Stardust Memories October 4, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, London , 2commentsStardust memories is the name of a 1980 Woody Allen film which I had forgotten all about, but the name kept occurring to me on a subconscious level as an echo to seeing the posters for “Stardust“.
Warning: This is a rambling account of my activities yesterday, with no particular purpose other than to blog for the sake of recording events and thoughts. I spent most of yesterday in central London starting out with a Creative Coffee Club meeting at Foyle’s bookshop, which was a drift in and out kind of gathering where I met several people for the first time including Toby Moores, Sue Thomas and Karyn Romesys. We discussed the nature of creativity, the role of peer group meeting venues for random philosophical discourse during periods of historical change, online community and social networks, use of real names, intellectual property and the ownership by celebrities both dead and alive of their own image amongst other things. I’ll go again.
The afternoon I had designated for photography, with a mission to capture buildings and phenomena of the West End for a future website. A pleasant little task I imagined, strolling about taking pictures but it turned out to be much harder work than I thought. By “hard work” I just mean physically active, akin to walking up and down stairs within an old school building or supporting a roomful of people seated with technology. You can get a strange feeling at the end of the day called “tired” which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on the internet.
Back to the old London buildings. Most places need to be photographed from the other side of the street or even further back if possible. This means a lot of walking back and fore, crossing busy roads, trying various angles and waiting for gaps in the traffic, both motorised and pedestrian. I took more than a few shots of a glorious facade obscured by double decker bus until I had practiced the art of keeping both eyes open while looking through the viewfinder.
Talking of viewfinders, I’ve been looking for a replacement compact camera, the type that fits easily in a shirt pocket, and I get the impression that many of them these days don’t have a viewfinder, only the LCD screen. That’s no use to me. I can’t make out the details of an image on such screens in daylight let alone sunshine, and anyway, I like to feel the camera up against my nose, not suspended in mid air.
In another capacity I took the opportunity to look in on The Harp and was pleased to see Ross-On-Wye perry being stocked.
In Leicester Square, there were crowd barriers being erected between the theatre tickets booth and the Odeon cinema.
People were assembling, hanging about by the barriers and looking in, giving the appearance of spectators watching three Westminster Council road sweepers tidying up the ground. Some had large cameras and big bags so then it dawned that they must be papparazi waiting for an event. A glance around confirmed loads of posters for “Stardust” a new film which I surmised must be having a premiere in Leicester Square. That’s where they have them. Probably they were staking claims on the best vantage points from which to get a shot of Robert DeNiro a few hours later, as he steps from a taxi into the Odeon.
Maybe he was due to grant a TV interview outside, amongst the little tropical islands which lined a green carpet walkway, as a kind of temporary film set, leading nowhere. The most serious papparazi had bagged the line immediately outside the cinema and brought those little lightweight stepladders with them, in order to be three feet taller than everybody else, except when they all have them.
After traipsing around The West end for hours I was in need of a sit down and was lucky enough to find a seat upstairs in The Cove, above the pasty shop in Covent Garden, with half a pint of lovely Cornish Knocker, brewed in Newham, Truro. The pub above the pasty shop can get very busy at weekends but at 4.00pm on a weekday it was quiet and restful, so that was another thing I could appreciate about my new flexible lifestyle 
At six O’clock it was time to make my way to Baker Street for London Wiki Wednesday. This month’s host was ?WhatIf! an innovation company, with a bright and youthful atmosphere compared with some of the corporate hosts we are more used to. The hosts made a presentation using card storyboards rather than powerpoint live slides, and asked for suggestions about the usual issue - how to improve take-up and participation. Discussion this month took a turn more towards Wikipedia, with it’s growing control culture and victims. “It’s getting more nasty” said Gordon. Another told of how he fought Wikipedia and won, and an update on yellowikis - since “Yell Ltd” owns the colour yellow the wiki can be accessed from anywhere in the world except the UK, apparently. I’m not sure how that works, doesn’t it make our internet a bit like China? And they’re moving to Wikia.
I transferred 197 pictures from my camera when I got home and began processing some but it was too much to get through in one batch late at night, so will have to be interweaved with other tasks as the week continues. Looking up the news, I find out that DeNiro wasn’t there. They must have been waiting for Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller and Charlie Cox, the other stars of Stardust. The BBC couldn’t have been there either, otherwise surely they would have noticed that the red carpet was a green one.
Combining Wikis and forums August 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, Wiki , 3commentsZbigniew from Wiki Wednesday has some interesting ideas about combining wikis and forums. A bit mad 
, but very interesting!
In Brudnopis: Wikis and fora - other ideas
For example, the suggestion to allow some wiki functionality in the middle of threaded discussions, which to me seems like a license to rewrite history, except that there would be revision control over the various versions of a conversation.
- ‘overwrite’ a part of the conversation with a summary that would be a wiki page, editable by all the participants in the overwritten part of the conversation with the expectation that it will contain a consensus between them on what was written, the overwritten text could be available behind a link
I don’t warm to the prospect of ever having to take part in such a consensus, in fact I’m strangely attached to the notion of leaving archived conversations to stand where they took place but it strikes me this technique could become a useful part of the workflow in a close working team or managed community.
July 4th Wiki Wednesday July 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, wikiwed, London, COP , add a commentAnother London Wiki Wednesday last night, and a good one too. This time hosted by Bearing Point in Paternoster Square.
Tiddlywiki was on show again, this time with a quick prototype of an app for setting up VOIP connections in the form of “speedgeeking” which was chaotic as intended.
I spoke on ‘the importance of theory’ briefly relating Communities of Practice and Social Objects theories to the online landscape and wikis. No slides or pitches, just conversation really.
Steve Coast put on a great presentation explaining the rationale behind wiki.openstreetmap.org
“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.”
PS regarding the date, I was amazed to see that a group on Facebook called
“Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America”
has 88,057 members!
WikiWednesdayWiki Patterns February 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, distributed research, Wiki , 3commentsVia Enterprise irregulars, Wikipatterns.com
This was quite an exciting discovery, a group of people trying to put together a pattern language about wiki adoption. This is quite similar in many ways to what I have been developing on the DARwiki’s wiki facilitation page, which gets referred to by some bloggers. Wikipatterns.com launches with a group of people already involved, so I’ll join them and see what I can contribute. My initial thoughts are slightly troubled by the idea that the patterns may be applicable in some contexts but not in others, in particular the difference between enterprise wikis and public ones. Can the two quite different endeavors be described within the same pattern language ? We shall see. There’s another paradox in using a wiki engine which appears to encourage thread-mode, which is listed there as one of the anti-patterns. But at least these kind of contradictions stand a better chance of being negotiated on a wiki than anywhere else.
Wiki Wednesday and Forest Friday February 19, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, wikiwed, folksonomy, online facilitation, Music, London , add a commentI’ve got two evening appointments to write about this week. London Wiki Wednesday is the first since last March, when I spoke about my online exhibition and barn raising.
It’s at 29/30 Fitzroy Square, in the shadow of the BT Tower - nearest tube Warren Street. The format for the evening is this: lots of speakers get 5 minutes each, a short time for networking and some food and wine. For my turn, I shall be talking about Wiki Facilitation, Taxonomy development from Folksonomy tagging and then introduce the concepts behind pajamanation.
Then on Friday I’m down on the list of performers for the monthly Forest Roots club in Forest Gate, East London.
I’ll probably sing my latest song, “The Wreckers Prayer” and one other. Not Gernika though, that would take up the entire slot by itself and is better saved for April.
London Wiki Wednesday March 5, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, London, Action Research , comments closed
From John Barben’s blog I was notified of a date change and at short notice I’ve decided to go along to Wiki Wednesday in London on the 8th March where I’ll be briefly presenting some of my research, listening to a bunch of clever people talking about social software, wikis and web2.0 stuff, and maybe gaining support for my online exhibition ( opening March 8th) and DARwiki barn raising ( March 10th-15th) as well. Should be fun. So at a very late stage in the research cycle proceedings, it looks like I shall be able to do some sort of face-2-face presentation to a relevant audience after all. Funny the way things pan out.
Technorati Tags: wikiwed, distributedactionresearch, onlineexhibition, wiki, London, londonmeetups, barnraising,
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
