BarCampLondon6: Get Google's 20% Time for Yourself

Flexible working has recently come under the spotlight — due to the change in UK law from the beginning of April, all parents with children under 17 are now able to request flexible working from their employers. Employers are only allowed to reject demands if there are “good business reasons for doing so”.

Parents often want to take time off to be with their children and to provide childcare during school holidays, but time off work is not just for looking after kids. Sometimes you might want to change the balance of your life and invest in your own ideas rather than those of a company.

This BarCampLondon session was a discussion on how you could take time for yourself, and what you would do with it once you’ve got it.

Introductions

• Ben — a computer science student on his year out working for an ISP 2 days a week with flexible hours
• Shadi — a “person of leisure”, problem solving for friends and family
• Dale — working full time on flexible hours for a large IT company
  • shifted hours to be primary caregiver when first child was born, now wondering how to adjust hours to deal with second child
• Adam — took off half a day a week when son was born; that time now used for himself since son is at school; recently thinking of moving to a full day off each week
• Melanie — working full time but dreams of finding her own project; hasn’t found a solution yet
  • disappointed with work leaking in to personal time — e.g. people working on a Sunday to be ready for Monday morning
• Anna — likes travelling; would like to have some work of her own she can take with her while she’s finding her feet in another country
• Sarah — works full time but is setting up another company based in India in her spare time

Sarah’s experience

Sarah used to work for company similar to the one she has created. It was taken over a while ago, so she decided to set up something similar but better. She had a vague acquaintance who set up the contacts in India where development costs are very low (£300 per month!). At the moment she’s working on the English translation of the work done in India in her evenings, whilst working full time at her existing job during the day. This results in her working more hours than she would normally, but she has something of her own that she’s building up.

Ben’s experience

Ben is currently a student, trying to avoid going straight into full-time work. Instead, he’s working part time to his schedule. He has quit twice from his current employer as he didn’t want to work long hours. He wants to be able to work on his own projects.

Is working part-time really less hours?

Adam takes a day off every other week and gets to take that day completely for himself. However, Shadi used to work three days a week, but found that she was working until midnight to complete her tasks — her job was tech support so she had to get the customer back online. She also occasionally received calls on her days off if she was the last person to deal with a particular situation, asking her to deal with it. Since she had commitments to be in on certain days, she found she couldn’t alter her hours to compensate for working on her days off.

Ben pointed out that Carsonified have a company-wide policy to work a four day week — the whole office is closed on Fridays.

There’s also more choice than just full time or part time: some of Dale’s colleagues work compressed hours — working more hours a day, but four days a week. They still get paid full time. Others work longer hours during term time but have school holidays off so they can do childcare. See http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029491 for more information.

Sharing responsibility

As Shadi’s experience shows, you do need a job that can be put to one side — or a company environment that promotes sharing responsibility. Agile processes such as Extreme Programming make this a central part of the culture, not just to enable people going away but to encourage greater flexibility in the whole team. Hospitals also deal with sharing responsibilities regularly, with staff coming on and off shift but providing continuous cover.

Anna wondered whether the people sharing roles needed a certain level of communication skills in order to make this working style possible. Adam agreed: his company hire developers partly according to their ability to communicate in a paired programming exercise — the ability to clearly discuss what they’re working on is at least as important as being able to solve the programming exercise.

This approach clashes with a top-down, command and control culture: employees have to be able to trust their peers and communicate without going up and down the hierarchy. You can’t share a job with someone who you fear might take on your role and replace you when you’re not around.

When you have time to yourself, what do you do with it?

Setting up a new business is risky — so it’s good to balance it with the security of an existing job. Start-ups costs for online businesses are coming down — you can rent your servers in the cloud and only pay for as much CPU and bandwidth as you use.

There are also sites such as One Click Orgs which will enable you to set up a legal entity very quickly for little cost.

Sarah’s approach shows the value of capitalising on your experience — make sure that you’ve made the contacts and make sure that you build on them.

Involving other people

If you need to involve other people in your new venture, you have to balance their commitment with their involvement: if they’re doing you a favour for little money, they won’t necessarily work to your timescales.

Local currency systems like LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) can provide a community of people willing to help each other. The local currency is based on trust and disclosure, with everyone able to see everyone else’s trading history at all times. Members will hold to their commitments or risk other members never doing business with them (a bit like eBay reputations). Note that LETS are not a way of avoiding tax — if you’re operating a business that sells in LETS currency, you’re still eligible for paying tax on the income.

One of the original benefits of LETS schemes was the lack of interest on loans — you can easily have a negative balance and just agree to contribute more in the future. Given that bank interest rates are currently close to 0% anyway, this may not be such an incentive at the moment…

Anna pointed out that one of the most useful people to involve in setting up something new is a mentor — someone to get you moving and be there to provide advice on basic things like planning.

BarCampLondon6: The Guardian Open Platform

Simon Willison @simonw (at Guardian since October last year)

Context — stuff available before the Guardian Open Platform

http://guardian.co.uk is built and runs on a completely custom CMS called R2. This was built recently as an 18 month agile project supported by ThoughtWorks. It’s written in Java, using Spring to hold things together.

Everything on the Guardian site is based on tags (you can see the tags as headings in the right had column). These tags are a controlled vocabulary, created and maintained under editorial control.

Every page that is not an article is almost completely controlled by tags. You can visit a tag home page (like http://guardian.co.uk/technology) and by default it will show a bunch of articles appropriate for that tag. Alternatively, editors can take control of a tag page to highlight articles etc.

The system also supports “tag combiner pages” — pages showing articles from multiple tags, like http://guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change. These are generated in exactly the same way as the single tag pages but will have fewer articles due to the extra filtering.

In addition, any tag page can generate its own RSS feed — just add /rss to the end of the URL. RSS feeds are full fat, sometimes with ads, but their Ts & Cs are currently for personal use only.

What is the Open Platform?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

The new Open Platform allows for commercial use of the Guardian content. The Guardian have made everything available to which they have full rights (so no third party feeds and no content with restricted rights from freelancers). This includes full articles, audio and video (the audio and video is not served directly through the API but it provides enough metadata to link to it). There are currently around 700,000 articles stretching back at least a decade and sometimes longer.

The commercial terms seem reasonable and practical: you can build an interface that links to content on the Guardian web site for free, but it you want to publish the content on your own site then you’ll have to display Guardian adverts alongside it. This works for the Guardian too — they already get orders of magnitude more readers on their web site than their print circulation, and anything that increases their online advertising placement is therefore a good thing.

They have also built an API explorer (with a UI modelled on Firebug) that allows you to play with the data and discover the requests you’d like to make. All the data is URL based, with each article having a web URL (its location on the Guardian web site), a data URL (its location in the Open Platform API) and multiple tag URLs. The other entry point is the search URL, where you can search by text, tags and various dates.

Data is returned by default in a structured XML document, but you can switch this to JSON using the explorer UI. There’s also an ATOM feed available by appending &format=atom to the URL — this data is the least rich at the moment, but easier to feed into other services like Yahoo Pipes.

The explorer makes it easy to browse the content — following links between articles and filtering any searches by picking out tags. Each search returns not just articles with full metadata, but also a section detailing the tags of all the articles in the search. In the tag data you get the number of articles in the search with each tag — so it’s easy to see how further filtering will affect your search results.

At the moment, the results only list topic tags, but there are also contributor tags and other kinds — all editorially chosen, and selected as interesting topics. For example, not every MP has their own tag, just those that show up in the news. The other kinds of tags will be added to the API shortly. These tags strike me as one of the most useful areas of the API — essentially the Guardian have built up an ontology of topics and they’re making it available for free. As far as I understand, if you use the tags but not the content (or at least link to any content on the Guardian website) then you don’t even need to put Guardian adverts on your site (this may be totally wrong — I haven’t read the Ts & Cs in full yet).

The Open Platform site has some examples on it already — the one that Simon Willison highlighted was a Stamen project: http://guardian.apimaps.org allows you to annotate Guardian articles with geo data (which isn’t built in by the Guardian yet) — then view the results on a map.

The Data Store

http://guardian.co.uk/data-store

As well as the content of the articles themselves, the Guardian have opened up some of the data that they use to prepare them. They have a team dedicated to collecting and updating various statistics from bird populations to government budgets and everything in between. The team is putting this data online and available as Google Spreadsheets — currently there are over 100 (up from 86 at launch).

Some of this data is the result of weeks of effort from the Guardian team — the sheet of government data by department was so impressive that the Cabinet Office called and said they’d like a copy as they couldn’t get the data themselves! All the data is vetted and has been published in the newpaper, so you can be reasonably confident of its accuracy.

New data is regularly published on the Data Store blog and the Guardian is trying to build up a community of data wonks around it. Already some people are getting involved, taking the data and doing new things with it — see various examples at http://ouseful.info such as pulling in the MP expenses spreadsheet into IBM’s Many Eyes visualisation system. Previously published data is also being regularly updated by the Guardian team — Simon Rogers has pledged to keep updating various of the data sets he has created.

BarCampLondon6: Self Documenting Web APIs (WSGIWAPI)

Richard Boulton @rboulton http://lemurconsulting.com/

Richard develops Xapian while working for Lemur Consulting.

Recently he was working on a project involving several web APIs interfacing with each other and he wanted to have a good way of seeing what each API was doing. One way would be to ask all the developers to create and maintain documentation, but with rapid development, this would quickly get out of date.

Richard started from the idea of having comments by the code (like Javadoc or rdoc) but has taken it further to make the documentation machine readable. In the case of web APIs, this gives the benefit of being able to create live documentation — some simple comments together with a form that allows you to try out the API directly.

At the moment, the framework he has made (WSGIWAPI) is not quite complete (he put it together on train journeys to and from work…) but it is already being used in the Flax project — an indexing and search server based on Xapian.

WSGIWAPI is works in python and uses python decorators (similar to Java annotations) to produce a WSGI object with documentation included. A WSGI object is a python web service plugin (see http://wsgi.org/wsgi/Learn_WSGI for details) that can be added directly to a web server — so by adding documentation to each method and a couple of lines of plumbing to a class, you can generate full web services complete with documentation and examples.

Since the documentation is machine readable, it would also be possible to generate a Javascript client library or a WSDL specification automatically from the code.

Nice idea — though I think it would get further traction if the idea was rolled into an existing framework rather than being on its own. There’s nothing stopping that happening — the WSGIWAPI code is freely available from http://wsgiwapi.tartarus.org (code on Google code at http://code.google.com/p/wsgiwapi/).

BarCampLondon6: Intro

This is easily the slickest, best organised Barcamp I've ever been to. The Guardian offices are amazing and perfect for a barcamp format, the food is not only very tasty but nutricious too (fresh broccoli & sugar snap peas make a welcome change), and the talks are, as usual, mind expanding.

The new Guardian offices in Kings Place (behind King's Cross and St Pancras stations) are truly a treat. They overlook the canal on two sides and make full use of the view. There are large glass windows in all the rooms -- if they don't look out onto the water, they have a view of the full height, glass atrium up the centre of the building. Unlike Barcamp London 3 at Google, all the rooms are right next to one another and you can see most of the people most of the time. Kings Place is also a new arts venue, with folk music, jazz or classical most nights -- I look forward to seeing more of it.

The only small niggles are the lack of space around the session grid (I'm sure there are pictures on Flickr of the crowd) and a possible lack of comfy furniture. The bean bags at previous Barcamps and similar events I've been on have been fantastic for encouraging a laid-back atmosphere -- here there are plenty of chairs but the floor is a bit hard. It feels a little more formal but that isn't a completely bad thing. I'm not sure how it worked for those sleeping over as I'm heading home for a proper night's sleep.

I've kept notes on several of the talks I've attended and I'll post them shortly, but I want to say thanks to the organisers for doing a fantastic job. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's sessions.

Beautiful offices at barcamplondon