Tom Hume

I've just spent a long weekend, and my first few nights under canvas in 2010, at the wonderful Playgroup Festival.

It was kinda special; Playgroup are a little collective of Brighton folks who put on interesting themed club nights (like the Blind Tiger Speakeasy). Somehow they managed to get the use of some land out past Crowborough, and constructed a small but perfectly formed event to hold on it. It was advertised in an unusual fashion: the line-up and location were both kept secret, the former until a couple of days before (I suspect they saved it to drive last-minute ticket sales), the latter right until arrival: we boarded a Big Lemon bus in Brighton with no idea of where we were headed.

Even the journey itself was a bit of an adventure: I met up with Ellen and we trundled down to the Pav Tav to collect our tickets. Arriving a little late for the bus, we bumped into Amy of Young Hanoverians fame and delicately applied the miniscule amounts of peer pressure necessary to persuade her to come along. Someone naughty had managed to find their way into a spare bus which had been abandoned by its driver, so we camped out there for a little while before mounting our actual steed, meeting and greeting a few of the other folks who were coming along.

The setting was idyllic: set on a rolling pasture surrounded by woods, with the borders less aggressively policed than some festivals I've been to. You could happily meander off and go for a wander, particularly if there weren't any security folks looking in your particular direction at the time.

The first night we camped out at the Victorian Freak-show which Jake Spicer and Ophelia Fancy were putting on. Amy kicked off the evening by shouting at everyone in German, reading a poem about fucking a dolphin and forcing us all to play stick-in-the-mud - a challenging game within the confines of a 20 foot square tent. Ms Dubberley Made Herself Apparent. Then the freaks themselves paraded before us, eliciting gasps of horror and whoops of approval, topped with the occasional inappropriate proposition from the less well-bred members of the audience. Bravo to all concerned.

I retired shortly after all this excitement, my nerves shattered and my mind twisted out of shape by the horrors I'd witnessed. Actually, I felt a bit ill, but it passed quickly and by the next day I was chipper once more.

Saturday started slowly, with a full breakfast from the cafe, followed by half an hour getting stuck into Soldiers and Ghosts back at the campsite. A short spell of rain tapping against the outer canvas set me snoozing, but I woke up in time to wander over to the clowning workshop, led by Danny and a few chums down from a clown school in London. We warmed up with some fun exercises, including "The Samurai Game" (which tickled me for aikidocal reasons), and producing an 8-person sex machine: a pulsing, synchronised loop of individual carnal motions contributed by each one of us, the speed of which was controlled by Danny "conducting" the machine. This all broke the ice and got us pretty comfortable in each others company, and was a great lead-in to the main event: donning the classic red nose and performing a song in front of the group, whilst slowly sitting down onto a balloon until it burst. This one was surprisingly tough - we were strongly encouraged to make eye contact with every member of our audience throughout our performance. There was nowhere to hide, no space for embarrassment over your vocal abilities to creep into. I've a new respect for clowns, cemented by a later conversation with one of the workshop attendees who'd been attending a militaristic-sounding mime school. 5 hours training a day? For 3 years? Jeepers.

I'd had a laugh, made a fool of myself, and warmed up physically, which really set me up for the rest of the day. We wandered back to the tents and got costumed up; like most Britons, we needed only the barest excuse to don animal outfits. Donkey and mouse soon busied themselves meandering from stall to band to stall to tent to band to stall. On the way through I drank my first chai (mmm chai), bumped into some Unexpected And Most Welcome Chums, and experienced the most sharply off-kilter experience of my life. Never again will I cradle a red pig wrapped in swaddling clothes to my ear as a French Fop sings beautiful songs about soup down a hose attached to its umbilicus. Then bands and dancing, with particular thanks to Carnival Collective, Brighton stalwarts who I'd never managed to catch before, and a couple of hours spent with a burgeoning crowd around a camp fire at the centre of the site. Here, as the hour grew late, a band struck up and were joined by individual musicians who'd fortunately brought their tools to the site, and regailed us all with song.

Sunday was a more relaxed affair, the morning spent alternating between book and tea and the afternoon dozing in front of a selection of bands and watching the world go past, before slowly packing up, saying goodbye, and taking the bus home. I don't think I've ever been on a happier bus.

Reading this back, I've missed out so much - the clockwork wonders that Peter of The Three of Clubs produces; the robot-dancing child; the Exciting Theme Park Ride; the Mad Hatters Tea Party; electro-metal at Bust The Box; the synchronised alien aerobics; the Giant Head; and much more. Those Playgroup folks know how to fill a weekend to the brim.

It was an absolutely magical weekend, and - like any great party - I ended it feeling exhausted, invigorated, and a few friends up. If you know me In Real Life you'll understand that from a cynical old curmudgeon like myself, there can be no higher praise. I'm already looking forward to next year, and thinking of things I can do to get involved and help out. Playgroup has a goal of "100% participation", and I can't help feeling that the high ratio of participants to attendees is one of the things that made it so great.

Golly, I've not written anything here in a month or so. Time for an update:

• After losing the mighty Mary Nolan to antipodean climes (if you are in Australia: hire her FAST), we're looking for a new Product Owner. The quality of candidates we've had so far has pleased us mightily, we're interviewing at the moment and it's going to be a tough decision.
• Did I forget to mention that we hired a new ScrumMaster a few months ago? After an 8-year break, Cori Samuel (FP Employee #1 back in 2001) has returned to the fold and taken charge of keeping our teams and process singing: two wheels of our cart.
• Two of our products are doing quite nicely, thankyou. Roulette Cricket has been featured in the "What's Hot" list by Apple for a little while now and has passed 80,000 downloads; the app is also now brought to you through sponsorship from BlueSquare, the gambling site. Meanwhile the Guardian Anywhere has now had more than 16,000 downloads with a retained audience of over 6,300 - and we've distributed more than 300,000 copies of the Guardian to this audience, with more than 50,000 in the last 3 weeks.
• We're heads down on a a couple of really interesting projects: new operating systems, new hardware, new design metaphors, exposing genuinely useful services to a new audience, and a pleasing physical/digital mix. I should be able to talk about one of these quite soon, and I'm looking forward to showing them off - they're looking gorgeous.
• I'm spending a bit more time than usual in London, helping some new friends lovingly kick in some doors (mainly advertising agency doors). Our Proposal Engine is humming nicely.
• Magazines and publishing are occupying a lot of neurons right now. With respect to m'learned friends at BERG (whose Popular Science is a thing of great beauty and gets lots of stuff right), I don't think that anyone has quite cracked this yet, and I'm hoping we get a chance to play here.
• Future Platforms will be 10 years old next month. This is both wonderful and terrifying, I'm hoping we can find an appropriate way to celebrate this.

Also - some interesting stuff I've been meaning to link to:

• I thought the Old Spice campaign was fantastic - the sheer frivolity tickled me, of coruse, but the live element of it also pessed a few buttons. For me it's another data point on a line we've plotted between Ghosty and Roulette Cricket. I'm looking forward to seeing the first mobile-first campaign like this. I'm hoping we get to do that one.
• The era of online anonymity as default may be coming to an end: "Standing behind your words, owning them and the consequences they have on others, is part of adult communication. And it’s time that communication on the Internet grew up a little."
• Fake, a tool for test automation on the Mac.
• How we built teleport, an intelligent counterpoint to the "price-em-low, shift units" mentality which dominates app sales today. It seems common-sense that there will be successes with many different pricing strategies.
• What an iAd looks like. I'm really curious to see whether the response rates from iAds will justify the much higher production costs, or whether Apple are going to carve out and own "brand" advertising and leave response to Google.
• Zero tolerance for latency: "For classical medias, we are just seeing the beginning of a vast catching-up phase. In doing so, the incumbents face digital native challengers that are way more skilled than they are in dealing with interfaces and with zero latency delivery."

This months favourite new blog? The Ad Contrarian. Favourite new Tweeter? The sadly-quiet Brignumeeja, who seemed to fall over just as they were getting started. A shame, some of the scene here would benefit from a bit of a dressing-down and taking itself less seriously.

A couple of weeks back I wandered along to Write Club, a night that James and Ellen have kicked off, hosted by the mighty Skiff. The format intrigued me - we were to be shown a photograph, then given a very short amount of time to write a story based on it: 15 minutes, then 10, then 5, then 2. Over the last 6 months I've been really interested in extremely constrained creativity, and I've been routinely surprised by how much gets achieved by teams participating in the Mobile Mountains workshops I've been running... so the format was very appealing, and perhaps less intimidating than I might otherwise have found it.

I don't think I'd written any fiction - other than proposals and press releases - since I was 13 years old, and despite doing a fair bit of public speaking, I was pretty nervous about reading my work out. James very kindly prefixed the event with a stern warning that there were to be no apologies - a staple of spoken-word events, I understand - and I felt that the timeboxed format gave me a convenient excuse for any misgivings I might have over the quality of my work. Even with that, I can't claim to be happy with it - I found myself routinely heading in the same direction, overly clever-clever stories which spend too much effort trying to be twisty, shocking or rude. Ah well - it was interesting to observe myself heading down the same track again and again, even when I was trying not to, and encourages me to work on developing a bit of breadth.

I've posted my stories, together with the photos that inspired them, below; and I'm looking forward to the next event already :)

The Harpooning of the Synchronised Swimmer (15 minutes) "My dad and I, we've been doing it for years... and he did it with his dad. I'm making it sound like a tradition, but really I think it's just us, we've got a bit of a taste for it. I'd be lying if I didn't say I enjoyed it.

We go out late at night; before the early morning fishermen slide their boats down the rough shingle and out into the water, we're already a few miles out. Dad knows where they go - says the sea tells him, affecting a slight cod-sailor lilt as he does so. Me, I think he's nuts but I don't like to say anything.

Sometimes we'll see none for three, four days, and then we'll hit a shoal, sliding in and out of the water, showing off to each other. It's a bit weird seeing them out in the cold green water under the smokey-grey sky: indoors is kinder for them, they have a much better life there.

My grandpa once caught eight of them, flapping away in eerie unison, still miming at one another 'n' slamming their pouty gobs open and shut as he harpooned them, one at a time, dragged them onto the wet deck and tenderly clubbed them unconscious for the ride home.

We get them back and pile them off the boat, make sure they're they'll all still compus, then it's down a back-alley at the docks to a man who knows a man who knows a man. He say takes them up to a lockup in Gatwick then it's abroad with 'em - I hear Moscow and Eastern Europe are popular these days. We don't get the best price, but it's better than a kick in the teeth; a pair will sell for more than double, a quad can make the month.

I saw the quad again, on the telly - 2008 I think, Beijing - only for a brief flash as I was flicking channels. I recognised the scar dad's barb in one of the four legs as they lifted out of the water as one, then I switched over for Hollyoaks."

Shitrag migration (10 minutes)

Morning breaks. Nothing on the mat.

"Fucking lazy fucking bastard paperboy, sacked off for the morning, no bloody respect" he grumbles, voice falling unsteadily from outrage to nothing as a month-old stain of ketchup catches his attention and derails his train of thought.

3 hours pass. Not even a bill, not even a flyer advertising window cleaners or new local sellers of pizza.

"Fucking bastard postie, fucking striking bollocks", he opines, to no-one in particular, and no-one nods quietly in agreement.

Bereft of any contact with the outside world but not really missing it all that much, he shuffles around the filthy flat. He can't find the takeaway menu - where'd she put it this time? So he cobbles together a filthy lunch, and for dessert repairs upstairs to enjoy a characteristically unpleasant 3pm bowel motion - relief followed by the crushing disappointment and then shame that only a hollow cardboard tube can bring.

As the sun crawls down the horizon and he settles down filthed in front of countdown, creases stretch out and thin triangular wings start to flex. Briefly darkening the view through the back window, the origami flock rises as one and heads 180 degrees off magnetic north for the long flight home.

Reluctant Ringmaster (5 minutes)

"Roll up, roll up, see the artist! Marvel at his brushmanship! Wonder at his innovative use of oils! Quake at the implied satire of his imagery!"

The top hat is unnecessarily OTT and slightly patronising. Plus it's dark and it's wet and it's late and I want to go inside and curl up with a ham sandwich, a jammy dodger, and Radio 1, but he says I'm not allowed to until it's done.

I bash out an especially unpleasant caricature of a rotund women who's brought her two children to see me. She shrieks, her eyes well up and they slope off, leaving 6 neat puddles of tears.

I get the night off.

Statue Pipe (2 minutes)

I been here 200 years, protected by Arts Council funding and a large umbrella-like structure which keeps the worst of the rain off and offers protection to the crowd which inevitably gathers beneath my chin in a storm. Penniless artists touch me up on occasion, keeping me fresh.

And then there's the museum next door, new plumbing, grade 1 listed over my grade 2, and I'm half-blinded by the new drain running through my left eye.

Miles and I wandered along to The Future of Collaboration last night, there to meet up with 50% of the local digital/software/whatever community to hear a panel discussion with Nico MacDonald, Michael Bull and Cory Doctorow. It's an event being run as part of the Battle of Ideas season, by the Institute of Ideas. Good speakers, a hot topic: expectations were high. I took a few patchy notes.

Cory kicked off with the first in a volley of excellent soundbites, observing that predictions of the future tend to say more about the predictor than they do about the future. The internet is "the worlds best copying machine". It's become so important to businesses and governments that it can't be shut down, even during events like the Myanmar riots of last year - because large influential corporations like oil companies aren't, in fact, oil companies, they're IT companies that happen to move oil around. I didn't find this analogy particularly helpful; given that all IT companies need people (even Google have sysadmins), isn't it just as accurate to say they're all HR companies that happen to shift XYZ around?

Michael Bull was up next - I've wanted to see him speak for some time. If you've not heard of the guy he's been christened "Dr iPod" after spending a long time looking at how the device affects us - and writing a book on the topic. Michael's been looking at things more from a consumption point of view - comparing the rise of universal collaboration to the collapse of communism leaving nothing but capitalism as an option: collaboration is all there is. He clearly has some doubts over the fundamentally positive view of this technology which Cory was promoting, referencing a UNESCO report which found that use of communications technology in children was both inversely proportional to their happiness, and led to their difficulty in determining who to trust. "The more you use technology to mediate a community, the more multisensory experience you lose", said Michael, and despite being an enthusiastic digital over-sharer myself I found it hard to disagree. I'm not alone, apparently we each spend on average 27 hours a day using technology (if you double-count hours where we simultaneously use more than one device, e.g. mobile and TV - yes, my pedantrometer was tingling at this point, but I saved it for later). "We're all existentially alone together", Michael ended, noting that most people talk to on average 8 others with any regularity, and that seeing others talking when you're not leads to feelings of isolation. Michael took a circumspect view of things, and whilst I didn't feel he presented as attractive a case as Cory, I was left wanting to dig into his book and understand the points he was making better - they felt like they had some depth which couldn't be easily explored in this format of discussion.

Nico was up last, and as one might expect from a Register journalist, deftly cut into a few of the earlier points made - particularly those by Cory. He laid into the inappropriate reuse of terminology: applying the label "open source" to things which are merely broken and which you want to make better, e.g. politics, is both unhelpful and does an injustice to the nuances of the original idea. Beneath my calm exterior, I transformed, Manimal-style, into a sea-lion and started yelping and clapping in an uncontrolledly excited fashion. There's a lot of hype around sharing and collaboration, said Nico, because the industries most affected by it are the media, publishing and software: we got this stuff first and have a tendency to talk it up, but many people live predominately in the physical world and have a different set of concerns. He then made what I thought was a comparitively weak point about open source being fundamentally contributed to by people who should either be doing their day jobs, or spending time with friends and families in the evenings. I found this unconvincing, given the resource that companies like IBM, Oracle, Intel and Firefox are putting into open source projects. Similarly, he talked about open source replicating what's already out there rather than doing anything new, and being poor for work that can't be readily tested like user interface. Cory made a good rebuttal later on this point: all UI is pretty awful with the exception of two or three (cough Apple cough). I'd extend Cory's point to apply to replication: very little software from any source is doing anything truly new, and I could think of a few examples of open source innovation (Quicksilver and the web itself spring to mind).

Nico talked about sharing through social media being a form of affirming ones existence publicly - "I share, therefore I am", and ended his speech with what I felt was a very interesting point: that historically the friction in communications gave ideas time to develop, and that losing this friction might be a Bad Thing. I wonder if, just as Dopplr digitally conjures serendipity, we might end up producing digital artifacts which deliberately introduce or simulate friction. The closest example I can think of to this is the GMail "undo sending" function - where Google essentially lies to you, telling you your email has been sent when it hasn't, such that you can then postpone sending with for a short window of time. It's cheap and dishonest (not traditionally the characteristics of good software), but it's all for your own good - and it's a tremendously useful feature.

The panel debated a little from this point, with a few questions from the audience (fewer than I'd have liked, compared to the number of sometimes-vague points the audience chose to make). My notes and memory get hazy here, but Cory talked about the breadth of blogging content dwarfing the size of the publishing industry; Michael snugly pointed out that "we get the technologies we deserve and incorporate them into existing patterns of behaviour"; and Nico talked about our love of open source perhaps stemming from a societal distrust of authority, and pointed out that most social services don't succeed in giving people the self-actualisation they seek in using them. Instead they're used for showing off, rather than contributing to a collaborative work.

Cory again delivered a few excellent (and valid) soundbites: we have a temptation to treat everything as a destination, not a journey - which is like judging sex by what's left on the sheets afterwards: writing fan fiction can be more fun than reading it. He then spoke about the wrenching pace of technical change, and the need for business models than can last 3 months and then be revised. I found this last point really quite naive - as if the only thing that affects a business is the technology that enables or assists it, and as if inertia doesn't also come from how said business presents itself to the structures around it (customers, competitors), and engages with them over time. I'm sure some businesses may be able to reinvent themselves rapidly, but I don't see how it's necessary for all of them to do this. Perhaps this is the moment I shall look back on in 20 years time and murmur wistfully, "That was when I got too old, and Stopped Getting It". I hope not.

Michael drew some analogies with Czech writers in the 70s and 80s who transmitted their ideas in novels wrapped up and concealed inside paper bags; with communism gone they had nothing to write about, and there's a nostalgia for this time in a world where information flows so freely and easily. He talked about universities who had started giving pupils iPods as educational tools stopping the experiment, as public spaces in schools turned from areas of conversation and discussion into the areas where individuals chose to cocoon themselves with music. And he gave some examples from his own experience around digital media: when they podcasted lectures at Sussex University, attendance dropped 20% without any evidence that the podcasts were being listened to.

Nico popped onto the innovation bus briefly, opining that bringing together the best of what's out there is not innovation (though Apple seem to have done a very good job of just that, and get showered with the I word as a result). Mindful of predictions of imminent (or even current) wrenching technological change, he pointed out that our great-grandparents lived through the move from agrarian to industrial civilisation - surely a much more profound change than the Internet has delivered? And he talked about British culture, in particular, not yet understanding the profundity of having canonical information available in one place.

I left the event early, pausing only to embarrass myself in a pathetic display of pedantry; but I ended up feeling that maybe the panelists were having discussions along different axes. No-one seemed to be arguing that the scale of collaboration hadn't gotten larger as a result of the Internet, the points from Nico seemed to be fundamentally "yes it has but it doesn't make as much difference as the media likes to say", Michael said "yes it has but maybe that's not all good", and Cory "yes, and you'd better hold on because it's going to be an amazing and scary ride".

Were I to be sat on this imaginary rollercoaster with one of the panelists, I'd choose Cory, because fairground rides are more fun in enthusiastic company - but I suspect that his enthusiasm might not be too comforting to someone like myself, who's scared shitless on rollercoasters (even metaphorical ones, sometimes). The opportunity for global collaboration seems to be there, but even the poster child for online collaboration, Wikipedia, doesn't seem to have taken advantage of this scale:

Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

By comparison, the Apollo moon landing programme - predating the Internet - employed 400,000 people. I wonder what it is that Wikipedia is not fit to hold the sandals of, and can't help but be a teensy bit excited.

Stats from dating site OKCupid: "despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well"

Tom Watson on opening UK postcodes: "I like to think that the liberation of public information in re-usable formats using open standards is an agenda shared between progressives in both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. At the heart of the debate is a profound belief that citizens should have a greater say over the public services they use."

Does the iPhone app store actually sell that much?: "This isn't to say that the iPhone App Store is a failure. In fact, I'd argue it's been a huge success in making the iPhone significantly more valuable. But as evidence that there's a huge market out there of people willing to pay for content if it's just packaged up nicely? There's just not enough there to be convincing."

Letter from a postie about the current Post Office shenanigans: "The Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures. This is how it is being done."

More on generative music, this time making audio from the internal operations of programs;

Coping with change on Scrum projects - advice for testers: "With concepts such as TDD and BDD, the testing effort has shifted from a traditionally tail ended process to a front ended process and as a result quality is built in right from the start."

How to present whilst people are twittering: "Presenting while people are twittering is challenging. But isn’t it better to get that feedback in real-time when you can do something to retrieve the situation – than wait till you read the evaluation sheets a few days after the conference – and find that you bombed?"

Nokia are working on AR language translation: "you know you’re living in the freaking future when you can point your phone at a bunch of alien characters and have them magically make sense"

Ghost in the field, lovely visualisations of RFID fields, reminiscent of Dunne & Raby;

The ultimate uncluttered tube map: "the whole network distilled into three lines and twelve stops"

Simon Maddox has very kindly published the stats from his 0870 app for the iPhone; not sure if it's reasonable, but I found it quite shocking that an app which was downloaded and used to such an extend generated so little in ad revenue ($680.82 in two weeks);

Sketching in hardware: "We are coming from years of passiveness to the possibilities of designing and modifying pretty much everything around us"

Joh and I ran a dry run for our Agile2009 workshop tonight, held at the mighty Skiff in the North Laine, Brighton... and after a frantic day of last-minute prep, I was quietly pleased with how it went.

The session opened with a few slides setting the scene about mobile. These definitely need some work - whilst I know the material quite well, I hadn't prepped them and it showed. I waffled somewhat, but fortunately at such a speed that it was over quickly for the audience, and we could get on with the meat of the workshop: exploring how an iterative design process can help address the kind of constraints that mobile inevitably entails handling.

We split into two groups - with 9 attendees this gave us teams of 4 and 5 respectively. Persona in hand and product concept in mind, one team headed upstairs and the other stayed downstairs, each spending 15 minutes designing a product with the aid of copious amounts of card, post-it notes, the ubiquitous Sharpies and some rather natty 1.5x sized replica mobile phones my dad and his girlfriend had put together for the session. After 15 minutes we halted the groups and swapped one member between them, to act as a test subject for a 5-minute usability test... after which the groups convened to show off their work, and the results of the test, in a short demo session.

Constraints were introduced, with each team having to transpose their product to a new device and form factor. Then rinse, repeat: another 15-minute design session followed by 10 minutes of demos, and a 10-minute run through to discuss learnings.

After the shaky start of my slides, I was pleasantly surprised by how things went: both teams managed to produce a useful design and test it within 25 minutes. One team definitely received worthwhile feedback from their test subject, the other got some but were less sure of its value. In any case, the notion that a group of people could go from zero to a coherent and in some way tested prototype in such a short space of time was both heart-warming and genuinely impressive... and I couldn't point at domain knowledge or mobile experience as being the cause of this success, with both Ribot and Mary (the participants with a background in mobile) located within one team, and no mobile experience in the other.

Learnings from the session displayed a comforting level of consistency between the two groups, too: both felt that moving to a smaller screen lent their design more focus, and that working within tighter constraints contributed to their creativity, rather than detracting from it. Time limits were clearly a problem (how could they not be?), and whilst one group found cross-platform consistency to be a tough trick to pull off, the other observed that their design changed less than they'd have anticipated in the move from iPhone to clamshell.

Both groups then consented to exchange beer for a pile of incredibly useful feedback, which we'll be using to further hone the session before running it in Chicago. And one comment which really chuffed me up was overhearing participants moot that firstly, this format might be an interesting way to open up a Hack Day type of event; and secondly, that he'd really like to see the product he'd worked on *actually get built*.

As always, thanks to Jon Markwell of Inuda and the Skiff for hosting, to Joh for gently stamping on some of my more ridiculous ideas and her rock-steady facilitation, and to everyone who came and participated :) There's a photo-set, yellow-hued thanks to my grotty HTC lens, here.

Update: slides from the warmup are here.

So, it's that time again. We're exceptionally busy and have won a few new projects and clients in the last month or two - with no sign of business slowing. So we're on the look-out for staff again. We're after a few different souls:

• Developers, ideally with some commercial experience of mobile (J2ME, Android or iPhone), and familiarity with or experience working in an agile environment (if you read this blog you'll know we're a quite formal Scrum shop). You'll have a strong appreciation for the role user experience plays in the software development process. You'll obviously be excellent.
• Mid- to senior-level designers; we'd be open to considering someone without commercial mobile experience, but you'll definitely need a strong background in digital media and a genuine enthusiasm for mobile. We're after someone with a mix of visual and interaction skills - we think the line between the two is blurred, and we like it that way. You'll have to be willing to get your hands dirty and learn a little about how your designs are actually implemented. Strong communication skills will be vital.
• QA - and specifically, someone interested in QA as a career path in its own right, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone to a development job. Over the last couple of years we've developed a huge appreciation for thorough, pedantic, devious, downright cruel QA folks who can find obscure bugs with which to taunt our developers, all in the nicest possible way of course. Someone with experience of both manual and automated testing would be a bonus; double points if you've worked in an agile environment before.

For all roles, you'll be working from our offices in central Brighton, and be very comfortable working in a cross-disciplinary team. You can have a look at our site to get a feel for what we do if you like, though I'll warn you that it's horrendously out of date and gives only a vague feel for where we're headed... We offer good salaries and an opportunity to work on *huuuge* software products which touch the lives of literally millions of people, for a global client base. We like to travel - earlier this year most of the company spent 2 weeks camped out in Shenzhen, China, kicking off a project for Microsoft - but it's not in any way compulsory. We also make a point of allowing time for personal development and R&D, and do some reasonably off-the-wall projects: birdwatching, ghost hunting, and location-based gaming have all decorated our portfolio. Drop an email to recruitment@futureplatforms.com if you're interested, and we'll have a chat. Unless you're a recruitment agency of course, in which case stop reading right now and please avoid the temptation to get in touch, even if you're completely unlike all the other agencies and incredibly special in a way that you can't quite describe without sound like just another bloody recruitment agency. Honestly - every time I post a job advert and politely say "no agencies please" I'm assaulted by a tidal wave of dull phone calls from recruiters who seem to think that by ignoring me completely they'll somehow persuade me to pay them fees, and it's all gotten a bit boring.

ScrumFest is coming to Brighton! 8th and 9th July, at The Werks in Hove. Well worth checking out if you're interested in this sort of thing, also take a look at the WelfareCSM workshops Tobias Mayer is running just beforehand, with the dual aims of introducing Scrum to organisations beyond the software world, and getting training to folks who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. Lovely.

I forgot to post about BOGFest - Brighton Outdoor Gaming Festival, the inaugural event of which was held last weekend in Brunswick Square - curated by Richard Vahrman of Locomatrix fame.

There was a programme of events running all afternoon; after a diary clash with a 5th birthday party, I managed to make it along at 4, missing Tai Chi Twister and Clock the Doc but arriving just in time to kick off some games of Fruit Farmer, one of the Locomatrix formats.

It was really interesting seeing Real People playing Fruit Farmer. We cheated completely, of course, and presented each player with a phone and GPS unit that had been preconfigured with the application installed - in real life they'd have to do this themselves, which we know to be a bit of a barrier (though the geocaching crowd seem to use applications on occasion, so it's not completely out of the question).

We had 6 pairs of players run off for a game. All bar one of the pairs managed to locate themselves quickly and orient themselves against the on-screen map - working out what direction they had to run in to do anything useful. A few players noted that their position was a little laggy, and we were slightly embarrassed to find out that the game layout we'd chosen for the day was slightly too large for the playing area - meaning that players would've had to climb onto the roofs of local buildings to collect a few of the larger pieces of fruit. Memo to self: next time, check map first.

But that said, players seemed to enjoy the game - particularly some of our younger participants:

Also throughout the day we had some treasure hunts running, a scavenger hunt at the end of the day, and Tristan brought along his Hunt the Wumpus QR-code game - he's written a great post on how it went for him, which you can find here.

Time constraints meant that I never got to show off ArchaeoloGPS, the game I've been doodling with recently. Perhaps next year... :)

Update: quite a few of the posts I write relating to our work at FP are lengthy. I'm going to try summarising them up top, to highlight points of interest and help you decide if the whole thing's worth reading.

What we learned:

1. Retrospectives work better off-site, when you have a projector handy for demos;
2. Two small teams work better than one large team;
3. QA involvement has been "bursty", leading to lots of pressure at the end of sprints;
4. Flat burndown charts could be a serious warning - some thought required!

Today was our first review and planning day with the new two-team Future Platforms, and to give ourselves a bit more space to stretch out, we tried holding the morning session at The Skiff - a coworking space run by the Inuda folks a couple of streets away from our offices.

The facilities there were excellent. As well as more space we had walls to stick postits onto with (and lots of visibility, room to walk around, etc.), a projector, and beanbags galore. All of this - plus being in an unusual space away from the usual workplace - made a big difference.

The review went well, with our two teams (Anjuna and Tonberry) demonstrating projects they've been working on for Microsoft and the BBC respectively. Compared to the limited visibility you get by passing a couple of handsets around a room, having 5 foot tall on-screen demos felt like heaven... and the demonstrations themselves seemed to "flow" a little more than in previous reviews. If only I could talk a little more about their content; as usual, NDAs have my lips sewn shut. Unusually, our design team weren't presenting their work this time around - much of it has involved supporting the development teams (and was therefore visible in the dev team demos), and South by Southwest had taken its toll on our design resource over the last fortnight....

I was really looking forward to the retrospective, and wasn't disappointed. The near-unanimous view from both teams was that splitting the company into two had been a success. Each team felt more focussed on their respective projects, had been less affected by context switching, and found stand-ups both quicker and more useful. Even better, we could see measurable and significant improvement in the productivity of the company split into two teams (vs all being in one team).

One issue which was surfaced by 4 different people was that of planning and testing time. We have a persistent experience where testing effort bunches up towards the end of sprints - so that at the start of each fortnight there's sometimes not enough for our dedicated testers to do, and at the end of the fortnights too much.

My own tendency is to attack this problem by trying to spread the load of testing more evenly throughout the sprint (encouraging units of work - user stories in our case - to be taken through development and testing to done before starting on others) and having other team members help out with some of the testing work when there's too much (whilst some of it demands the eager eye and magic software-breaking fingers of a good QA specialist, I feel there are areas where the rest of us can usefully pitch in). We had a fairly lively debate on this one, and didn't reach a useful conclusion. In particular I had hoped to bring in some of the limiting-in-phases techniques Karl Scotland covered in his recent Kanban presentation (also held at the Skiff), but we didn't reach consensus on adopting this - so I'll give it another go next time around.

Burndown charts also stimulated a bit of conversation. I'd experienced a worrying few days with Anjuna mid-sprint, when progress on getting stories to completion was minimal even as the team frantically worked on a core section of the product... and I'd found myself noting a problem but stuck on what to usefully do about it. In the end the team pulled through and delivered, but I'm left feeling slightly worried; we've had sprints in the (thankfully distant) past where a flat-lined burndown continued right to the end, thanks to my ignoring the signs. Putting a positive spin on it, the worst that we'll ever do is experience a single unproductive fortnight, but even that would feel like a huge opportunity wasted. More thought required.

Finally, on design; last sprint we opted out of planning it formally, this time around we're officially embedding the design team with Anjuna, where they can crack on with pushing that particular product forward together (and without distractions from other projects).

A solid day; we saw the juicy fruits of our work, had some productive discussions on how to get better, persuaded a sizable chunk of the company to come out for gyoza etc, planned in two teams' worth of work for a fortnight, and still managed to finish dead on 6pm. Considering that a year ago planning days were regularly overrunning and leaving us all half-dead, with a smaller team, it's great to see how we're improving. On that particular point, it's amazing what benefit an hour or so of working up a sprint backlog for each team the day before planning can deliver...

Thanks as usual to Joh for her facilitation of the retrospective, and to the Skiffers for hosting us!