Guardian SXSW Hack Weekend 2011

Over the weekend of February 12th/13th The Guardian hosted a two day hackathon.  The purpose of which was to consider the obstacles faced by journalists and reporters whilst covering events such as SXSW.  An alternate, slightly broader objective was to simply build "cool shit".  Jemima Kiss from The Guardian explains more about the event here.

In the build up to the hack weekend I'd been thinking about the kind of problem I'd like to tackle.  A problem which seemed to be particularly relevant for SXSW due to the sheer number bands playing, 1,900+ over 5 days, was figuring out who to go and see.  Looking at the SXSW schedule is a daunting task to find out about bands you've never heard of – and lets face it, out of 1,900 bands there gonna be quite a few who are new to you.

Since picking up my ticket for SXSW I've been busy finding out about who's playing.  This has typically consisted of a lot time on LastFM, creating a Spotify playlist, reading up on Wikipedia entries, and generally soaking up what the web has to offer.  All of which has been fun, but not something that I want to do for all 1,900 bands.

So coming into the hack weekend I thought it might be cool to have something which listed all the bands playing at a festival and against each one pulled in information associated to the band from across the web displaying it all in one place.  Combining this information with the location, date and time of the gig would then allow me to build up a schedule of who I wanted to see.  I also wanted someway of recording my notes about the band that could then be shared with others.

All of this sounds pretty doable, but not being a programmer I wasn't sure where to start!  Thankfully I was able to buddy up with Ben Nickolls and Paul Tanner who were both interested in tackling the same problem.

Over the course of the two days what we were building changed approach a couple times due to reasons partially technical, partially through time constraints and partially through my realisation that trying to learn (basic) JavaScript at 4am wasn't cool.

What we ended up with at the end of the weekend was a two-pronged solution.  A webapp built using jQTouch that uses data provided from both Robbie Clutton's and Matt Andrews's APIs to display a list of all the bands playing at SXSW and then a breakdown of a suggested schedule based upon your LastFM listening habits (a massive thank you to Robbie and Matt for providing the APIs).  From the webapp you can see some basic information about the band and if you wanted more you could then click through to a more detailed view where you can also add your own notes to be shared with others.

The detailed view of the band we built using TiddlySpace where with the help of Paul Downey's LastFM plugin it pulls in information relating to that band.  It still needs a bit of love but we hope to continue working on it over the next few days, you can keep track of what we do here and at gsxsw.tiddlyspace.com.

Overall the hack weekend was incredible fun and although I left feeling exhausted I'm eager for the next one to come around.  I learnt a huge amount over the two days and made some great new friends.  Some awesome hacks were built and you can see the full list here.

Oh, and we also got so cool retro swag:

My top albums of 2010

Seeing as everyone else seems to be doing it I figured that I may as well put down my top 10 albums of 2010.  Here's the list in a rough ten through to one. No laughing please.

10 - Learning (Perfume Genius)

http://myspace.com/kewlmagik

9 – I'm New Here (Gil ~Scott-Heron)

http://gilscottheron.net/

 

8 – Causers Of This (Toro Y Moi)

http://toroymoi.blogspot.com/

7 – So Runs the World Away (Josh Ritter)

http://joshritter.com/

Oxjam takeover of Brixton

Anyone who's been near me over the past few months will no doubt have heard me talk about Brixton Oxjam, an event taking place on October 23rd, 2010 that I'm helping to organise.  Over the past four months much of my time outside of work has been taken up with a host of activities in preparation of the event.  We are now just four short weeks away and still with plenty to do I thought I'd write a short post about why I got involved.

Of course the best way to experience the event will be to come along and join in the fun.  And it just so happens you can get yourself a ticket from here.

Wherever I've lived I've always enjoyed getting involved in some form of community aspect.  Living in Three Bridges I helped out as a coach and team manager for Crawley Athletic Club.  When I moved to Bromley I arranged a monthly meet for local people interested in technology.  Moving to Brixton I wasn't sure what I'd end up getting involved with.  It just sort of happened...

How it began

I've always loved music though not being able to play an instruments (and I've tried) I settle for going to see live bands.  One Sunday evening in May I was at my local which just happens to be the rather legendary Windmill.  I got chatting to a guy called Andy Hankdog who turned out to have had a spell playing with the Sex Pistols and later The Professionals.  Andy suggested that I should come along to an acoustic folk evening he was holding the following day and if I brought my guitar then I could play.  I tried to explain that I didn't play, but somehow ended up agreeing to go along.  As it happened my lack of guitar or any musical ability wasn't noticed, there were a bunch of great musicians who played through the night and I was able to sit quietly at the back listening in.  At the end of the evening Andy, myself and a few others talked about how Brixton has such a great music scene. From the local up and coming artists through to established acts who've made the big time, as well as the numerous venues that host regular events.  When it was suggested that it'd be fun to organise something to promote Brixton's music scene I thought the idea would get laughed out.  It didn't and that evening we walked out all agreeing to do something about it.

The next day

Having never organised anything like this before I didn't really know where to begin.  My first step was to think about what we wanted to get from the event.  This led to three simple goals:

1. promote local bands
2. promote local venues
3. promote Brixton culture (the market, the restaurants, the arts etc)

Assuming that we'd need some kind of permission from the local authority I rang round desk after desk after desk at Lambeth council before speaking to someone who's long job title contained the words 'entertainment' and 'license'.  She was extremely helpful and fully supportive of what we were trying to do.  Enthused by everyones supportive nature my next step was to speak with local venues and see which ones might be happy to get involved.  With pretty much blanket positive responses my concerns over whether there was an appetite for this began to fade.

Continuing to speak to pretty much anyone who'd listen I was asked by Space Makers, the team who run Brixton Village Market, whether I'd heard about Oxjam.  I hadn't and from what I was told it sounded like perhaps I should.

Oxjam

Oxjam's slogan is "local music, global impact" and their goal is to raise money and awareness of Oxfam by running a month long, nationwide music festival.  They were calling for teams across the country to take on the responsibility of organising an event in their area.  The Oxjam website showed that this year there was already a Brixton team so I got in touch to see whether it made any sense of joining up.  It did and together with Jacob Todd, Paul Dickie, Leila Halid, Felix Jakens and Camille Christian we became Brixton Oxjam.

Being a part of Oxjam it was interesting to see the motivations behind the team, not just within Brixton but across the other regional teams.  Some were fully motivated by raising money for Oxfam, others were taking part in order to gain experience of organising a music festival, others were doing it because of their love for music.  Whilst Oxfam do a tremendous job and are an extremely worthy charity to raise money for my primary motivation remained helping raise the profile of the Brixton music scene – and fortunately this was something strongly shared across the team and we've (hopefully) been able to do this.

Where we are now

So we now have a little under one month until the Oxjam Takeover event.  As a team we've come a long way since May.  We've secured five fantastic venues: The Windmill, Upstairs At The Ritzy, Plan B, The Rest Is Noise and The Dogstar.  They've been a real delight to work with and fully supportive of Oxjam.

 

We've listened to countless bands and demo tapes – many have been amazing and others have been, well, less so.  I always thought I had quite a varied musical taste, but this experience has opened up many new genres of music to me!  Trying to pull together a line up that matches the diversity of Brixton has been an interesting task.  In the end I feel we've managed to get a great line up, which just needs some final confirmations before being announced - watch this space!

As well as preparation for the take-over we've also held a number of fund raising events.  These have included a jumble sale (ingeniously called Rumble In The Jumble), Swap Shops, and my personal favourite a film screening (seeing Oxjam listed at the famous Ritzy cinema was a strangely proud moment).

 

In the final run up to October 23rd we have a host of other events to help spread the word, these include a fashion show, taking over Brixton Village Market, an acoustic open mic night, and a fund raiser gig in New Cross.

The future

On October 24th when Oxjam has been and gone I'll be getting some sleep.  And then maybe thinking about next years event.