Five points from Be2Camp Brum

It’s nearly two week since the fun day out in the Midlands that was Be2Camp Brum, the second regional incarnation at the event that encourages innovation and all things web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now?) for construction. A challenge in anyone’s language given how traditionally slow some of the industry has been in relation to new fangled stuff. But the movement and the people behind it are nothing if not eternally optimistic and upbeat (barring yours truly, who delivered a gloomy assessment of the state of journalism to finish off the day). And this time there was the added pleasure of matching real faces with Twitter portraits, particularly in the case of @robinbrittain and @earthxchange. Here’s a video snapshot report of the event, with added frenetic 90s beats:

My experience at such events is to feel a sugar surge of excitement both during and immediately after the day. Inspiration and ideas abound. Where you sometimes scratch your head is to what end all the intellectual effort and ideas can take us. In that sense it was good to hear from Rob Annable, one of the organisers of the event, who gave a concrete example of how he took an idea from the first Be2camp last year, that of using the Openstreetmap website, and subsequently incorporated it into a project he was working on.

So what did I learn? Well apart from amassing some cool links, here’s some learning point and questions:

Playing and resilience: Looking back I was most impressed by a presentation from Toby Barnes at an media agency/production firm called We Are Mudlark. A couple of points stood out: the first was his powerful case for game-playing, which his firm spends a lot of time developing. He saw the experience as one that can inspire change in a more effective way than pure policy or traditional culture. “When we play we have emotions we can’t have with culture,” he argued. His second main point was around his distinction between sustainability and resilience:

I don’t think we can make things that last forever. We can’t throw old stuff away. We need to make things and build systems that change.

Barnes stressed that this was particularly key for the public sector and recounted an experience with the MOD, who buy top quality equipment, but only every seven years. “I went there and they had seven-year old museums. It was like a museum. It shouldn’t be that way”.

Maps, maps: Aren’t they cool? They look so great, you can share information on them, add layers of data, build awesome apps etc. Look at what you can do with the aforementioned Open Street Map, Pachube, Google etc. etc. And for the industry the system developed by Earth Exchange also looks really promising. However, I remained a little sceptical about the practice. Is it just me but after you’ve tried some of these more ambitious mapping systems do you move on to the next thing? How sticky are they really? Perhaps it’s down to functionality but for me there’s a gulf between theory and practice for digital mapping.

Making technology accessible: This is an extension of my last point. I have been getting progressively more and more excited about Pachube, in the theory that goes behind the site and the scope and scale of what they are trying to achieve (the site allows people to share energy informationon devices, kit and buildings). Usman Haque, the founder and an event speaker at , is clearly a very clever man. He’s now in talking with Arup about hooking one of the firm’s buildings into Pachube, which as he said offers the ability to provide real-time post occupation evaluation. “This is post occupancy in the real world,” he said.

Where Haque lost me, and the site does as I navigate my way around, is fleshing that out. There’s tonnes of techie info and apps but not enough practical examples of what outputs they are getting, how to find them and why they are important. This is perhaps my weakness not theirs. However I do feel that in order for web 2.0 to truly bed into construction a mission to communicate what it can do is absolutely essential. Bridging the gap between theory and practice is the next stage – perhaps that’s what web 3.0 will be.

Birmingham is not shit: Not if you read this site.

I still don’t get Second Life: I’m running out of points. This point is pretty self explanatory.

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