IPO: Sean Dennehey for Comptroller

Yorkshire wants Sean Dennehey to be the next Comptroller and Chief Executive of the Intellectual Property Office. He is already interim comptroller and we want him to keep the job.

If you agree:

• read my article in IP/IT Update

lobby Lammy and your MP

support our campaign on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and every other social networking site using the #sean4comptroller hashtag.

Ian Green's Comments on BarCampBradford

Ian Green of Green Communications inspired, piloted and managed BarCampBradford and much if not most of the credit for the success of the day belongs to him.

Ian is a PR wiz who has done marvelous things for some of the biggest companies and institutions in the country as well as individual inventors, start-ups and SME. His clients seem to include a lot of law firms some of whom I know very well. He is a very good speaker and blogger and everything he writes is worth reading.

His latest blog post is "We did a BarCamp" and I commend it to you.

Another Blogger's View of BarCamp

I arrived at the WOW Academy at lunch time and so missed the morning's presentations. Charlotte Britton was there though and you can read her appreciation at "Charlotte Britton: Reflections on BarCampBradford".

BarCampBradford Update

I have just discovered that the presenters of the excellent session on Second Life were David Batty and Rebecca Barker. Rebecca's website is at http://rebeccap.co.uk/. David has a link to Second Life at http://bit.ly/1SnVBh. His website is at http://www.davidbatty.com/

One of the most useful presentations that I have ever heard - not just at BarCamp but ever - was Ian Smith's talk on Rethinking the Presentation http://bit.ly/77h5G.

There are some really good pictures of the event on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/greensontour/sets/72157622808510230/

There is a photo of the list of the talks at http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2660/4104806795_6b5e1ba158_o.jpg

Also a picture of the delicious cup cakes which we devoured at the WOW Academy http://tweetphoto.com/c526b2

Anybody who subscribes to twitter can find these and many other links and comments by entering the #bcbradford hash tag.

A wonderful day and many thanks to all who made it possible, particularly Steve Ding and Ian Green.

BarCampBradford

Yesterday I attended and spoke at BarCampBradford which took place at the WOW Academy and the National Media Museum. These are two of many world class institutions in Bradford which very few other towns in the United Kingdom can match.

A BarCamp has nothing to do with the Bar (in any sense of the word) and is not really a camp. The best summary of the concept that I have found is the one that appears in Wikipedia:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences (or unconferences) - open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. The format has also been used for a variety of other topics, including public transit, health care, and political organizing.

The advanced list of presentations included the following:

• Google's hidden gems by John McLear - Primary Technology and Welcome3's MD exposes some of googles hidden gems including Android, CSE, Analytics, SSO, Adwords & Adsense.
• Twitter for Business - the dos and donts of Twitter and how it can make or damage a brand's reputation - Ian Green
• How a small local team of individuals are trying to find new ways of bringing social history to life - and aiming to change attitudes to open data along the way. (Jon Eland
• Rethinking the Presentation - how to not kill people with Powerpoint. - Ian Smith
• iPhone Application Development - Things I've learned from making my Zombies game - Matt West
• Setting up an ecommerce business & use of social media, blogs, Twitter, Facebook... - Chris Wildman
• TBC - Alistair MacDonald
• A Decade of WebDesign - Tracking trends in design - Monica Tailor
• Retro Gaming - A session, round-table, discussion, demos of retro games and retro tech - Mohsin Ali & Pawel Dubiel
• The 'Civic App Store' - Round-table around OpenCities, OpenData, Cities as Operating Systems, Streets as Platforms, Unique AR useage & Mobile apps for cities - Mohsin Ali
• Version Control - An introduction to how we use it to develop large CMS projects - Panoetic
• Legal Challenges of Web 2.0 - Will cover such issues as ownership of copyright and other intellectual property in user generated content, liability for user generated content, privacy, dispute resolution and much more - Jane Lambert
• Internet marketing workshop - want more website visitors? Conversion/sales/downloads? Reputation? Round table IM problem solving with John Allsopp
• Drupal For Good - presentation on how Gentlehost are using Drupal for Social Change, then it's over to you for discussing ways in which Drupal can be used for good - Alice Kærast
• How to sell yourself better at interview - we've interviewed somewhere in the region of 50-60 developers this year, and only hired two. What we've learned in this process - Adam Hepton
• User experience in .net magazine December 2009 - a response on a couple of articles in the latest issue: interview with Brian Kalma from Zappos, and article by Craig Grannell on 'Master user experience design' - Keith Doyle (Usability Analyst)
• Making a Game! - A presentation on the process of game making and the various markets. (Simon Barratt - hoping he'll be able to get by just working from his bullet points!)
• Get rich with Free Software - Free Software, what it is, how it works and how you can get fat rich with it. John Leach

With 5 presentations at any one time campers had to be selective. Of the published presentations I attended John Leach's talk on Free Software and Ian Smith's on presentations. But there were so many more announced only on the day such as Alex Wolf's talk on 101 tasks in 1,001 days which revealed a really useful time management tool and a fascinating introduction to Second Life by a speaker from Lancashire whose name I wish I had caught. All the discussions were excellent.

I spoke on the law: "The Legal Challenges to Web 2.0" which I presented from SlideShare itself as there was a shortage of screens in the museum, That no doubt explains the rather flattering email that I received from SlideShare just before my presentation:

"Legal Issues of Web 2.0" is being tweeted more than any other document on SlideShare right now. So we've put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the "Hot on Twitter" section).
Well done, you!
- SlideShare Team

I suspect that says rather more about the number of people on twitter who tweet about SlideShare presentations at any one time than the quality of my slides but it was sweet of them to send it.

Best of all were the people I met yesterday from all walks of life such as well as the chance to renew catch up with plenty of old acquaintances. I do hope this event is repeated.