my name is mwd

Last weekend was the fourth, and my first, Over The Air – a two day event focussed on things mobile and internet and secure and so forth, held at Bletchley Park. Part conference, part hackathon, park big nerd day out, it delivered in buckets. There were a few hundred like minded people there, and it was a wonderfully relaxed and friendly atmosphere. And, for those willing, we got to camp on the lawn over night – not an opportunity that presents itself very often, and one Laura and I took advantage of :)

I must confess I only attended a few of the talk sessions, as I was quite excited by the hackathon topics, but those I did go to held my interest and were of a high quality.

• The team from O2 labs gave a good talk on one of their current projects, #blue, which looked like quite good fun – opening up the network’s SMS system via a json API. Overall I was both impressed and pleased to see a strong showing from the growing research labs at O2 – it was really good to see O2 have some people trying out disruptive things with an eye to the future.

• Andrew Betts of Assanka, one of the team behind the FT’s new web app, gave a great talk on the practicalities of publishing your mobile app as a web app, rather than a native app. Full of great tidbits that they’d learned along the way. e.g., CSS columns aren’t much use yet; careful what you put in, and indeed name, your manifest; and lots of useful tips on debugging tools like weinre and Charles Proxy.

• Adam Cohen ran an wonderful hands on session where we formed groups and built a Mindstorms robot that we controlled over bluetooth from an Android handset. Our team, consisting of Laura, James Smith, and myself had great fun with this, and we managed to rig James’s iPhone to the front to let us record video as the session descended into the inevitable robot battles :)

• Bill Thompson gave a very good ignite talk in the evening, imploring us not to build more advanced interfaces, but senses. Why put all this augmented reality on a tiny screen on a phone, which to some degree just removes you further from what you’re trying to experience – can’t we find new interfaces instead? A call to the hardware hackers out there. (Bill put it much more radically than this :)

Despite the wealth of talks, my attention was focused on the hackathon running at the weekend, and I wasn’t alone in this.

There were many different challenges set during the weekend, but I was particularly taken by the Blethcley Park Challenge put forward by PJ Evans – to find a way to replace their audio guide system using visitor’s phones. The challenge was not just to replicate the existing audio tour, try to take it beyond that – a smart phone opens up a wealth of other possibilities for guiding people around Bletchley Park: using location to deliver the appropriate content rather than users having to type in codes, real time event information, adjusting the tour to what’s open today, and so on.

As those of you who’ve followed what I’ve been doing with PlaceWhisper, this seemed like a perfect match to the kind of things I’ve been working on, and provide them with something that wouldn’t make a good hack, but also be something they could potentially deploy if they wanted. So I set about creating a custom iPhone app for Bletchley Park that would take advantage of the PlaceWhisper infrastructure to provide a series of tour trails around the park, and then add on custom bits like a front page that lets you know what’s happening that day, and an events list that tells you what’s happening for the coming month. PJ kindly provided all the people taking up the challenge with the actual audio files from the current system, so by the end of the hackathon I had a working app that would play the proper content as you followed the trails around the huts and buildings of the park.

After the talks and hacking were over there was a presentation and prize giving for the hacks – it was amazing to see the range of hacks people had come up with over the weekend, and I can recommend reading through the list of winners to get a sample of the wealth of projects that people submitted – and there were more amazing hacks than there were prizes. I was fortunate enough to win the particularly challenge I worked on, so a huge thanks to the judges!

That’s me in my utilikilt receiving my prize :)

But what an amazing weekend. It’s hard to describe just how good an event it was, and how good the atmosphere was. I suspect it’s just simpler to recommend you read PJ Evan’s blog post, which does a much better job that I could of capturing it.

At about 2pm I found myself standing and staring at what was going on around me. People were sitting on the grass, in circles, laptops open, furiously typing between bouts of laughter. Inside the mansion, people rushed about as if they had just leapt from Aristotle’s bath. Taking pause, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the closest Bletchley Park had come in over 65 years to it’s wartime purpose. Bright young things, grouped together, solving problems and relishing the challenge. You could feel the energy of the thinking.

Well put, and I think for me this is the lasting image I’ll have of the event – fantastic people working and enjoying themselves in the sunshine:

A truly excellent event, and huge well done to the people who organised and ran it. Can’t wait for next year!