I went to four talks on four very topics, which is perhaps a little surprising considering the focus of the day: Non Profits and Tech engagement

Social Monitoring

This was a two part talk with the focus being on monitoring information within social media. This could take the form of following discussion on a topic relevant to a charity’s engagement, or could equally be applied to monitoring a brand activity. I noted two tools in the first half which I thought could be of use. The first was Social Mention, which is best used for tracking social sentiment on the various social networks (Twitter, et al). The second was Board Tracker, which can be used for checking various forums for keyword mentions. There was also discussion of using the advanced mode of Google search. The second half was a brief discussion of a theoretical Twitter filter that would allow someone to summarise the important points of conversation using an quasi-AI approach. The interested parties of which broke of into a group to discuss the implementation of the project.

FLiP

This was a talk given by my boss Dave Fletcher. I was involved in the projects inception at the Jailbrake weekend hosted by Social Innovation Camp, so I was very interested to see how the project had progressed. I was pleased to hear that even after talks with various authorities and forthcoming pilot runs, the project had retained its original good ideas; to get friends to help you identify your key skills in a structured and playful format which will hopefully aid you in gaining employment. This is such a promising project and I feel really proud for even the small part that I played in its creation.

Giving What We Can

Well this talk absolutely blew me away. It was one of those ones that starts interesting and makes you chuckle and finishes with you feeling shocked at what you’ve learnt. The presenter, Toby Ord, has actually appeared in various mainstream media publications discussing his project, but as he readily pointed out, it isn’t a message designed for the 140char social conversation. I think it would be difficult for me to do him justice. This is a man who has such belief in the difference he can make to so many peoples lives that he is pledging to donate a significant portion of his income for the rest of his life. His argument is convincing and I sincerely hope you will visit his site, givingwhatwecan.org and take the time to read what he has to say.

Music, The Ultimate Non Profit

The last talk I went to was actually more for fun than engagement, but considering my rock background I really can’t be blamed This was Ben Walker of Twitter song fame discussing his life as a niche geek semi-celebrity. Fun and quirky.

All in all, I had really fun and interesting time. I will certainly be going to another Barcamp at my next chance. Barcamp Non-Profits will be coming back, perhaps in spring and probably in London next time. You can find out more by going to barcampnonprofits.com or by following them on Twitter @barcampnfp. If you get the chance make sure you go.

I’ve been keeping my head down for some time now. I’ve really been wanting to get good at what I’m doing before I start to think of other things. But I’m happy to say that recently I’m starting to ‘get it’ with many of the techs that I’m using. I know I still have sooo much to learn, but it’s a good feeling to be making progress.

Oh yeah, I use Ubuntu for both work and play now. Good times

Hmm, what else is new… I move in a couple of weeks, to a place in Headington. At the moment there are five of us living in a four bedroom house in East Oxford. It’s fun and communal and all, but I’m really looking forward to moving in with just myself and Emily. You should check her blog by the way: emilychiang.wordpress.com.

Actually, I think that’s it for now. Take care.

I got a First Class Honours BSc in Multimedia Systems and Communication, Media and Culture.

Shocked I was. Smiling, but shocked. I knew that it was mathematically possible, but I was really just aiming to get a good 2:1. Perhaps that be seen as aiming low, but I didn’t come to university to flog myself every night for a grade. Yes I wanted to do well, but what I really wanted was to spend the time thinking and learning more generally. I wanted to learn many things and being at university, in a learning environment, I could spend time discovering so many other things. For example, I developed a somewhat nasty habit of wanting to learn Linux stuff. Not just the technical system management but also how open source as an idea can be used in so many aspects of life… Anyway, the point is that I wasn’t targeting a First, my target was to do everything well, just good and solid with treats thrown in here and there and still time to live a little.

I saw the grades themselves first before I knew the final result and I knew it was looking good. Nothing was below B+ and I had a nice collection of As. I was pleased to see my dissertation had got an A, I knew the coding was pretty good but I felt my sociological investigation of open source development had been a little weak. I’d also got 100% on my final web design module, which is unheard of (I suspect the tutor may have had some explaining to do there!) so I felt good for the 2:1. I checked my percentage and saw 68.7% (the boundaries are 40%=3rd, 50%=2:2, 60%=2:1 and 70%=1st). How tantalisingly close, within 2% of a First. I did as anyone would do and promptly posted what I believed to be my result to Twitter. Feeling pleased I decided to have a look around the results pages a little when I came across the line stating your degree result, “First Class Honours”. I could do little more than point and look at my girl Emily who’d also just got her results, a 2:1 in Linguistics.

Well as it turns out, if you score four or more B+ or above in your final semester (my final year was 5 As and 3 B+s) then they lower the bar for a First to 69%. I’m guessing this is to allow for improvement over the two years. And of course we can’t have decimals points in the percentage, they need to be rounded.. up in my case. I got a First within a margin of 0.7% (they round up all)! Twitter needed an update! With exclamation marks!!!

For one thing, the narrow margin certainly means I’m not complacent in the result. I know I could have done better and probably should have done. But it certainly makes the future look a little brighter. I don’t expect prospective employers to be pulling my arm off, but when looking at future Masters I know that I will now have a greater choice. The biggest bonus though is how proud my family are, my Mum said she had a little cry. Not too bad a result for someone who left school at 16. Guess I need to hire a gown now.

Just thought I would tell you all about a new site that I’ve created for homework. It’s for an Oxford based band called Branch Immersion, a three piece acoustic outfit, some friends of mine. The site is hosted on the uni servers at the moment but I expect we’ll host it here at SkinOfStars towers soon enough once they’ve bought their domain name and I’ve ported the static pages to WordPress.

This is an original design and I must be honest, one I am very proud of. Please check it out at the temporary address (I’ll update with the final address later):

http://wwwusers.brookes.ac.uk/06021836/u75131

http://skinofstars.com/branch_immersion

http://boxfire.co.uk

I am making a news and events information filtering web application. It works like this: News and event announcements comes in one end via submission, XML feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) and possibly some kind of easy tagging widget thingy. Once they are in people get to vote on which is the best story. We have some pages for displaying the popular stories which can be customised by the user based on factors like time or category. These customised filters can then be collected in XML, like Netvibes or iGoogle or just Firefox bookmarks. I’ll probably also throw in some social networking tools as well.

The site should be going live at the start of February and will initially be targeting the Oxford area. At roughly the same time the beta code (built using Ruby on Rails) will be made available on another site with a suitable open license.

I shall post further updates through January on this very blog.

Political Situation In The UK
3000 words on the current political climate in the UK, includes social mobility from Marxist and Fiskian perspectives, political compass and Modernity via Giddens, language and power in the vein of Brodieu and power relationships in general.

Identity and Culture
3000 words looking at composition of identity by examining representative items. For this I’ll mainly be looking at sexual consumerism (bring on the Chomsky!) and post-modernity pastiche.

Next week I have two exams. One in Networks For Media which includes both wave form mathematics as well as computer networking structures. The other in Programming With Objects, which will include writing structural programming designs on paper (which will be odd).

As I’m sure you can image, I’m not going to be posting big next week either. Take care all.

Kevin

Last week was freshers week (Week 0?!) so I tried to go out and party a little. Since moving into my new house and taking some time gardening I’ve found that I wasn’t really going out, so I decided to make a bit of an effort. We were convinced that Saturday would be a big party at a student union club, Blitz. It had always been one of the best nights of the week, which left us convinced that it would be so this time with many old friends around. Guess we were the only ones who thought so. There were a few friends there, but to be honest it was only the ones we’d invited personally. Still, a fun night regardless.

Recovery from a Saturday night is easy when the sun is out. We are lucky in our new house in having a small gate from our back garden straight onto one of the largest parks in Oxford. South Park has one of the best views over the city so we had little to do than lay back, drink tea and soak in the view. An absolute treat considering the horrid weather we’ve been having of late.

And now to work.

Computer Systems – A
Multimedia IT Skills – A
Human Development and Learning – B+
Human Communication – B+
Communication in Groups – B+
Playing the Game: The Culture of Digital Games. – B
Structured Programming – C

It would seem that I’m at my best and my worst when I’m with computers, go figure.