It is just over a week ago that we held our second developer day - Plings I/O (input / output). Many thanks to all those that came along and made it such a productive day, along with Becki and the Studio Venues in Manchester for making things go smoothly.
In my initial “state of play” address (which sounds far more stately than it really was!) I made a point that we had reached the point of the there being 10,000 Plings being aggregated and published by the project every week. Indeed, the contrast between this and the Developer Day last year were quite clear. Last year it was all about the idea of Plings; this year we now have the reality.
But, alongside this new level of data, we have a vibrant and active community of developers around the project. It was great to see a room of 40 people (from all over the country) get together to focus on the Plings API and the wide range of applications being developed/tested/thought of. This is our challenge – how to continue to stimulate and support such a “market”, whilst at the same time effectively sift through the volume of data.
We were joined by Matt from Hidden Creative, who gave us an enlightening talk on Augmented Reality and how that could help with promoting positive activities. And some Star Wars stuff. Many thanks Matt.
Throughout the day there was plenty of discussion, deliberation and development amongst participants. It is probably unfair to think that a room full of developers for a day would result in “something” being fully built – but here is a run down of some of the activity we witnessed, in pictures:
A round table of Drupal engineers and advocates including Luke (Ecobee), Callum (Neontribe), Simon (Colugo), Chris (Menus & Blocks) and Darran (Lancashire YPS) swap notes and code in terms of how it can work with Plings related data I/O
Iconomical demonstrate the workings of the forthcoming Plingorama (working title) widget that can be embedded into third party sites - and gather Beta testers
Pete (1UP Design) and Adrian (Synergy) take a peek behind the scenes their various Plings-related apps
Tim (Practical Participation), Andy (Norfolk Connexions) and Peter (Bolton MBC) work on code for Facebook integration
Harry (Neontribe) and Tom (PushON) delve into Boredometer stats
David from Substance leads a demo around the Plings API
Luke (Ecobee) styles a Plings tee!
More photos on Flickr - again, many thanks to all that made the day so interesting.
Developments since
In the ten days since there day, there have been a few developments that we wanted to highlight:
- Chris from Menus and Blocks blogged and published a Drupal module
- Tim put the Facebook search code onto the wiki, which Peter at Bolton implemented
- Alice started to look at Couch DB and Plings
- Callum from Neontribe started to prepare the Layar app for release
- Liz from Iconomical blogged in relation to their Plings widget
- We’ve organised an event in Manchester on the 8th July to start Young Rewired State Manchester
Please join the developer mailing list to tell us more. Again, we found it really rewarding to bring everyone together. The cakes were not bad either!
In case you may be wondering, “let a 100 flowers bloom” (encourage many ideas from many sources) was an original phrase from Chairman Mao, but has been re purposed by Anthony Wilson and Clay Shirky amongst many others!
I do not work for NeonTribe I work for Ecobee!
Naughty.
Doh. I’ve edited it.