Big thanks to Joe for posting on Upcoming.

The Raven in Bath was the venue, free wifi and good beer were the lubricants, and lively geek-focused discussion the order of the evening. Sam and James turned up to pitch in with all things mobile and infrastructure related (cheers for the lift home Sam).

Brian Kelly was already there and we quickly got into discussions about the web in Universities and managing digital information.

Shortly after the first beer another geek group were attracted by the various mobile phones, pda’s and internet tablets that were merrily twittering, bluetooth jacking and generally taking up drinking space.  Unfortunately I didn’t get names for everyone (the Raven is quite popular with non-geeks also which made circulating tricky).

Dan Hilton and a few others started compiling a directory of companies in the Bath and Bristol area that everyone knows (IMDB being the prime example), but few realise are local. Then they moved on to some of the less well known ones but that are pretty significant in valuation terms.

Tim Perrett explained how he was delivering communication management systems for major blue chip clients that are finally realising that they don’t have to send out 7 welcome letters every time you buy a new set-top box, and they can save a bundle on postage charges at the same time. I had a chat with Jon Stethridge (Unique Media) about his internet video business and the work he’s doing down in Falmouth with their media graduates. That brought us on to the issue of bandwidth into the far south west of the region and punting HD files between Falmouth, Bristol and London (which prompted Sam to remind me afterwards to never to underestimate the bandwidth of a Ford Transit full of backup tapes).

Tim Beadle and Tim (didn’t catch a last name) arrived a little later and we soon got into stories from behind the Iron Curtain and the serialisation of stories through blogs and authors’ differing motivations for writing.  Richard Harrison (Pluggable) was floating between conversations also, talking about web development and php amongst other things.

A cracking evening all round and still in full swing when we headed back to Bristol.

A new initiative from the Pervasive Media Studio (currenly only with a Media Sandbox website) is the iglab.

I was a bit late, but the games were in full flow when I arrived. Simon Johnson was organising the evening and getting people to ’swarm develop’ the games played. The focus was on ‘interestingness‘ than cunning technology and after each mini-play the assembled players were asked for ideas on how to improve the game they’d just played.

Only a couple of the Sandbox commissioned teams were present, Simon himself obviously, and the guys from ThoughtPie (flush from their national press coverage in the Guardian), but there were around 30 people which made for a pleasant buzz and enough people to have some players, some observers and lots of conversation around the edges on how to improve the games. Plus the wii was out, so plenty of stimulation for how to design, build and commercialise interesting games.

Bit of moblogging, bit of beer, a great mix of game developers, games research academics, and enthusiastic game players made for a good evening out and a healthly start to iglab.

Today was mostly spent in Exeter, at their new rugby stadium and conference venue (Sandy Park) at a consultation day for SWRDA’s new Corporate Plan. Ironically, given one of the Regional priorities is to be Carbon Neutral in new projects by 2011 and lots of folk had been persuaded to take the train, the trains were cancelled with the ensuing delays, confusion and chaos. Those of us that travelled by iron horse had no such problems.

The big drive, amongst other things, is to move from employment-led growth to productivity-led growth. Which is a good and noble thing, but rather misses the opportunity to go straight for competitive advantage-led growth. Given most of the attendants were from the public sector, it’ll be interesting how they perceive productivity.

In fact it was the part of the agenda ‘The Most Important things the RDA can do’ that triggered my Monty Python alarm when someone (almost verbatim to Life of Brian just after Brian gets captured) called for the corporate plan to have a plan to actually do something, lets stop planning and actually do, whole new motion, generally seconded, etc.

It took Sean Fielding from Exeter University, after a quick and shameless plug for his institution, to make reference to competitive advantage.

After coffee and networking, 10 flipcharts were set up with statement / questions posted that roughly related to parts of the Corporate Plan. Each table began at its corresponding flip chart number, discussed the topic for 4 mins, then moved to the next flip chart, repeat, rinse, etc. One hour later everyone had contributed thoughts on all the topics and was desperate for lunch. Apart from a bit of chaos setting up, things went smoothing and there were some interesting points raised (lots on spatial planning, housing, and a bit of a gripe about SWRDA). As Jane Henderson (CEO, SWRDA) pointed out in the wrap up, some of the requests were for things that SWRDA was doing but hadn’t told everyone about, and some of the points weren’t SWRDA’s responsibility or mandate to address.

Whether anything changes in the final Corporate Plan, we’ll see.

It was a very different crowd to the one I normally circulate in so that was interesting. A couple of connections were made, a couple were missed, too early to say the longer term outcome.

At Open Coffee the other night, after bemoning the lack of access to pre-seed capital and the unlikelyness of the banks to lend Simon and me £1m to run our own venture fund, the topic turned to the usual mix of mobile, hacking and start-ups.

Somewhere between the beers, Dan proposed a hackathon in Bristol! Sam and James were up for it, I haven’t coded since 8086 days and a bit of kludging in ada but happy to support as always.

Thinking of a Friday night - Saturday session, perhaps at The Hub in Bristol.

So what should the focus be (mobile, games, soc-nets)?

Who wants in?

Having been on the fringes of academia for so many years I have been able to balance theoretical knowledge and what ’should be done’, with practical application and what ‘can be done’.  Unfortunately or fortunately I’m not sure which,  I had never had to explain the concept of plagiarism to a group of people that do not do a lot of academic writing.  So you can imaging the looks I received when I started ‘banging on about’ self-plagiarism.  This is a principle that I don’t recall being taught, but always knew was to be avoided.  Now not to plagiarize ….. if you want to learn more about the topic I suggest you read Miquel Roiq MD pages.

The problem:  You’ve written an abstract and submitted it to a conference.  There is another conference in a very similar area/field as the first.  Can you just send off the same abstract.

The answer:
NO, you can’t.

This fact was greeted with much distress.  “You can’t plagiarize yourself!’ were the cry’s, “plus the deadline is in two days I don’t have time to write another one”. My response was seen to be very unfair when I told them that they can’t submit anything then.

Well it’s amazing what can be done.  With the deadline approaching (Midday today: 1st Feb) I was sent two abstract last night to review.  They were edited and returned to their authors.  This morning the confirmation of their submission has arrived and everyone was happy.

Hopefully the trials and tribulations caused this time will not be repeated, but it is something to watch out for.  Happy writing