Like FOWA before it, dConstruct 2010 was my motivational and inspirational day of the year; a day that reminds me why it’s even worth switching on the computer in the morning. A whole day to get out the office (or grotty student bedroom, depending on employment status), see a great place (Brighton is really, really nice), talk to some people you don’t get to see all that often and listen to some people you might never get to hear speak again.

I wish I’d taken grown-up notes, but these were my important parts:

• Marty Neumeier: be good and different. Very different.
• James Bridle: history is more important than we could ever realise. The man printed out Wikipedia.
• Merlin Mann: being a nerd is great, because you care. As long as you know which nerd to be next: don’t get replaced by a bash script.

Disclaimer: this won’t be interesting if you’re one of those people who thinks location-based services are “oversharing”.

The decision between whether to use foursquare or Gowalla is as difficult as it’s ever been. I’m currently in the Gowalla camp, but seeing some of the beautiful visualisations from WeePlaces.com (here’s mine) has got me wavering. Because this is what it’s all about, actually being able to see the data that we’re ploughing into these services day after day. There’s been talk the last few days (summarised nicely by Jeremy) about whether it’s worth trusting all our data to different corners of the web. And it totally is, as long as we can see what it is we’re trusting them with.

This is what makes me giddy about people like BERG; they make really pretty things.

Here’s how London on my GowallaWalk map looks just now:

As people far smarter than me have noted recently, this is where Twitter and Facebook fail (damn, I can’t remember who I read this from). There’s no easy way to see what I posted last Christmas, for example, on either of those services. But I can easily see, on a shiny Google map, every place I’ve been since January. I can see the distance I travelled with my family across South Africa. The safari camps, restaurants, beaches and shops we went to. All of which evoke memories. And that’s just plain cool.

[25:21] If you’re sitting in any organisation, and let’s not forget this is not just going to be governments, it’s also companies. At some point, as I said earlier on, and it’s a glib line, but the only sure cure for leaks is transparency. At some point you’re gonna realise that you’re better off releasing more information. That the more you hold secret, the more risk you have of leaks, and anything that looks like a leak looks like an exposé. Now that’s going to be a very hard lesson to get across to controlling institutions, but I think if we’re looking at a long term impact here on the culture. I’m writing about this obviously, so it’s on the top of my brain. But I think that this default of publicness versus a default of privacy and secrecy is what we’re grappling with here, and we get to a point where there is no mediator.

[33:26] So what the fear was, that they put forward is someone would come and scan your garbage. So what, they find out I’m 33 now, not 32? Then what? What does that do? We don’t look at the implications, but technology yields change and change yields fright and fright yields protection. And that’s a very small example of what Jay just said. Whether you’re a big institution, or whether you’re a survivalist, or whoever you are, there’s two responses to this world coming up: to embrace the change, or to try to fear it.

And the killer…

[34:22] Yes, we need secrets. But first you have to have the trust to know that those who are holding secrets are holding them for a reason.

Face recognition. Finding faces that aren’t already tagged. Presenting them, ready-to-tag, to the owner. This is pure genius for getting people to participate.

These two years I’ve spent at the University of York have been absolutely fantastic, and it’s impossible to overstate how big a part the media societies have played in me having so much fun. I’m working away from university on a placement this year, but before I start in the big and scary world of “real work”, I wanted to write a little about the things I’ve done at York that have totally completed the experience.

Nouse Website, Spring 2009

This was the first time I got involved significantly in something society-based at university, in the second term of my first year. Working with Ali and Mike, under direction and with massive effort from Chris, we recreated and iterated on the theme for Nouse, the student newspaper (if you know what’s right for you). It meant a load of late nights in the office, fixing things up and getting them ready for launch; my favourite tweet of the early morning “office HTML cluster-fuck” (after one such launch) has to go to Henry.

YSTV Video Production & Website, October 2008 – Present

Looking back, over the last two years YSTV is the best thing I’ve done at York. I’ve met so many more people there than I would have anywhere else on campus and I couldn’t be more pleased that I decided to get involved. From being Matthew’s bitch in the very first term (filming footage for the York Sport Show) all the way up to last term, working on the website with more people than I’ll be able to mention. Mark and Simon somehow managed to get me in front of the camera, though I’m not sure how that even came close to happening. Hopefully I’ll be staying involved in the website this year, from about two hundred miles away.

York Students In Schools, January 2009 – May 2009

I’m not sure why I decided to join YSIS, but I’m so glad I did. In the second term I was helping one afternoon a week in a primary school (Dunnington Church of England), and this year I’ve been assisting with ICT at All Saints RC School. All the teaching has been valuable experience, but seeing the ICT curriculum being taught in a real school, to real kids, has made David’s somewhat different approach so much more important. The teaching quality that I saw at All Saints was amazing, but when the syllabus dictates that you need to teach pupils how to print from Microsoft Access and exactly what that obscure button in PowerPoint does, there’s only so far you can go.

Do More Stuff

If there’s one thing that it was important for me to take away from here, it is this: you might not get on with every single person you come across (can you ever?), but there is absolutely no reason you won’t get along with most of them. You might even have fun.