We just got around to schedule the next Drupal Public Sector Exchange following the success of the the first one. On the 8th of May we will convene at the Hub Westminster at 7pm to discuss how we increase adoption of the Open Source content management system Drupal in the public sector with a focus on councils.

It was clear from the first event that the most important issue is to increase coordination, collaboration and communication in between councils, developers and stakeholders. While the cost benefits are easily explained – see our earlier post here -one of the central topics for this DPSX will be to discuss how we can create a platform and community that fosters regular exchange of what works best and eventually the sharing of code, which is well written and documented.

DPSX will always have talks on specific topics of interest to this growing community and also allow space for the general exchange of ideas that are useful for this community. To this end we have asked the following speaker to present:

Dave Denton from the GCloud Propogation Team will be explaining the G-Cloud platform and provide insight into how the team are attempting to change the way the public sector procures and operates ICT.

Mark Taylor CEO of Sirius, and member of the Open Source Consortium
will be sharing experiences from acting as a technology advisor to all main UK political parties and multiple Government departments, includig a 6 month stint as Chair of the Cabinet Office New Suppliers to Government working group.

Peter Brownell, will on behalf of DPSX, facilitate the discussion about next steps for DPSX to grow into a better platform and community for Drupal enabled councils.

We will be announcing a detailed program shortly, but already have:

Peter Brownell – DPSX

Dave Denton – G-Cloud (TBC)

Mark Taylor – Open Source Consortium (TBC)

You can register via Eventbrite

Also check us out on Drupal.org

One of our attendees at the last CodeMaker course Jess Owens just posted a well written review of the day course. Jess works at the creative research agency ‘Face’ in London and called the review “Why Market Researchers Should Learn to Code”, because as she writes:

‘The dirty little secret is, how far does the industry really understand the technological ground it walks upon? Research firms mostly hire people with degrees in psychology, social sciences and humanities. Don’t get me wrong, these are great subjects and give us a lot of insight into human behaviour and culture. Problem is, it leaves us only observers of the technological world – not hackers and makers.

As a result, innovation in the research industry is not keeping up with the technology’

Needless to say this is why we designed the course. Whether you work in what’s called a tech company, or a creative, or research agency (or in media) we are all using digital technology day in and out. But many of us rely entirely on some rather haphazardly acquired knowledge about how web and mobile apps work, what an API is etc and therefore make often poor decisions when it comes to developing and commissioning digital projects and briefs.

Jess adds that

“(…) by mid-afternoon we were doing far more than we’d ever expected – mashing up Google Maps data with real-time geolocated Twitter information and public datasets. It was awesome.

A course like this won’t make anybody a fully-fledged programmer in a day – instructor Peter Brownell is great but he’s not a magician. But it will leave you knowing much more about how web technologies work, and collaborating better with developers on social data projects in future. That’s worth the entry price alone.

But more than that, this course left me excited.  I’ve been friends with programmers for years, but somehow coding has never seemed like something I could really do – it was just too big a body of knowledge to learn. But this course changed that: it showed me how to start. Best of all, it gave us all the tools – JQuery examples, JSFiddle to play with the code live, and geodata via Google Fusion Tables – to go away and keep playing, and experimenting, and learning.”

Thanks so much Jess. We are certainly up for helping more people to look underneath the ‘digital bonnet’ and to transform them from ‘CodeBreakers’ to ‘CodeMakers’.

We will holding another of our investment days ‘Get The Money’ on the 25th of April as part of the launch of Mother at The Trampery on St John Street – a new place for makers and entrepreneurs. The half day program is designed to teach about the ins and outs of investment and companies that will get selected will also get to meet different investors.

GrowthAccelerator, Mother and MiniBar have teamed up to create a series of workshops covering topics such as, ‘how to pitch your idea’, ‘an insight into the investment landscape’ and ‘the role creative branding plays in growing companies’.

What?

We are offering 20 companies the chance to attend a half day of workshops at Mother at the Trampery. Over the course of the program you will meet a series of experienced VC’s, angels and successful entrepreneurs taking the workshops.

If you want to attend please email Katie Lewis – k.lewis@e-synergy.com – a one page executive summary, which must include your company name, registration number and telephone number. She will then inform you, if you have been selected to attend. The deadline for applications is the 19th of April.

We were pretty pleased to be mentioned in Forbes Magazine by our friends at 3D Industri.es, who launched publicly for the first time at MiniBar last year. 3DI connects buyers and suppliers of industrial components through its 3D search engine, which could be a pretty disruptive service given how difficult it to connect the physical world of objects and the interweb…

Here a quote from the article:

“3D Industries gave their first public pitch at ‘Minibar’ London in August 2011. 3DI founder and CEO Dr. Seena Rejal said, “The overwhelmingly positive feedback from the tech community galvanized us into quitting our jobs and completing the fundraising”

Very nice to hear how MiniBar can be of a little help….

Last Wednesday we held our first CodeMaker course open to the public in the lovely board room of Mother. We had a great crowd of attendees with very diverse backgrounds. Some worked in technology companies such as Nokia and Twilio, others at creative agencies like Mother and Facegroup. We even had a guy from BRE the big building consultancy.

All of them were united in the desire to understand how digital products work better and to many even had done a bit of coding in HTML in the past. So in the morning our coach Peter Brownell took them through the history of computing starting of with the invention of the Abacus in 2400 BC, introducing them to binary as the basis of modern computing. Then we moved onto modern programming languages such as Python and Ruby, explained the architecture of web and mobile apps and after this geeky warm up dived into HTML and CSS by hacking some of our favorite websites using the nifty X-ray Googles and some other online tools to explain CSS. In between these modules Peter, who has been software developer for almost 20 years gave very valuable insight into how to plan web projects using agile principles.

Following a yummy lunch downstairs at Motherwe then proceeded to introduce Javascript and started tinkering with the Twitter API, Google Maps API and Google Fusion tables, which we all combined in a single, simple app. It was quite an exhausting day, but participants left with the feeling that they now have a much better vocabulary to communicated with developers, a better understanding of the complexity of building software and many said they now wanted to get deeper into coding. So all in all we felt we had delivered a good course that does what it promises, but also already started thinking about how we could provide follow up courses from teaching Ruby to diving into ever expanding  world of social API’s, agile planning…….

We are also really happy that there seems to be quite a demand for CodeMaker. The next one on then 18th is already fully booked and places for the 25th are filling up. We will announce new dates shortly. You can register your interest at the bottom of this page.

MiniBar on the 22nd of March was all about Big Data and what tools and approaches to use to make sense of the quadrillions of individual data points collected every day. We had a greet crowd of around 350 attendees mingling, mixing, networking. Have a look at the video to hear some of the most important points made by the presenters. We had:

Francine Bennett, CEO, Mastodon C

Dr Rhys Newman, CTO, eMedia Track

Duncan Ross, Director Data Sciences, Teradata

Emmanuel Marchal, VP Sales, Acunu

Francesco d’Orazio, Chief Innovation Officer, Pulsar/FACE

Thanks to ICTKTN for sponsoring and Mother for hosting.

We are delighted to see how fast our Codemaker Days are filling up. We have a great bunch of people joining us from lots of different backgrounds in lots of different companies so we will certainly be meeting an interesting group.

The course tomorrow (27th March) and our second one on the 15th April are both already full but there are limited paces left for the course running on the 25th April.

Each course only has 12 attendees to ensure that everyone gets the maximum out of the day and the atmosphere is cosy enough that you can ask as many stupid questions as you like. We want you to learn everything you need to know on the day so we’ve designed this day with great care!

If you’re curious to read more have a look here and if you want to attend fill in the registration form at the bottom of the page and we will get back to you.

I’m so impressed by everyone who made it last night in the freezing, sleety London weather. We had been at Mother all day hosting our Get The Money Day, a day of workshops around investment with 20 interesting start ups. The day was delivered by our friends from E-Synergy and Pembridge and supported through the Growth Accelerator Programme. You can read more about that here.

Our actual MiniBar evening was hosted by the ever marvellous ICTKTN, who we have enjoyed working with on a number of different projects over several years. We always really enjoy working with ICTKTN and greatly appreciate all of their amazing support.

The lovely Charlie Jayne who was representing one of our favourite partners, SkillsMatter, was there handing out booklets for their courses with discount codes for anyone who wants to attend from MiniBar.

Our designer neighbours from Poke even popped down for a visit and a bit of free beer to fortify them for the walk home.

These were two new faces for me so it was lovely to meet them both and hear about what they’re up to. Thanks for joining us Rina Nir from Teachmania and Calypso Rose from IndyTute.

Finally here are our fine presenters presenting. From left to right we have Rhys Newman from eMedia Track, Francesco D’Orazio presenting Pulsar, Francine Bennett from MastodonC, James Alexander speaking about Intellect, Duncan Ross with Teradata and the winner of our Get the Money Day with her business, DinDins… and finally Christian off to one side.

Thanks again for braving the cold. See you all next month.