dConstruct 2008: part one
Last week I made the annual pilgrimage to Brighton for dConstruct - one of the UK’s leading grass-roots Web conferences. Now in its fourth year, the theme of the conference this time was “Designing the social Web”, a topic increasingly of relevance to what we do at IOP Publishing.
“Social Software” is merely software that gets better the more people use it; it’s not necessarily about creating the next Facebook or MySpace, and many (though not all) sites could benefit from social features. While we, as a company, have dabbled in several of the Social Web’s themes (blogs, commenting, registration, social bookmark links etc.) and have oft-stated aims of engaging with communities of interest in the world of Physics, it’s probably fair to say that our efforts have been piecemeal and not informed by any overall Social Web strategy. I could start going off on one about the need for multi-disciplinary Web teams, but I’ll save that for BathCamp at the weekend…
In previous years, I’ve come away from the dConstruct conference wanting more depth; 45-minute sessions are necessarily biased towards an overview or taster of any given topic. This year, I booked onto Joshua Porter’s workshop “Social Web Design: from Strategy to Interface” in order to get a bit more substance.
I left Bristol on Wednesday afternoon, taking a slightly odd train journey via Bristol Parkway and Reading. Four hours later, I was in Brighton. A taxi ride took me to the hotel (Kemp Townhouse), which was small but perfectly formed; after checking in, I wandered out for food. Knowing that geeks and healthy food were unlikely to be in close proximity over the following days, I chose Sawadee, a Thai restaurant in St. James’ Street where I had a new experience: asking for a table for one. No matter, though; the next two days were bound to give plenty of social interaction so some peace and quiet was welcome, and the food was tasty but relatively healthy: Thai fishcakes followed by pan-fried cod in a sweet-and-sour sauce with rice.
After that, I returned to the hotel to get some rest before the learning-and-networking onslaught to follow.
To be continued…