If you want to see FirstPlaces in action, go to http://demo.firstplaces.org/

A while ago I had the privilege of being invited by the lovely Tiina Carr and Joanne Mateer of The Workshop to visit Sheffield and their lovely offices for the day and help come up with ideas around Digital Inclusion. It produced some really interesting ideas, some more immediately useful for them and some less so. Of the less so useful ideas is one I decided to pursue at the recent Rewired State Get Online event which was co-produced with UK Online Centres.

The premise behind that idea that formed with much tea and good biscuits at The Workshop and that now sits behind FirstPlaces is this. You remember events such as your first kiss because they are emotive events. You enjoy things which relate to your passions and interests and you want to do more of them. It’s about chemistry in the brain.

So let’s make the journey online for people be about joy and wonder. The internet is huge, so let’s give them a place to start that they’ll enjoy, an experience that is curated by either their friends/family or the special interest groups they’re already a part of. All too often it feels like digital inclusion carries with it the risk that at some point it would be measured in units of “people being able to access government services”. For me that feels like the end goal, and a very far away end goal too. People enjoying all that is for them online and feeling confident and returning regularly feels like the metric. However if we’re going for the transformative effects of being online, personal interests feel like the right sort of gateway drug to doing the hard stuff online like banking, job hunting and engaging with government.

I’ve been playing a bit of late with making short image based presentations to see if an idea feels right before laying down any code or sketching. Here’s the one I made for this, which I’ve now updated with a few screenshots and a killer slide from the presentation that Joel Mitchell put together with Ben Griffiths and I about the related hacks we made.

First Places Ideas

I’ll put a little video up later about how this all works, but I think it’s fairly clear. 

You say who you want to get online, where they are and what they like. 

You then pick the nearest or most convenient centre for them. We can add in information about access for people who are disabled and opening hours, given time. 

They then get to print out a page with all the information on it which they give to the person they’re helping. 

Who go there, hopefully get help to open the nice simple short URL. Part of the project was to build a shortner that was not just for a URL, but for combination of URL and visit. 

They get greeted and are on the real internet immediately, seeing things that hopefully relate to their passions. We all get data about inclusion which we can then use to make maps of where people are using the service to get online.

As I was reflecting on the awesomeness of Young Rewired State, in particular, and Rewired State UK Online, I started to see a pattern emerging in my involvement in these fantastic events. Unsurprisingly it involves APIs. The four Rewired States I’ve been thinking about relating to APIs are the first National Hack the Government Day, Rewired Culture, Young Rewired State 2010 and the Rewired State Get Online day which happened on Saturday. 

For each of these events I built a custom API. APIs are useful, especially in the time constrained environment of a hackday. They allow you to build many things so quickly. At Rewired State UK Online at the weekend a very small number of developers built a lot of things very quickly based off of the APIs (here and here) that Sym Roe and I built beforehand. Looking back over the four Rewired States that I’ve made an API for, I’ve realised I’ve built them using some quite different methods.

Two of them imported the provided data, a CSV file of schools for National Hack the Government Day and a rather difficult to work with SQL dump of the Government Art Collection for Rewired Culture.

The other two involved just-in-time data use using YQL as a clean way to create a data source from other data sources. I’ve been playing with this pattern since Bonnier Hack Day. I’ll talk about it a bit in a post that’s in the works about Childs I Klimb, a way of telling a story of people climbing Kilimanjaro for charity. 

Interestingly each approach has it’s long term pitfalls but all are very useful for moving things along at hackdays. The import mechanism clearly has the potential problem of data going out of date and needing to do the tricky thing of reimport. This is of course if you can find out that it’s changed. We’re getting quite good at publishing public data, we just need to come up with ways of versioning it and telling people when it’s changed. Then there’s the other hazard of import, that the form of the new data not matching the old and breaking the importer. 

This second problem is the one which can bite the just-in-time API idea too. For scraping webpages, as in the UK Online fake API I made, a change in the page structure can lead to the API failing. I hadn’t considered it before, but had to deal with it in real time at Young Rewired State, the same is true of CSV data. Changing the order of the columns can be quite disastrous. It’s blindingly obvious now, but I hadn’t thought of it before. Part way through the day an extra column had been added into the lovely spreadsheet of scraped data I was using as a datasource for YQL. This broke some casting and in turn broke the data returns.

I’ve always agreed with the publish early, publish raw idea on public data. CSVs are an ideal data transfer format. Lightweight, easy to parse, easy to work with. My only caveats have always been about unique URLs for the latest and archived versions of the data and also that the data should contain the correct descriptors, preferably URLs for the things they’re describing. I now have another caveat now. It relates to the structure of the data inside and the structure of the table in the CSV, but moreover it relates to how these things are created and curated. CSVs often result from products such as Microsoft Excel. They’re created by humans for humans and often for making graphs. What we need to do is to find ways of describing templates and then validating the spreadsheets against those templates in almost a schema validation form before they are published, publishing that template/schema alongside it.

One thing that always strikes me at hackdays is how much more productive they are if there are already APIs available. It’s totally blindingly obvious. The less time you have to spend scraping, parsing, cleaning, finding out where the layout of what you’re scraping breaks etc, the better. That gives you more time to actually make things that’ll make a difference.

As I mentioned yesterday, there’s an interesting and important Rewired State day about digital inclusion happening in a couple of weeks time at Google HQ. Obviously my mind started to whir a bit as to what could be made. UK Online will be providing their online center data for people to make things from, but I thought I’d help to get myself and other people a headstart by firing up YQL/AppEngine and making a little API onto their location finder feature on their website. 

The code is on GitHub now, please fork it, ammend it, don’t poke at it/me too hard with a critical eye, it’s only an hour of very rough work but it does the job. One thing I may add to it is a querystring parameter to split the address up into fields (mainly to reduce the need to parse the return for a postcode). 

It’s quite simple, you just do a GET like this and out pops some JSON. 

http://ukonline-fakeapi.appspot.com/?postcode=ec1a4dd

You can provide a callback parameter too if you like to get JSONP. 

Happy playing and hopefully see some of you on August 7th for a day of fun. Sign up here.

There was something which Vic Gundotora said at the first Google I/O in 2008 really struck me. He talking how Google wanted to move the internet forward and why they were doing it. The “why they were doing it” was blunt and quite startling, I’ll paraphrase: the more people there are having a good experience on the internet, the more people there will be who would have a need to search, and thus the more revenue will hopefully come to Google through people using search and services. It was breathtakingly simple and very impactful when I heard it, and it still is. 

The section I’m talking about starts at about 08:34 and the real punchline is around 10:37 and the slide is below.

This concept isn’t just for the big people like Google. It is a concept that has an impact on individual developers and totally has an impact on digital inclusion. If more people are brought online, who are currently not online, there will statistically be more people using websites and it will be better for us developers: more work, more clients, more big shiny boxes sitting in the cloud serving sites and hopefully more happy people on the other end of the TCP/IP connection looking at what we made. There’s one snag though, and it’s a big one. Digital inclusion is not simply about pipes. It’s not even about computer ownership or access although that’s a big part. I think it’s about joy and delight and wonder, and at this point all I can really do is refer people to Matt Jones and Dopplr and the rubber ducky slide. 

For me it’s quite simple. If you make it enjoyable for people to be online, then any difficulties they had getting online the first time, either through fear, through nervousness about computers or security, or what a mouse is will melt away. They’ll want more wonder and will see some immediate emotional benefits. They’ll learn about being online on the real web rather than on training games. All too often in inclusion people have aimed for the statistical jugular about signing up for specific things and jumping through hoops. This stuff needs measuring, but I worry that unless people find the things online that matter to them and enjoy them, then we’ll lose quite a lot of the people who we’ve got online quite quickly after that initial burst. 

Martha Lane-Fox and I talked about some of this a while ago, it’s always inspiring to hear her tell stories about the people who have found things which change their lives. It was also really great to hear her talk at Activate this year, and in particular two things stuck in my mind. The first was her talking someone who she was helping to get online on the phone. She found out the person was interested in Craftwork, helped them find things and talked about the delight of hearing the responses from the person when they started finding things that they were interested in. It feels so right making the first places people go the places that matter to them. 

The second thing she said, is that we as an industry need to think about website design, IA, development, and in particular making things which are aimed at making the experience good not just for ourselves, but for those for whom this won’t feel so natural. (I hope the video of her talk goes live soon, as she says this brilliantly, but for now there’s an interview with Aleks Krotoski about some of this as part of the Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast). 

I’m not suggesting for a moment, and neither I think is Martha, that we need to dumb down web experiences, we just need to make them more beautiful, more intuitive, more mindful of the audiences. More inclusive you might say. They’ll then be far better first places for people to be when they’re online, they’ll get to the things that matter to them personally quicker and they’ll have a greater emotional connection to the web as a whole. 

Here’s my suggestion for something that would be a good first place. The quite wonderful, beautiful and simple Owls Near You. 

Simple, fun, elegant… 

Delivering the wonder of Owls that are indeed near you, and some key modern concepts of the web such as customised information on maps in a very short interaction time.

So what can we all do practically in the short term. Well there’s an opportunity coming up very soon. On August 7th 2010, at Google’s UK HQ, Rewired State is running a hackday in conjunction with UK Online. The details are here and people should get signing up. It’s big, it’s important societally, it’s a good thing to do and it’ll make our industry stronger.

I read something today which I had such a knee jerk reaction to that I felt the only thing to do out of deference to the author was to not post a comment on it, but to share it, write about it and read the thoughts of others I respect. That thing is Andrea Di Maio’s Keep Developers Out of Politics, Please. There are so many places I disagree with it that I didn’t know where to start, there are also places where he may have some points. 

What I did instead of placing a knee jerk comment about it was to actually retweet it as I knew that many of my eloquent friends, also developers, through what they said in 140 characters or less be able to totally pull apart at the very least this first stereotyping statement:

Developers would be better communicators? This is quite laughable. Good programmers are often shy, self centered, geeky. I can’t see how they could be particularly skilled to communicate complex political platforms.

I’d like to know if he really believes this statement after reading something like Kevin Mark’s wonderful piece about the Digital Economy Bill and The 1710 Statute of Anne, or indeed any of the pieces on Kevin’s blog. He may counter that it’s one thing to be able to write well, another to speak well. To counter this I can think of many times of being in exceptional conversations with people like Kevin and many other friends who are software developers. We’re not sitting in nerdy huddles and we’re often not talking about technology. Often the conversations are about the societal impact of technology or society as a whole. These conversations often happen in public too at conferences such as the Activate Summit. I won’t labour the point, I’ll just move on to the next bit that frustrated me.

Well, I would have thought that developers might be needed to advise Congressmen, but not necessarily sit in the Congress to do so. I can hardly imagine a Congressional debate on whether to use .Net or Java to implement a mandate.

This seems to me that he feels that developers are so wrapped into the very code-ness of code that they never lift their heads above their monitors to think about bigger picture things such as business and societal problems. It’s quite a simple one to rebuff with a quick pertinent and personal example. About nine months ago I was lucky enough to be giving a keynote at a Gartner Summit on Portals, Content and Collaboration. The talk is almost identical to the one I gave at FOWA a couple of weeks later, a copy of which is on Slideshare. It contains a remarkable lack of discussion of programming languages. In fact it contains so little technical detail that I was worried about giving it at FOWA, however I felt that the rationale of why we were working on the Open Platform and the impact that it was having on the news industry and on the long term future of the news industry was significantly more important than anything relating to implementation.

I’ll not comment much on some of the statements such as:

I can’s wait to see a congressman furiously typing on his laptop to hack the workflow management system or hacking into the text of a bill to change it at will.

apart from to say that looking around at conferences and seeing developers typing only ever makes me think that they’re having further conversations about the issues they’re hearing about using social platforms such as Twitter. This activity isn’t a million miles away from the behaviour of many of our elected political classes (and I personally enjoy every tweet of our good friend Tom Watson MP from the house). 

The final point which I find so unrecognisable from all of my friends and fellow developers is this one:

I am not totally sure that a web developer is necessarily a great communicator. On the contrary, developers tend to (indeed) develop rather than use somebody else’s technology. Isn’t the not-invented-here-syndrome something that developers are usually affected from?

I don’t recognise this pattern at all. Open source, the use of open data, commercial APIs, cloud platforms and the sharing of ideas and code among the people I am lucky enough to work with, and see the work of, is the very antithesis of this statement. I remember a presentation from Matt Jones and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr at d.Construct in 2008 which contained a slide which said “Not invented here. Yay!”. That slide for me sums up all that is current in the world of smart, sustainable, rapid build software development. Look at some of the prototype projects coming out of Rewired State at one end of the spectrum and at large scale endeavours at places such as Twitter and Facebook and you’ll see the rolling innovation of building upon each other’s experience and code and then releasing the ideas and code back into the community. 

There’s a point in this paragraph I’d like to mirror and a point I actually agree with…

I do really hope that Clay’s post was meant to be humorous.  If not, we should start paying attention to a new breed of technocrats that has coalesced around the Obama administration, ill-advising about the unlimited power of web 2.0, fantasizing that government would be something else than an organization that develops and implements policies and provides services.

I really hope Andrea’s post was meant to be humorous. It seemed so full of caricature that it felt like it had to be. I’ve read his writing before and often felt aligned with many things he said. For instance I do agree with him on paying attention to the new breed of technocrats, especially if they are ill advising, but that is true of being wary of any special interest group who seek to influence public policy. 

I hope by spending the time writing this I’ve proven that I’m not a shy self centered person, geeky or not, and moreover neither are my friends and colleagues. I just don’t recognise any of us in that article. 

The first things I’d like to say before I get going on this is that the NHS is an amazing thing. We’d be lost without it and I for one have experienced some of the very good sides of it in the last few days. The absence of blog posts for a while have been due to working fairly ridiculously hard of late both at work and at family. So hard in fact that I ignored a chest infection for a bit too long. Being an asthmatic, this is a very stupid thing to do as I learned at the weekend. 

My cough turned very nasty. When I coughed I nearly fainted sometimes, I spent most of the weekend on the sofa asleep, when I got up I was very light headed. This had been going on, on and off to a much lesser extent for nearly a week, getting better, then getting much worse. Something was clearly wrong. Checking my peak flow (why I needed to do something so scientific when things were clearly wrong is beyond me now) showed what I’d feared, I was down to between 20-30% of normal lung function for someone of my age and height. 

So, time to enter the world of NHS Direct. As the photograph at the top shows, my first attempt at this was somewhat abortive. Even trying to enter a single letter into the “What are your symptoms?” box led to the lovely error dialog. Graceful degradation appears not to be alive and well here.

I then went hunting for the phone number and called in. The voice prompt suggested that I should go through the online system first, but did give me a chance to talk to someone at the other end who triaged me very efficiently and courteously, clearly using some form of expert system.

They then passed me on very efficiently to a nurse who seemed to have quite a lot of the information from the conversations of the first pass, which was very encouraging. The further questions and answers led the nurse assessing me to deem me to be a priority case that according to the system would result in a GP coming out to me to have a listen to my chest and take action. Interestingly despite being registered at our local GP practice for over 2 years they still had me at my previous one, but eventually after a bit of Google/Google Maps work from me and a bit of reading out of postcodes of GPs near me from them we’d found my GP practice and I was logged into the system as a patient suffering acute asthmatic problems, likely to have been caused by a chest infection. Obviously if we had an electronic patient record system I wouldn’t have had to recount a history of my asthma or of my medication which normally keeps it well under control. We won’t go there though. 

After a short while I received a call from a doctor. They first medical question was how long I’d been suffering from a urinary tract infection which was the first inkling I had that things weren’t quite so joined up. I then had to go through the entire patient history again. I was then told that although I was clearly a priority patient that I wouldn’t receive a home visit as if they went to every asthmatic who had called in that they “wouldn’t be able to get to any other patients”. It was suggested I walk to the walk-in clinic at St Georges which since I was in Tooting wasn’t too far, or that I drove there. 

Both these options seemed foolhardy considering the patient history I’d given. Coughing left me light headed (coughing fit leading to light headedness while driving may be dangerous, possibly). A few moments with Google Maps just now suggests what I thought when talking to them on the phone that it’s about a mile to the walk-in clinic. Normally I’d be fine with that. However, on Sunday night walking to the bathroom on the same floor of our house was a challenge. They couldn’t tell me where the walk-in centre was or whether a cab could drop me a sensibly or safe short walk away from it. I was then told that if I was worried about walking that far I should call 999. This led me to question the prioritisation. If I wasn’t a priority case for a home assessment, what made me a priority case for using an ambulance for transport to and treatment in A&E. My breathing was very poor but controlled. Eventually after a period on hold I was told that a doctor would be coming to see me. 

The doctor arrived within an hour. When he arrived he had a printout with him which I thought was quite exciting and endearing. It reminded me of Tom Taylor doing fun stuff with microprinters which always makes me smile. His first question to me was “What medication were you given when you visited the doctor last week about your throat infection?”. Both he and I seemed fairly incredulous when I told him that I hadn’t been to the doctor last week, certainly hadn’t been prescribed anything and hadn’t spoken to anyone about a throat infection at all in any of my conversations on the phone. I did have a sore throat, but only through coughing and the side effects of raised doses of inhaler deployed steroids. The question came from the spurious information on his printout which I now wish I had a copy of. He assessed me as having a chest infection, prescribed oral steroids and antibiotics and gave me a prescription for more inhalers. Neither he nor any part of the service he knew about could tell me where the 24 hour pharmacies were in the area.

I then had a hunt for a pharmacy. There’s a pretty good Pharmacy finder on the NHS Choices website. I played with some of the data backing NHS Choices at a Rewired State event so knew there was information in there about opening hours and postcode. Sadly there is no way on the site of combining these things to find the nearest pharmacy open when you need it.

You can search local and then look for ones open before 9am or after 5pm. Ironically these filters also seem a bit broken. Searching for local pharmacies open after 5pm gives me no results, even for ones which are clearly open after 5pm in their entry on the site. Map view? Nope… There is the lovely UK Pharmacy iPhone app, but that’s built on a the only official dataset there is, not the NHS one which has opening hours and telephone numbers, but a Neighbourhood Statistics dataset from 2006. This isn’t a criticism of the app, you work with what you have access to. 

The whole experience shows more than ever that we have to join things up better. There were too many moments of misdirection of information for me to have confidence in the flow of the hard collected data from NHS Direct flowing to the local units and then from the local dispatch to the doctor who visited. Surely even with the dumbest internet connected phones and email we can move patient histories more coherently than this. It felt like chinese whispers played to the point of distruction. The outcome for me was good, I saw a doctor, but only partly because I questioned the wisdom of having an ambulance come and collect me.

As I’ve been taking the medications and abiding by the bedrest I was instructed to take. I’ve been watching what can only be described as a lot of daytime TV and news. My cognitive surplus deficit must be quite huge. I’ve heard a lot about decentralization of services, putting people in control, putting communities in control of service provision and local outcomes: The Big Society. After my experience I fear we are so far from systems that deliver information well between centralised services such as NHS Direct and parts of the frontline practice-led NHS that moving any further towards the vision set out last week may be running before we can crawl. 

Those fears aside, I’d like to play my part in The Big Society, just to test it out (although some of us may claim to have volunteered on community projects for a while now). I’d like to volunteer to build a simple HTML5 local pharmacy thing. I just need the raw material. I’m signing up to get access the non-commercial use version of it here. However I’m rather slightly confused as to why I can’t commercialise anything I made out of it (presumably anything including an advert even to pay for hosting would be disallowed) in these wonderful days of open data and the ecosystems and new economies that are due to be flourishing from it. 

The last two weeks have been both amazing and bittersweet, but mainly amazing, exhilaratingly amazing. I’ve been to Toronto, San Francisco and Washington talking about the Open Platform and the launch that’s just happened. The bittersweet part is that I’ve been carrying with me the secret that I’m leaving The Guardian. You might think it’d be hard to talk passionately about something you’re leaving, but it’s felt very easy been and totally natural, as it’s such a wonderful project and is totally the right thing for The Guardian to be doing. Having my last public appearance as a Guardian person be my presence on a panel at Gov2.0 Expo about UK public data with Sir Tim Berners-Lee was possibly the best way imaginable to bow out.

So why am I leaving? Well, for the best of reasons. It’s just time to hand over what I’ve been doing to full time staff there. I’ve done what was set out for me to do and what I wanted to achieve there. When I joined, Matt McAlister tasked me with building up a developer outreach program from scratch. Part of this whole program was to weave, into the perception of other internet properties, the message that The Guardian was not just there as a passive content provider, but that it was a technology force to be reckoned with. That it was much, much more than a newspaper. I think the image below, captured from the Google Code site the day after Google I/O shows that this has truly started to happen. 

I’ll write more later about the year or so that’s just passed and the project. It’s something I haven’t written about much here as I’ve been doing all of the talking about it at conferences, at hackdays and on The Guardian’s Open Platform blog, but it’s an interesting story. The long trip away from home has given me plenty of time to think through all the different facets of a monumental and exceptionally busy year. It amazes me how much we as a team have achieved and I’m currently I’m wondering how I managed to fit in all that I did. On average I was at The Guardian just under 3 days exceptionally busy days per week. 

When I joined in late October of 2008 I saw a vision at The Guardian which was breathtaking. They’re a long way there and more amazing things to come, and the launch now puts the commercial team in a position of strength to take the Open Platform forward. I’m lucky and happy to say that I’ll hopefully be involved going forward as an ad hoc consultant, time permitting. The team there is exceptional and I’ll miss them all. 

It’s been a fascinating time to be at a newspaper. The structural pressure in the industry has been incredible and while others have been throwing up paywalls, The Guardian’s thinking about the long term future and how to not try and control or just accept the changes in the industry, but to embrace and enable them is exceptional and brave, but is also the only sane thing to do. 

So what’s next? Well that’s a secret for now. I’ll be finishing off work at The Guardian and doing some other smaller projects in June.

I think part of the difficulty I’ve had about what next is that I hope what comes next will be as game changing commercially and societally as the work at The Guardian has been, but that’s a big ask. For now I’ll just wish all my colleagues at The Guardian the very best. 

I was really honoured when invited to be on the “Four Perspectives in data.gov.uk” panel at Gov2.0 expo. The chance to be on a panel talking about a subject dear to my heart, like UK public data and what The Guardian has been doing in this space, with three people I respect deeply was too good an opportunity to miss. As you can see from the photo above we all took our responsibility deeply and were preparing diligently for the panel. 

The panel was fascinating with four very different but very complementary perspectives. Sir Tim gave us the philosophical view and historical view. John Sheridan gave us the deep dive into process behind the data being placed into data.gov.uk and on the technology used, and showed (despite us confusing him by making him use my Mac in a funky “dual monitor where has my cursor gone” mode) off some of the great data and tools that are already there. Dominic Campbell talked about the political and governmental landscape and about the cultural and organisational change needed for and caused by data. That left me to talk about what The Guardian and I have been doing; talking about Open Platform, Rewired State and showing the examples of what is happening around app economies and environmental pressure in the micro climate of BART iPhone apps. 

The presentation is below and I hope you find it interesting. 

A year in public data, a view from within…

View more presentations from The Guardian Open Platform.

It was such a great way to round out a very busy, but incredibly exciting and rewarding trip to the US and Canada around the Open Platform launch and Google I/O. More tomorrow!

One thing that open data initiatives like the Guardian Datastore, data.gov.uk, OpenlyLocal, They Work for You and the GLA Datastore have done is to the world is they’ve made transparent the need for raw, verified referencable data. If ever there was a reason for this to be more the case in politics and electioneering, then this leaflet that landed on my doormat this morning is it. Something clearly designed to swing my vote. Just not as they’d hoped and more away from this cheap and appalling bit of election propaganda.

The statistic in the loosest terms presented there as fact is one of the most dangerous I’ve seen. Firstly, show me the numbers. If you want to be believable and credible that’s the least you can do. Making the text red is the oldest trick in the book to confer danger/importance.

Secondly, show me the source. Did you do the poll. If you don’t show me the source, that’s what I’ll assume. But that is because I’m lucky enough to have a stats and science background.

If I was being picky I’d also say show me your questionaire, sample size, methodology and a measure of relevance. Statistics and data are so important everywhere now. We just have to teach data literacy and most of all to teach people to question things presented as facts without evidence.

If a journalist made a statement like that based on a poll they’d have to qualify it. They’d have to show the numbers and quote the source. It’s time to hold these people more to account. I’ve just written to the candidate to ask for the source and the data. When I get a reply, I’ll publish it here.

A view I will be missing… 

The last week has been a strange one, separated from family and at times unsure of how long I’ve been away, I’ve been in San Francisco. Initially a sort of flying visit for Chirp it turned into a two week stay. It’s been difficult at times but wonderful on the whole and that is largely thanks to the people and organisations below who I feel I need to say thank you to. 

Firstly to Twitter. They have been amazing. I had two incredible offers of places to work this week, Twitter and Stamen. I feel so lucky and privileged. Twitter provided us with space, lunch, drinks and above all in so many ways, company and friendship. Thanks to Biz, Ev, Chloe, Isaac, Ryan, April, Taylor and Robin in particular for a great week and great conversations. You have beautiful offices. Thank you for sharing them with us all.

Secondly to Stamen. Thank you to Eric and Mike for the offer of deskspace, which due to a manic meeting load I was only able to take up on the Friday afternoon. I had a wonderful afternoon in the beautiful and creative surroundings of their new offices, which keep so much of the good feel of the first offices, but are light and airy and a space where thoughts, conversation and ideas just flow. Thanks to them also for a great lunch with Eric, Ben, Mike and Aaron and many others. Food for the body and mind.

Thanks also to friends at Google. Patrick Chanezon invited me in for lunch which then morphed into a part afternoon talking to the team about AppEngine and many other Google technologies and also talking through the morning’s announcements at f8. 

And speaking of f8, a big thanks to Sophy from Facebook who managed to get me in to see the keynote and attend at the last minute. I’d also like to thank the many other friends and firms that fitted me in to their schedules at the last minute, and sorry to those who I couldn’t fit in, I’ll be back very soon. In fact, the hotel is booked and has some of my things in store as there was no point in taking them back over the atlantic.

During the middle of the week I hit a bit of a low, and I’d like in particular to thank Kevin Marks and JP Rangaswami for inviting me to a fantastic dinner in Palo Alto where a group of very smart thinkers including Salim Ismail totally took my mind off of how much I was missing home.

I’d also love to thank the hotel where I stayed. The Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf. I was so well looked after by them and in particular Kit Wichlan their manage. Although it’s not as convenient for the Moscone as many of the hotels nearby I’m booked there for I/O as it’s just full of good people who help. 

Last but not least, Virgin Atlantic. Last year when flying Upper Class for the first time in my life Virgin delivered such awful service I nearly left them as a frequent flyer (I’ve only ever flown transatlantic once with another firm). I felt I couldn’t change and that has been rewarded. They’ve been phenomenal, from trying to fly me out through New York to get me home earlier, to rescheduling me back to the West Coast when they had availability, I can’t fault them. Their phone support has been amazing, staffed by lovely friendly helpful people who despite the very stressful conditions they were working through couldn’t have been nicer.

I also of course have to thank my lovely wife. Who has coped for much longer on her own with our two lovely boys, Tom and Sam. Thank you Bex. They’re calling the flight now, I’m coming home.