We (bike club) are planning a critical mass ride in support of the riders in Brazil callously mown down by a driver last friday.

As with all Critical Mass rides, we’ll be starting out at 6pm on the last Friday of the month (March 25th)

Full details are available on the Facebook event page, please come along and invite your friends.

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I ran two sessions at #bcbomo3, one on ableton live and the other… The Failure Swapshop

My aim for the session was to encourage people to celebrate their failures and share with the group the lessons they learned.

It went a bit like this:

“Hi, my name’s Luke, and I failed” (cue cheers + applause from the crowd)

“I did ___, it failed because of ___ and the lesson I learned was ___”

I kicked off the celebration of failure by talking about a start-up I worked on many years ago that lost its way and failed.

After a slow start, where people needed encouragement at first, the session really got going and more and more people opened up and shared business, personal and technical failures. Some were valuable life lessons, some… well… simply hilarious!

I wrote any lessons learned onto the white board (both sensible + silly):

• Stay on target (Stay focussed)
• Don’t lie about your abilities (but if you already have, learn the thing you said you could do asap!)
• Don’t trust:
  • Grown ups
  • Other people’s code
  • Your own code
  • Lotus Notes
  • Consultants
  • Programmers
  • Acronyms
• Back ups = Good
• Don’t get distracted by shiny things
• Don’t think you know it all
• Check for typos
• Always check the box contents
• Try a restart
• Don’t try to be funny (the story behind this one was BRILLIANT, I won’t recount it here)
• Don’t expose your dev server to the world
• Ask for help
• Failure can become a win

If you’d like to share your failure, please do add a comment below and tell us what happened and most importantly what you learned from your glorious failure.

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Bar Camp Bournemouth is done and dusted for another year, big thanks to all our attendees who made the event so good and our kind sponsors:
Proactive, Nokia OVI, Bournemouth Uni, the BCS (Dorset + YPG) and G3 Radio

A great variety of talks, from the technical to the… less serious:

Day 1 grid:

(Day 1 photo from Tom Morris)

Day 2 grid:

If you missed it this year, go forth and follow @bcbournemouth for details of next years event… or look out for a Bar Camp near you!

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We’re less than 2 weeks away (Feb 26+267h) from Bar Camp Bournemouth 3, last years event saw over 100 tech/web folk converge on Bournemouth uni for 2 days of talks, discussion and stuff.

See the site above for more info (few tickets available at time of publication) or search for #bcbomo3 on twitter for the dicussion around the event.

Also coming up for all creative / web / techy folks is the fabulous Meetdraw (Mar 24th) – more social than bar camp but still very much worth attending for those around Bournemouth who are creative / web based businesses.

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I attended the Conurbation 2050 lunch last month, an incredible mix of local business types, councillors, entrepreneurs, artists, visionaries, an MP and me.

The purpose of the Conurbation 2050 group is to bring together entrepreneurial and public-spirited individuals, so they can share ideas* and do things together, using their own initiative.

*ideas to develop the Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch conurbation.

Things I noted from today, in no particular order:

Transport improvement ideas – from a monorail to Heathrow terminal 5 type pods, it seemed really clear to me that a wide range of people (business, tourists and locals) feel this needs action, myself included.

An arts/creative space – I found this interesting as it’s talked about a lot and yet if you look at the lighthouse in poole (struggling), the cube gallery (closed), the shared market in Boscombe (closed) and numerous other projects… is there really demand or viability of such spaces? That’s not to say I wouldn’t love Bournemouth to be a creative hub, I just think they’re all missing… something from the idea.

An icon for the area: be it a landmark or attraction – it was noted by one attendee that a lot of the ideas focussed on attractions for tourists or visitors – would a landmark benefit locals? (Proposals included a dome on the beach + cliff, a Bomo Eye, skyscrapers..)

Some ideas have already begun to take shape (boat planes, coming soon!), some were just ideas.

Another common theme (which amuses me) was use of the term “Bomo”, from renaming the conurbation “BomoCity” to various “Bomo ___” named things – would one name ever work?

In a wider sense, could the councils get along to work more effectively as one?

One thing did strike me, if this is to become anything more than talk, in my opinion, it has to be led by business and not politicians.

I’d propose forming a Conurbation 2050 social enterprise to nurture ideas and make them happen, to lobby politicians to adopt the ideas independent of politics and get as many people involved as practically possible.

What happens next? Who knows.

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Another week, another story in our local paper about a Bournemouth Councillor making a bit of an arse of themselves online.

This week is Cllr Douglas Spencer‘s turn, not realising that a rant he wrote about a pub landlord on the internet, might make its way out into the wider world…

Previously we’ve had such highlights from our local representatives as: Cllr Dunlop not realising her comments on schools were public, an on-going “ner ne ner ne ner ner, I’m not listening” from the leader of the council in his echo blog and lest we forget, my personal favourite Cllr Grower aka omegaman in “sock-puppet-gate”.

So, to any currently elected officials of Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch I make this new year offer:

Dear Local Councillors,

As a concerned local resident, I’d like to offer my training services to help councillors better understand how to use the internet to communicate with the local population.

I’m offering to deliver a 2 hour training session, for free, to cover the following areas at a time and place to suit you:

• Recommended best practice for communicating online
• Security and privacy online (including Facebook privacy settings)
• An introduction to monitoring for mentions of your name online and basic reputational risk management

If you’d like to take me up on this offer, please call the office on 01202 798098 and we’ll arrange a time.

Yours Sincerely,

Luke Williams

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Dear Clients, don’t listen to anyone for advice, ever.

That seems to be the advice we (in the internet/creative/web/marketing industry) are  giving out at the moment.

To help with this, I’ve compiled a list of the most common experts and good reasons you could give to a client to avoid them*:

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