Thank you for your time!

He’s quite good at planning.

The first time I met his family, his brother Mark joked that we probably had a written schedule for meeting their grandparents and other family members. Mark was wrong. It wasn’t a joke. We actually did. Tony’s Sunday roast dinners used to get their own Gantt chart.

Alan, and all the HantsLUG guys we’ve known since moving to Hampshire, would probably agree that Tony’s planning and his lists are pretty epic but it generally gets things done (except when trying to get his phone to work at FOSDEM).

I think the thing that impresses me most, though, is that once he’s decided to do something, he gets on and does it to his best ability and that thing is pretty much always a success. Things like:

• Installing an all-new Dolby Digital EX sound system at Lancaster University FilmSoc (including wiring up the new rear speakers and reorganising the projection box so all the new kit would fit). The engineers were astounded, when they arrived, to find that the physical installation was complete and they were mostly just needed to calibrate it.
• Teaching himself Linux well enough that, for a long time, his website howto was the first hit whenever you searched for Core Linux, and he quickly settled in to HantsLUG as one of the people you went to for help with your Linux installation.
• Producing the Ubuntu-UK Podcast (which has had over 1.5 million downloads since it started in 2008), honing his audio production skills (and buying lots of new toys).
• Devising and producing the amazing documentary that is Don’t Listen Alone. I just love it!

His latest project is too young yet to judge its overall success but I have faith because he has form. Last month, he set up Tony Whitmore Weddings, his new wedding photography business. He’s always enjoyed photography, crafting photos with technical precision and artistic flare. Inspired by our friend James Hodgson‘s Christmas present to us, Tony decided to set himself a photo project a couple of years ago where he had to take enough photos in 12 months that he could produce a calender to give as Christmas presents the following year. On the back of that calender, he got his first wedding photographer gig.

Last weekend, he launched his business website (with logo kindly donated by my new cousin Jeff and his funky graphic design skills) and Facebook page, and he already has not only a reasonable portfolio but also bookings for future weddings.

I think he’s amazing – but then I would. I don’t think I’m alone, though, in having a huge amount of admiration for what he achieves when he sets his mind to something.

So why is this a big deal to me?

Last weekend was the third OggCamp conference, OggCamp 11, at the Farnham Maltings in Surrey. Two years ago, at the first OggCamp (a one-day event at the Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton), we invited Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc) to be our opening keynote speaker. Andy co-invented the MQTT messaging protocol about 10 years earlier and, while there was a server implementation of MQTT (Really Small Message Broker; RSMB) that you could download for free from IBM’s website, it was proprietary and there was no open source implementation available.

Andy wrote a new presentation, especially for OggCamp, describing the geeky innards of his Twittering house (as seen earlier that year on the BBC). The presentation was a fantastic kickstart to the day and (somewhat predictably for a conference with its foundations firmly in the open source world) Andy was questioned about what bits of his home automation system were built on open source software and open standards. The one significant part of the system that was proprietary was RSMB (the core part that enabled all the parts of his house to communicate).

Then OggCamp started, we had a good time, and we went home exhausted but happy.

And then, just two weeks later, Roger announced that he’d registered a new project called Mosquitto (as in MosQuiTTo) on Launchpad. He’d been inspired by Andy’s talk at OggCamp to write an open source alternative to RSMB. Within what seemed like days he had a working bit of code which was taken up and tested by others in the open source community and hardware-hacking communities like Homecamp.

I cannot claim any credit at all for all the hard work that Roger and others put in developing and testing Mosquitto. I’ve always been proud, though, that Mosquitto was born at OggCamp – we played our small part in helping connect the previously mostly corporate/business MQTT with the open source communities.

That Facebook announced they were adopting MQTT for their new messaging system the day before OggCamp 11 meant we could vicariously revel in Roger’s glory while we tried to find out just whether Facebook had adopted his code or their own implementation. The answer seems to be somewhere between the two.

And while I’m proud for OggCamp (of course), I’m also excited for Roger in his own right that his name is now in the licence agreement of apps from the mighty Facebook – that kind of recognition for your hard work must be such an amazing feeling!

It’s brilliant that there are people who have taken the event name literally and are camping for the weekend. Hopefully the weather will favour them! The Farnham Maltings venue has a really nice feel to it and is ideally located for the park and pubs. The attendees at OggCamp really make the event what it is and the best bit (well, one of them) as an organiser is seeing everyone arriving at the venue on Saturday morning!

We’ve got three stages, two of which are being run as an unconference. That means that the wonderful OggCampers volunteer talks and others vote for the ones they’d like to see most! We’ve had some really great talks submitted this way in the past. It sounds a bit chaotic and it is, but it works! We’ll be using CampFire Manager by Jon Spriggs to schedule these talks for the first time this year so you’ll be able to propose and vote for talks by txt msg and see the schedule up on the digital displays around the venue.

Our main stage schedule is basically complete. The Ubuntu Podcast team will be joining forces with the Linux Outlaws for the traditional live podcast recording. There will be a panel discussion and a raffle (of course) too! Our wonderful main stage speakers include:

• Simon Phipps
• LornaJane Mitchell (careers in Open Source)
• Chris Gutteridge (Southampton OpenData project)
• Steve Lee (Accessibility)
• Wayne Myers (professional music production on Linux)

We’ve got some exhibitors, including

• O’Reilly (who are offering 40% off their books on the Saturday)
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Hacker Public Radio
• Ubuntu UK
• Reprap 3D printer

We’ve also got some surprises planned for the weekend which you’ll only find out about by being there. If you want to come along and join in some or all of the weekend’s activities, you can. It’s free. That’s right, it doesn’t cost a penny. There are a few tickets left and you can get your hands on them here: http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com

It’s free thanks to our lovely sponsors:

• Bytemark (our headline sponsor!)
• Google
• Chris Procter on behalf of lug.org.uk
• Bitfolk (sponsoring the Saturday night party!)

This week is always the quickest of the whole process. Before we know it we’ll be standing in the William Cobbett pub sharing a drink or two with the lovely OggCampers on Friday night and won’t touch the ground until after the Sunday night drinks! The plan for the weekend (and lots more information) is available on the OggCamp website.

One of the best parts of the weekend is meeting people who listen to the show, so please say hello! See you there!

In the past…

Traditionally, you would probably publish papers about your idea in peer-reviewed academic journals so that people interested in that area would read about it and think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”. Similarly, you might present about it at conferences where your audience of like-minded people would listen and think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”. If you had teaching responsibilities, you likely also taught your students about your new approach, explaining the weaknesses of the old approach and why this new approach is better so that when they come to doing their own research projects they think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”.

Except (I’m guessing here) it probably doesn’t always work like that. Especially if your cool new research idea is a statistical method. Especially if your new statistical method requires its users to sit down with a calculator and manually work through an equation instead of just opening a data file and pressing some buttons in SPSS, the statistics package popular with psychologists, marketing people, and others.

The unfortunate upshot is that your cool new statistical approach just doesn’t really get off the ground, no one else writes about using it (so you don’t get the all-important citations in other people’s publications), and it just slides quietly away into the ether.

In the 21st C…

If you are as cool as your cool new research idea, you might also embrace the wonders of the world of social media and online communications. Obviously, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, presenting at conferences, and teaching your students are all good and necessary things to do. But they’re probably not enough in some cases–and I’d guess that statistical methods is probably one of those cases.

I don’t know whether Hayes & Preacher (or Preacher & Hayes) went through that exact thought process when thinking about how to promote their cool new statistical methods to psychologists and other social scientists, but it seems that usability was one of their aims (for example, Andrew Hayes suggests that people have tended to stick with the older methods, rather than adopt the newer and better methods, because the old ones are “simple and widely understood”; Hayes, 2009, p 411).

• Written macros to extend SPSS
  Users can use the macros to (fairly) easily run the tests using SPSS, an environment they’re already familiar with. Macros are a bit fiddly to work with so, for one of their tests, they’ve even written a custom dialog that you can install in SPSS which adds a new entry to the Analyze menu so that you can just open a standard-looking dialog box to select the appropriate variables names and run the test. All this is available for free download from their website.
• Created a Facebook group to answer questions
  You can start a new topic (thread) to ask a question or describe a problem, or you can browse the existing 1636 (and rapidly rising) topics (at least, I’ve been able to before but today it seems the back/forward links have gone walkabout). You can also use Google to search for specific topics. Both Preacher and Hayes typically respond to questions and problems within a day. When I was having some technical problems, they asked for a my data file and ran the test on their own machines to check whether it was just my installation of SPSS that was the problem (it was).

Benefits for users

As a student trying to understand the statistical procedures by reading and re-reading their journal papers multiple times, it was invaluable to be able to ask the authors themselves (via Facebook no less) to clarify specific details as they applied to my particular experimental design. Browsing the 1000+ topics of discussion was also very educational as I came across answers to questions that I hadn’t even thought to ask yet.

Benefits for them

The benefits for them are surely great too. Obviously they have to spend time writing, testing, and supporting their macros etc, and they also have to spend time responding to help requests on Facebook. In return, though, they vastly improve the ease of using their statistical procedures, while also giving you (the user) a warm and fuzzy feeling about the procedures (the power of positive affect) and that there are many other people out there trying to use the procedure too (the power of social norms), all in all making you (I would guess) more likely to keep trying and to talk about the procedures to others. Those are the intangible and difficult-to-measure benefits of a good user experience.

In addition, they’re getting loads and loads of feedback from their users on where their procedures or explanations are difficult to understand, or where users commonly have problems, so that when they write a book on it, they’ve got valuable material to respond to and include which should make the book incredibly useful to users. We’ll see if that’s true when their book, and accompanying new macro, comes out next year. And there’s another thing, while they’ve got you in a discussion on Facebook, it’s practical (but also good promotion) for them to refer you to one or other of their papers, or to mention the book coming out next year. And there’s a list of up-coming events at which they’ll be conducting workshops on these statistical procedures. It all helps to boost citations.

Everyone wins

I think it’s brilliant. Not just because they helped me by answering a question within a day and diagnosing the problems I was having running their macros. But because they’re tapping into resources that are free and much of their target audience already use. And by doing this, they’re making their cool ideas as accessible as possible, which can only really be a good thing for everyone concerned.

References

Hayes, A. (2009). Beyond Baron and Kenny: Statistical Mediation Analysis in the New Millennium. Communication Monographs, 76(4), 408-420. doi:10.1080/03637750903310360

Disclosure

I work for IBM, who own SPSS.

In 3 weeks time, it will be OggCamp 11 at the Farnham Maltings in Farnham, Surrey, UK. It’s a two-day event about technology, open source, music, art, politics, community, creativity, and more!

It’s free to attend but please sign up on http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com/ so we have an idea of how many people to expect.

If you’d like to help promote OggCamp 11, you can add a badge to your website.

All information is at the OggCamp 11 website. If it isn’t there, let us know and we’ll add it.

It just asks for your views on how you use energy in your home and how you might be willing to go about using less of it (as we keep being told we should).

But I can offer the knowledge that you’re a lovely person, possibly make you the target of some good karma, or just give you the out-and-out fun of filling in a survey!

I have to restrict the survey to people who live in the UK. This is because the survey content is largely biased towards UK home energy conventions and it just wouldn’t make sense for someone living outside the UK to take part.

To complete the survey, please go to:

http://is.gd/UKenergysurvey

Whether or not you are able to complete the survey yourself, I would greatly appreciate it if you would pass on a link to the survey to your friends, colleagues, relatives, or even random people you talk to on the train every day.

If you’ve read this far and, hopefully, are going to take part or pass on the link:

THANK YOU!

P.S. If you’re on Facebook, I have a page called Laura’s PhD Research. Please Like it if you…um…like it.

So I tried again. This time, I wasn’t to be put off. I had to do it.

An Irish man answered. Friendly and welcoming. I felt awkward; he sounded happy; I didn’t want to spoil his day. I asked when my current contract ended.

“No problem, I’ll just check when your commitment ends.” He said it, not me: my commitment. He told me my commitment ended on the 23rd May 2011. There was a slight pause where neither of us knew quite what to say next. “Um…do you want to upgrade?” he ventured.

“I’m leaving. Can I have my PAC number please?” I gabbled. Just to get it out. There was another pause. A slightly taken aback pause. I felt bad. He’d been so sunny and warm until I’d phoned him like a rain cloud across his day.

“We’re…we’re sorry that you’re leaving.” He made an effort to smile again; to put on a brave face. “Okay, so you’d like a PAC number?”

“Yes please”

“I’ll have to check if the department is open. It’s, you know, bank holiday, so not all of the departments are…er…open today. Because of the bank holiday you know.” It was his turn to gabble.

“Yes” I said. “Of course.” Then, suddenly, to reassure him: “I’m sure I’ll be back. At some point.”

I paused, then added: “It’s not you; it’s me.”

As I listened to the ‘hold’ music, I relaxed a bit. I’d done it. it was nearly over. I was going to get a PAC number and then I would be free to move on. Free to discover a new network.

“Hello, Laura?” said another male voice. More efficient, slightly less friendly this time. Yet still polite.

“Yes” I said.

“You’d like a PAC number?”

“Yes, please,” This was it; I was nearly there.

“Can I ask who you’re leaving us for?”

My heart sank slightly. He was going to make this difficult. Why couldn’t he just accept it? I wasn’t trying to play hard-to-get. I just wanted a PAC number so I could move on from this old relationship to a new and vibrant network. He thought I was just trying to get a better deal.

“giffgaff” I mumbled.

“Which network?”

“giffgaff.”

He’d never heard of them. I felt a sudden sense of derision towards him. Granted, I’d never heard of giffgaff until last week but then I don’t work in the telecoms industry. I’d just asked on Twitter if anyone had any recommendations about Vodafone vs O2 coverage and SIM-only deals from each of them. I hadn’t even been aware of the quiet dark stranger standing in the corner, waiting to catch my eye.

@oldmanuk had been first to point him out. He’d not known him for long but what he’d seen, he’d liked. @oldmanuk had suggested talking to @maygg or @thomasj; both were with this newcomer, and they might be able to put in a good word for me. If I was interested.

Instantly, I had glimpsed the excitement I’d felt in the first couple of weeks of my current commitment, a long two years ago. Then, it had been less about the relationship and more about the gift of the new handset that had arrived to my home. About removing the box sleeve to reveal, inside, the shiny dark-blue touchscreen phone, its smooth surface unsullied by the bumps and scratches of my old phone. The novelty had faded over the two years but I wasn’t ready to give it up, despite the tempting offers from Android.

giffgaff wasn’t offering me gifts like that. He wasn’t offering them in return for a fixed-term commitment. All he asked is that I check in briefly every 3 months. If I wanted more, more was there. If I didn’t, there was no pressure. I liked that about him. I liked his easy-going nature.

“giffgaff?” asked the Vodafone customer service representative. “Are they a third-party website?” The slight derision I’d felt grew into coldness towards him.

“They’re another provider. Running on the O2 network.” I was annoyed with myself for feeling like I had to explain myself to him. I didn’t owe him anything. Yet I felt guilty, like I was being unreasonable, like I was playing around on a rival network.

“Oh” he said. “Can I ask what they’re offering?”

I held the impatience out of my voice as I replied: “Um…they do…um…kindof goodybags – they call them goodybags – that last a month. For £10 I get 250 minutes, and txts, …um…unlimited txts and data. And cheaper prices outside of that. And they…um…have…um…an interesting business model.”

I was gabbling again. In silent anguish I added: “why won’t you just let me go?”

He paused. I wished I were still talking to the first man. I’d felt bad for hurting him but at least I’d been able to talk to him. This man was colder, more experienced, more distant. I just wanted to get away. At the same time I understood that he was doing all he knew just to keep me. But I didn’t want him any more.

“I can give you 300 minutes for £9 a month,” he offered. My stomach tightened. I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me.

“No, it’s okay. I just want to go,” I said. Firmer this time. I had to make myself clear. I wasn’t just angling for a better deal. I wanted a complete break. I wanted to be able to to see giffgaff, without the ties, without the costs. Without the guilt.

“So you just like the look of this company?” He was trying to be calm and polite and rational. But, to me, he seemed to be suggesting that I was flighty, that I was falling for appearances, that I was being irrational.

“No, I like their business model. They’re community-focused.” I knew I probably wasn’t making a lot of sense to him. I was being defensive. I just wanted to get this over with. I wanted to move on.

“Okay, so you need a PAC number.” Relief slid down my tummy. Finally, he seemed to understand. My hand shook slightly as I wrote “PAC:” on the front of my giffgaff origami envelope and then waited for him to speak again.

He slowly read out the letters and numbers as I wrote them down.

“Thank you very much,” I said, as I hung up.

I looked down at the PAC number written before me, among the bright decoration of the giffgaff origami envelope that contained my SIM for the future. I was free.

My future was bright; my future was giffgaff.

Hello, and welcome to the Ubuntu UK Podcast! It’s Tuesday the 1st of March 2011 and with me this week are….

And with (something like) that, this Tuesday at 8.30pm (UK time), we’ll be kicking off Season 4 of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast. And you can listen along. Live.

Regular listeners might be aware that we attempted a couple of episodes live last season. It mostly seemed to work. The weak excuse for broadband in Studio A held up well enough that we’re going to give it a go properly. So every two weeks, you can listen along with us live on the Internet.

While you listen, please join us in the chat room, on Twitter or identi.ca and offer feedback and other contributions as we go.

If you’re new to UUPC, it’s a one-hour Internet radio show on which we mostly talk about stuff relating to computing and the world of Open Source Software. If you can’t listen live on Tuesdays, you can download the show as a podcast from our website or from iTunes. We’ve been called “the Radio 4 of Linux podcasts” – basically, we’re family-friendly (no swearing) so you can listen around the house or in the car. We like to think we’re entertaining and a bit humorous. And we drink tea and eat cake when we can (though not while we’re talking!).

If you’re curious, have a listen to a past episode or to Tony’s Episode 0 teaser which he released last week.

See you Tuesday for:

Like some of my IBM Hursley colleagues, I’ve been playing with a Current Cost electricity monitor for the past couple of years.

Like many of them, I’ve played with the technology, got my real-time electricity readings publishing to a server on the Internet, and looked at the data in graphs. I also learnt how to use my Arduino to take those readings and make Christmas lights flash.

I’m a User Experience Specialist in my day-job, it probably won’t be a surprise that I’m interested in understanding how people use the technology as much as the technology itself. My first degree was in Psychology and my Masters in Human-Computer Interaction, so while design itself is interesting to me, I’m more interested in how users understand what’s going on, what they want to do, what motivates them, and so on.

One of the reasons for my Christmas lights project (aside from learning to program) was to make build a kind of ambient, emotional connection between my house and my parents’, 250 miles away. My original intention (though it didn’t quite work out technologically) was to display my electricity readings on one colour of the lights and their electricity readings on another colour. So as well as having a kind of ambient indicator of our own current rate of electricity usage, I can see little things about their lives too: when their lights flash faster for a couple of minutes I can see they’re making a cup of tea.

Emotional connections to the technology around us (which uses energy of some kind) is hugely important to our global use of natural resources. For example, think about when you last bought a car. Usually there’s some kind of emotional factor involved, whether it’s the model of the car and the personal image or status you’d like to project, or the aesthetics of the car, or its comfort, or the way you feel it gives you your freedom.

One thing I’m interested in looking at is how ordinary people understand energy and their use of it (at home, at work, when travelling). Having a technology day-job, I’d also like to combine that with understanding how people perceive and think about technology in relation to energy-saving.

When I decided to do a PhD, I figured the Psychology of Energy Use would be pretty specific as an area of interest. And it kindof is, but it also kindof isn’t. Within that, there are just soooooo many approaches I could take; eg looking at people’s attitudes, their values and beliefs, their behaviours, their emotional experience of the technology and energy use, their perceptions of risk and control of technology, how other people’s attitudes and behaviours influence their own, how their local environment (eg where they live, where they work) influences or constrains their ability to manage their use of energy (electricity, gas, oil, petrol, etc).

So far, I’ve mostly done lots of reading and thinking but aware that there’s so much more I need to do before I can even decide on my exact research question. I decided doing some writing about it might help me organise my thoughts and ideas a bit. So here’s my first stab at that.