It’s just one short week until OggCamp 11! Each year we’ve done this event, it’s grown. This year has a really special feeling about it.

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!

Why I’m trying not to fly this year

At the start of 2010, I decided I was going to try not to fly this year, for the whole year. Now six months in, I’ve finally got round to blogging about it to explain why.

(I actually published this post briefly about a month ago but I realised I’d miscalculated the figures in the second part of this post. Apologies to people who read the first version as the figures and graphs have now been fixed, and I’ve re-written most of the article based on more up-to-date information.)

The main reason I’m trying to avoid flying as much as possible is because of the disproportionate impact that flying has on climate change compared with other forms of transport like trains or cars. Planes, like cars and most UK trains, emit carbon dioxide (CO2) which can be measured in metric tonnes. The combustion of aeroplane fuel, however, emits other gases too: nitrogen oxides and water vapour. At high altitudes (which is where most aeroplane emissions are made), these gases have an increased impact on the climate compared with at ground level¹.

Travelling by plane can produce the same emissions per person as travelling the same distance by car but you typically travel further in an aeroplane than you would by car or train so the amount of carbon dioxide emitted is greater before you even start to include the effect of the other emissions at altitude.

How flying compares with other activities

Currently, each person in the UK, on average, is responsible for about 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide (and the CO2 equivalent in other greenhouse gases) per year². For the sake of comparison with other countries, the USA emits about 19 tonnes, France emits about 6 tonnes, China about 4.5 tonnes, and India about 1 tonne per person³.

Although the UK looks quite virtuous in comparison with the USA (see the graph in ³), now compare the UK with China and India. And remember that the 9 tonnes doesn’t include all the stuff we import to the UK that is manufactured in other countries, such as China and, therefore, is included in China’s accounts.

When you include the things we import, plus flying (currently not included in national environmental accounts), the UK’s average person emits nearly 14 tonnes of CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases (collectively known as CO2e)⁴. However,  this being an average means, of course, that some people emit more than that and some people less than that. Typically, the more money we have, the more greenhouse gases we cause to be emitted.

Aeroplane emissions account for about 1.2 tonnes of CO2e per person⁴ but are rapidly increasing¹. For the sake of comparison, home heating and car travel each account for about 1.2 tonnes of CO2e per person per year. Also, only about half the population of the UK takes 1 or more return flights every year.

Although some effects of human-induced climate change are too late to reverse (and we’ll have to adapt to those changes), we can avoid more significant increases in global temperature (2-4 degrees Celsius) if we significantly reduce our CO2e emissions. In the UK, this means reducing our emissions by about 75-80%^4,5. This sounds a lot but it’s possible if we reduce to almost zero our use of fossil fuels, such as by reducing the amount of energy we use to heat our homes, changing to using electric instead of petrol/diesel cars, and changing our electricity sources from coal and gas to mostly renewable energy sources (potentially including nuclear energy)⁸.

Which brings us back to aeroplanes, which run on kerosene, which is a fossil fuel. Although there is research into alternative fuels for flight, there’s no alternative at the moment. And even if there were already, planes have long lifespans and so would be unlikely to be replaced with newer more efficient versions very quickly.

So, aeroplanes are running on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, aeroplane journeys tend to be over longer distances than typical car journeys (one return flight from London to New York is nearly 7000 miles⁶, compared with the UK average of 9,000 miles that a car would travel in a whole year), aeroplane emissions have a greater impact because they are at high altitude (one return flight from London to New York emits about 1.5 tonnes CO2e per person⁶ over 7000 miles, compared with 1.2 tonnes CO2e for 9000 miles of car travel per year), and even the emissions from short-haul flights cause about twice as much impact on the climate as the same emissions would on the ground.

So, the single most significant thing an individual can do to reduce their impact on climate change is to stop flying.

All my flights in my life…ever

When I started learning about the human impact on climate change in terms of numbers, I wondered about the impact of flights I’ve made. Last year, although I didn’t really think about it in any detail, I was vaguely aware that I’d taken quite a few short-haul flights throughout the year. And I knew that the previous year, I’d flown to the U.S. for a conference as well as some flights within Europe. Through a combination of saved emails (flight booking confirmations) and memory, I constructed a list of all the flights I’ve ever made since my first in 1999.

The following graph shows the 37 flights I’ve taken, by year, since 1999 (click the image to see a larger version):

And the next graph shows my carbon dioxide (including equivalent greenhouse gas) emissions for those flights:

The four years with large spikes were the years I took return long-haul flights to the USA (twice for work, once for a wedding, and once for a non-work conference). Other than that, the flights have all been within Europe, including six within the UK (between Southampton and Scotland).

So why has the number of flights I’ve taken increased so much in the past few years (specifically, since 2003)? Mainly, it’s a result of getting a job (I was a student until 2001) so I could now afford to fly. Also, post-university, friends started getting married and inviting us to weddings. Two of the long-haul flights, and four of the six internal UK flights, are wedding-related. There was also the christening of my godson which I’m counting as a wedding-type of event here and involved a return-flight to Europe.

Here’s a breakdown of the CO2 emissions by the primary reasons for taking the flights (the number in parentheses in the legend shows the number of actual flights per reason):

The greatest proportion of emissions was due to flights for work, that’s not too surprising as I work for an US company but only four of the eight flights making up that large segment were actually long-haul. Two were short-hauls within the US, and two were short-hauls to Europe, which just goes to show how big an impact transatlantic flights alone have on greenhouse gas emissions. The two next largest categories of CO2 emissions are Conferences (non-work-related) and Weddings, both of which include one return flight to the US. In contrast, although the greatest number of flights is down to holidays, they’ve all been in Europe so the CO2 emissions per flight, and overall, are lower.

Bearing that in mind, my 2005 and 2008 flights produced nearly 2.5-3.0 tonnes of CO2e per year, which is twice as much as the average UK person. And that’s before I even start counting home energy usage, car travel, and so on.

In conclusion…

The lesson at the crudest (and probably most obvious) level, is to avoid going to destinations that require long-haul flights. That would imply that short-haul flights are mostly okay then? Well, not really. The key thing with short-haul flights is that there are almost always alternative ways to travel that same distance that have a much smaller impact on climate change, making it often unnecessary to fly. Even when the amount of CO2 per person works out the same by car as for flying (you can fit more people in a plane than in a car, for instance), the effect of that CO2 and other emissions at high altitude is worse than at ground level. It’s possible, for example, to get from the UK to the South of France by train – which is especially good for the CO2e accounts when you consider that France’s high-speed train (TGV) is almost carbon neutral as it runs on electricity mostly from nuclear sources (not fossil fuels like UK electricity)⁵, and the Eurostar is carbon neutral through an active project to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as possible and to offset the rest⁷.

I can’t swear I’ll never go to the US (or other long-haul destinations) again, and there’s not really an alternative way to get there other than flying. I wouldn’t take that decision lightly though. For this year though, during which I’m not flying at all, that means the US and other destinations for which there is no alternative are out, and I can only go to places to which I can find an alternative mode of transport.

---

If you’re interested in knowing how I calculated my flight emissions for the graphs above, and the exact figures used, I’ll be showing my workings in a separate blog post soon.

References

¹ Calculating the Environmental Impact of Aviation Emissions 2nd Edition, Dr Christian N. Jardine. Published by Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, for Climate Care, 2008.

² CO2 Emissions Per Captia, UK. Google Public Data. Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2007. Accessed on 4th July 2010.

³ CO2 Emissions Per Capita, US, UK, France, China, India. Google Public Data. Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2007. Accessed on 4th July 2010.

⁴ How To Live A Low-carbon Life, 2nd Edition. Chris Goodall. Published by Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2010.

⁵ The Hot Topic. Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK, 2007.

⁶ Mileage for a return journey between London Heathrow and New York’s JFK airports calculated using Climate Care’s online calculator at http://www.jpmorganclimatecare.com/ on 4th July 2010.

⁷Eurostar’s Tread Lightly project: http://www.eurostar.com/UK/uk/leisure/about_eurostar/environment/tread_lightly.jsp. Accessed on 4th July 2010.

⁸ Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, David MacKay. Published by UIT Cambridge, 2008.

Well, we’re just two weeks away from OggCamp10. It’s all happening in Liverpool on May Bank Holiday weekend. And it’s all looking very exciting!

I went to visit OggCamp10 venue The Black-e this afternoon with Dan and it’s really cool! It’s right in the centre of Liverpool and right next to the massive and brightly coloured Chinatown arch, the entrance to the oldest Chinatown in Europe. The Main Stage is a lovely big room on the upstairs, Stage 2 and 3 are in the basement, and the exhibition/chillout area is on the ground floor by the entrance. We’re planning to have conference wifi too, supplied by one of our sponsors, The Linux Emporium.

After spending longer than planned roaming The Black-e and trying to imagine it filled with people, we walked 5 minutes down the way to Studio 2, the bar for Saturday night. Studio 2 is the “studio where Coldplay, Barry Manilow, Take That, Spice Girls & Diana Ross recorded” but is now converted into a rather unique-looking bar with food. The building is still a proper recording studio though and, in Studio 2, the padded doors remain, as does the glass window between rooms, and separate recording booths. The bar will be available from 6pm until 2am and the chef will stay on in the early part of the evening so that we can buy food there.

And finally, there’s Liverpool itself. I’ve had various slightly doubtful enquiries about whether it’s worth going to Liverpool (especially if it’s quite a way to travel). I’ve been to Liverpool a few times in my life and I think it’s a really cool city nowadays.

As the 2008 City of Culture, Liverpool has been much regenerated over the past few years and is a really interesting place to be. Lots to see as a visitor, like the big wheel down by the docks, Albert Docks themselves, the Merseyside Maritime Museum, food at the old Bluecoat School…

…and not forgetting the rather random SuperLambBanana, an “unusual artwork [that] was created to warn of the dangers of genetically modified food, whilst being appropriate to the city of Liverpool due to the port’s rich history in the trade of lambs and the import of bananas”,  and the 125 mini SLBs that have been sponsored by local (and not-so-local) businesses and are mostly located around the city just waiting to be found–including near the OggCamp10 venue:

And of course there’s loads of good food (including good Chinese restaurants right by the venue), lots of shopping down the road, and, if today’s anything to go by, lots of sunshine too.

p.s. Thanks to Dan Lynch for the first photo, and to my Mum for the last three.

OggCamp10 is an unconference, which means that the schedule will be finalised on the day. So if you come along, you can not only have a say in that schedule but you can offer to be part of that schedule.

What to expect…

OggCamp10 isn’t just about software. You can offer to talk about anything at all. And if people want to hear your talk, you’ll be able to give it. Even if your talk isn’t on the schedule, you can still meet up with like-minded people and discuss the things that are important and interesting to you.

At last year’s OggCamp, we had talks on how to hook your house up to Twitter (or Identica!), politics and geeks, online privacy and security, engaging young people in open source, how to explain programming to your grandmother, just what is Pokebook(!), and what your pig says about you (yes, really).

You can see the final schedule from OggCamp 2009, plus photos and Twitter/Identica feeds from the weekend, on the OggCamp 2009 website.

OggCamp is jointly organised by the Ubuntu-UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws podcast teams. OggCamp 2009 was a one-day event in Wolverhampton, UK and about 120 people turned up – which was fantastic! OggCamp10 will be a bigger and better two-day event in Liverpool, UK at The Black-e community arts centre.

Audio trailer…please play

Our resident Liverpudlian, Dan, has done this brilliant audio trailer for OggCamp10 (MP3 or OGG). Have a listen! If you produce your own podcast, we’d be eternally grateful if you’d play it for your listeners – thanks!

Sponsorship opportunity…

And finally, if you are interested in sponsoring OggCamp10 by contributing towards the cost of the venue hire, or by providing prizes for the event, or if you have any cool novel ways to support us, please email me: uupc@lauracowen.co.uk. Thanks.

Two weekends ago, we were back in Wolverhampton for the last ever LugRadio Live rock conference. After 5 years of the fortnightly LugRadio podcast, last Summer, the presenters called it a day and announced that LugRadio Live UK 08 (July 2008) would be the last ever LugRadio Live.

And then they agreed to do another last ever LugRadio Live – in October 2009. And it really is the last ever this time. It was, as usual, a brilliant event with some great talks (including Matthew Paul Thomas (@mpt) on reporting usability bugs in Ubuntu, and Gervase Markam on his first computer program) and the premiere of Tony’s Don’t Listen Alone documentary about LugRadio; all followed by a highly amusing geek kareoke in the basement of the Connaught Hotel in the evening.

It was, however, unlike previous LugRadio Lives, a one-day event. So the Ubuntu-UK Podcast and the Linux Outlaws podcast teams joined forces to put on a second one-day event, OggCamp, on the Sunday.

Venue

Because we had absolutely no idea, at the start, how many people might be interested in coming, Tony did some hunting around for venues but came to the conclusion that the official LRL hotel, the Connaught, would be best. And it would be free. That way, LRL attendees could stick around in Wolverhampton for a few hours more and nurse their hangovers in company.

I just found an email Tony sent to the OggCamp gang back in July:

In the interests of making it easy to organise…, I was thinking that some sort of unconference…would be best. We’d need to agree (and fund) a venue with ‘net access and set up some sort of website, but that should be about it. And a pithy title, we’d need a pithy title.

And that’s where it started.

Tony booked the venue, three conference rooms in the Connaught, on the collective understanding that we may never see that money again but also the hope that enough people would stick around after LRL that we’d have a respectable number of people turn up out of curiosity.

Money

As I say, the OggCamp team of seven people (Tony, Ciemon, Popey, Daviey, and me from UUPC, and Fab and Dan from LO) agreed that the venue cost would be shared between us and we accepted that we may never recoup it. But if we could recoup the costs, then we would. Also (and moreover), we wanted the day to be a little less spartan than just three conference rooms in a hotel. So we contacted people who we thought might be interested in sponsoring OggCamp, hoping that we might be able to get someone to pay for things like free soft drinks or tea/coffee for attendees throughout the day. And souvenir mugs to put the tea in.

In the end, we couldn’t provide hot drinks but the venue were fine about us bringing loads of soft drinks. Andy Smith from Bitfolk offered to sponsor the drinks. And then a couple of our sponsors said they could lend us enough digital projectors between them that we could have one in each room plus one for a TwitterFall display. It was starting to look like this could turn into something.

Over the following weeks, we got an incredible response from people and companies interested in sponsoring this brand new event. (The full list of sponsors is on the website.) By the time we got to LRL/OggCamp weekend, we had gained enough sponsorship money to cover all the costs we had incurred apart from the venue hire itself. This included things like the free drinks and stationery (little things like a cash tin and bucket for voluntary donations if they were made, and marker pens, paper, and sticky notes for the schedule sign-up grid).

We had also all agreed that we’d really really like to have the OggCamp mugs. So when we knew what sponsorship money we had, Dan found a company who could print Fab’s design on to mugs and deliver them to Popey’s in time for OggCamp weekend. We worked out that if we sold some of the mugs, we could make back the last bit of non-venue money and, if we sold a lot, we could start to make a dent in the venue hire. At any rate, we could give free mugs to the people who volunteered to help out on the day as crew, and we could each have one as a souvenir whatever happened.

Several of our sponsors had given us material prizes, like a couple of Viglen MPC-Ls (mini, low-powered computers), some Ubuntu laptop bags and hoodies, and an Arduino Mega. We hit on a great idea that would distribute the prizes in an interesting way and might help us pay for the venue: we’d have a raffle.

I’m not sure whether an Open Source event has ever taken the village fete approach to fundraising before but it seemed the perfect solution for us. So into our stationery stash went a book of 1000 raffle tickets.

Website

Meanwhile, Fab was getting us all sorted in the digital world. He speedily knocked up an OggCamp website and a very cool logo, as well as some digital badges for us all and others to strategically place in blog posts to publicise the event. Somewhere along the way we’d had a vote on names and OggCamp came out on top – it fitted the ‘pithy title’ requirement, and it chimed nicely with the fact that the two podcasts focus on the open source world and both release a .ogg (open standard) format of their episodes (the ‘camp’ part nods to the unconference/barcamp style of scheduling we were planning to adopt).

Very early on, before anyone could back out, Fab also registered an @oggcamp account on both Twitter and Identica so that we could start tweeting and denting about it.

Research

Next, Tony, Daviey, and I figured we could do with finding out a bit more about how this unconference/barcamp lark works in practice. So we used it as an excuse to nip over to Dublin to attend Laura Czajkowski’s one-day OssBarCamp. Although Laura hadn’t gone for the full unscheduled unconference event, it gave us a good idea of what you can achieve in terms of a community event on a reasonably small budget and lots of enthusiasm and community spirit.

Meanwhile, Tony was also joining regular LRL planning calls because, as in previous years, he was in charge of the AV crew for that event (sound, videoing talks, making sure speakers’ laptops work). So he was building on his insight into how the seasoned LRL organisers did things. Also, we’d all attended LRL several times, and most of us had crewed for LRL at least once. So we had that experience in hand at least.

Unfortunately, the one thing we really couldn’t research, because of the lack of time and the distance from Hampshire to Wolverhampton, was the venue itself. Tony had had to base the booking on disjointed email discussions with the hotel and printed room dimensions. All we knew was that what would become Room 1 was on the fourth floor (fifth floor if you’re in the U.S.) and the two smaller Rooms 2 & 3 were on the first floor (second floor). That separation made us slightly nervous but the hotel assured us that there was a lift right by the rooms so we envisaged people being able to nip up and down between sessions without too much trouble.

Marketing

As I’ve mentioned already, Fab got us Twitter and Identica accounts early on, as well as the OggCamp website so that we could post details about the venue and plans as we got them. We also set up a Facebook event page, which turned out really useful, if only by giving us a sense of the order of magnitude we should expect in terms of numbers (though even Facebook underestimated in the end).

We also recorded a cheesy but fun trailer to play on the podcasts to advertise OggCamp. One late night after a UUPC recording at Popey’s house, we each recorded a script that the Dan had written. Dan then produced the trailer that features in each of the episodes of UUPC and LO in the last few weeks up to OggCamp weekend.

Probably (at a guess) the most effective marketing was by the lovely LugRadio guys themselves who gave us a place on the LRL Weekend page of their website. We certainly got a few emails at the end of September from disappointed LRL fans who couldn’t get tickets for that event and wanted to let us know either that they couldn’t come to OggCamp because they hadn’t got tickets for LRL or that they would come to OggCamp despite not having tickets for LRL and could we guarantee them entry after travelling so far? We did also get emails, tweets, and dents from people who were planning to come to both events or even just for OggCamp anyway. Which was really encouraging.

We’d been pimping the event on each of the podcasts from the time we had confirmed the venue, and both podcasts had had positive feedback from listeners about the event. On the whole, we’d estimated that between the two podcasts (in particular the Linux Outlaws podcast which, like LugRadio, has an active online community based around the podcast – although UUPC has a large listener base, it was hard to know how much of our fairly diverse listenership would make the trip to Wolverhampton), we could probably rustle up at least 50 people.

By the end of September, more than 60 people had signed up to the Facebook event page to say that they would attend. Althought that’s no guarantee at all, it did suggest that we’d get a good attendance. LRL by this time, though, had given out more than 200 tickets. So we knew there’d be maybe 200 geeks in Wolverhampton on the morning of OggCamp, and while we weren’t expecting them all to stay on for OggCamp by any means, there was the possibility that they might! Our maximum capacity was 170. And we knew there were people who were coming only to OggCamp on the Sunday.

LRL at least knew that they were oversubscribed and were able to say ‘no ticket, no entry’. We of course had no idea how many might turn up and wouldn’t know until the morning itself. We did start to get a little nervous at this point about having too many people turn up instead of too few. Which is kindof a nice situation to be in but also not.

In saner moments, though, we figured we could possibly get about 100 people. Which would be a very nice, and very satisfying, number. Even more so if they each bought a mug so that we would break even and so that we wouldn’t have stacks of OggCamp mugs left over to store indefinitely in someone’s house.

And finally, our most impressive marketing came courtesy of Linux Format magazine who kindly ran a free full-page ad for OggCamp. Unbeknownst to us, they also featured us in their Community News column on the opposite page from the advert. Which was all very cool and exciting.

The final week

Aside from Tony (who’d been organising AV stuff for LRL in tandem and was, therefore, very conscious of the LRL/OggCamp weekend moving ever closer), this was when it things got really busy. All the big things (apart from when Daviey’s new baby would make an already overdue appearance) were fine (Dan had AV sorted, Tony had the venue, Fab’s design work was all done, the mugs had turned up in time and were now stacked next to the trays of soft drinks cans at Popey’s, the UUPC team all had new t-shirts and they’d arrived at Ciemon’s in plenty of time) but there were still a few things left to sort out.

So that week, most of my evenings were spent re-learning how to use Scribus and creating, with Popey over IRC and email, a set of direction signs (reversible arrow design idea ‘acquired’ from FOSDEM), signs to warn people that they may be photographed and/or recorded and not to hurt themselves while at OggCamp. As we’d not seen the venue layout, we had no idea how many we’d need so Ciemon and I just printed *a lot*. Ciemon also knocked up some cool CREW badges so that the voluntary crew members would be identifiable.

Fab came over to the UK early to do a live recording of Linux Outlaws with Dan (they’ve only met a few times in person; the first time was only last year at LugRadio Live).

And then it was just a case of packing and hoping that we hadn’t missed anything really important.