page at fullcirclemagazine.org
forward slash podcast. Send us a comment to podcast at fullcirclemagazine.org. You can also send us
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Comments and audio may be edited for length. Please remember this is a family friendly show.
So that's one interview down, two to go on our open tech debrief on the full circle podcast.
Our thanks to Les Pounder. We'll see you next time on Hacker Public Radio. I'm Robin
Kathleen. Good bye for now.
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