Second Tech Meetup: another success...

Edit: Added an older video of Yann's demo

It seems the Tech Meetup has caught the attention of the techie folk around Edinburgh, and the second meetup on 8th October was also a big success. We had about 70 people attending, which was a lot more than we expected. Consequently we also ran out of pizza and beer...

So as the self-designated official blogger for the event, I'll try and relate the happenings of the night...

Like last time, we started around 7 o'clock with people filtering in till 7:30. This, lets call it 'group chat time', was useful as it is a good way for people to chat with acquaintances and meet with people they already know. On the other hand, it also takes up a lot of initial time. So for the coming meetup in November we are going to start earlier at 6:30 instead of 7:00, so that we can do the introductions earlier, which means people can start meeting new people earlier.

Introductions

After pizzas had arrived and everyone had had a slice or two, we started with the public introductions like last time. Going through all 70 people did take time, but we think it was pretty useful as it helped break the ice. Even though this might not scale as the number of attendees grows, we still want to carry this on for as long as possible. The main objective of the meetup is to get people meeting and chatting to people they don't already know. A public introduction helps this because even though people don't remember each and every person's name, they can still remember their faces and then come and chat to them afterward.



We are looking for ways this can scale in the future. We are trying to avoid name-badges, etc as that would make the Tech Meetup feel like yet another formal conference or a networking event. Having peoples' profiles and interests on a website beforehand might be a way, but people will still not know who the person is that they want to meet in the crowd (unless we have clear photos on the website, or use name-badges... ).

Many have also proposed a "corners idea", which we are going to try out this time. Basically the idea is to designate certain corners of the room to certain topics where people who want to talk about that can gather. I think it is a good idea. Coming up with a general and yet interesting set of topics for the corners is the hard part. We would love to hear more feedback on this...

Demos

We had two demos again like last time. We had more lined up but sadly had to cut short as we ran out of time, and it was getting late. So, this time starting earlier would help...

Wii Loop Machine

In the first demo, Yann Seznec gave a great demo of his Wii Loop Machine software. Yann's application allows users to create new electronic music using a Wii remote. A big part of producing electronic music is to do with looping music samples and mixing them in a good rhythm. Yann's software allows you to control, mix and match these loops, just like a DJ would, using a Wii remote. It also looks fun because you start dancing with the Wii remote, while producing music.



Here is a video from Yann's blog:


Wii Loop Machine 2.0 :: an intro from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Technically, Yann mentioned that he is using aka.objects library for accessing Wii remote developed by Masayuki Akamatsu. Yann also has plans of porting the Loop Machine to the windows platform soon. All in all, it was a fun demo.


Erlang



Gordon Guthrie of Hypernumbers gave a high level yet interesting talk on Erlang. He focussed on the philosophy behind Erlang which was designed from ground up to be a concurrent & distribution-oriented programming language. Even though Erlang syntax is similar to many other functional programming languages, it provides native concurrency and multiprocessing capabilities. So an application written in Erlang can scale easily to a large network of computers.

As scalability is one of the biggest concerns for any successful and growing software application, having this functionality inherent in the design since the beginning is a big plus.

Here are the slides for Gordon's talk:

Erlang

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: programming erlang)

Photos

Thanks to Adam Yates, we have some great photos of the meetup. Here are some of them (all throughout this post). I have also uploaded them to the Facebook group.



Future plans

• Dates: The next meetup is fixed for 12th of November which is a Wednesday again. We have also decided to hold meetups in the future on the 2nd Wednesday of every month, so that it doesn't conflict with most of the other events.
• Website: We have a plan for a getting a full-fledged community website up for the Tech Meetup. It will have videos of demos, photos, member profiles and facilities to contact each other, forums, Job listings and Event registration. This looks like a lot of work, but we hope to roll it out in phases soon... All suggestions are welcome...
  
• Venue: If we continue to grow, 8th Floor of Appleton tower will soon be too small. Bigger halls in the new Informatics Forums are an option. We have decided to stay with Appleton tower for the coming meetup, and see if we do actually outgrow it...

All in all, it was another great meetup with lots of new people coming this time. Can't wait for the next one...

Hacker News network of users (based on commenting behaviour)

There has been a lot of discussion lately on trust measures, reputation and groups on Hacker News. So, I decided to run some experiments on the crawled dataset of stories released by Xirium (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182374).

Of course, the real database of voting history of users would have been much better, but this is all I could get...

Calculation

The trust values were calculated as follows:

1. For each story the submitter gets +1 from all commentors. I know this is naive, but bec. of lack of voting history (on the story), I had to go with this assumption.
2. Each commentor gets ( votes_on_that_comment / total_votes_on_all_comment ) for each comment on that story, from all other commentors. (Again I know this is naive).
3. Trust values are added up for (object, subject) pairs across all stories.
4. The votes on the story were recorded as votes from a virtual user 'HNCROWD' for the submitter. After adding up, the trust value from HNCROWD for a user reflects the 'Karma' of the user on the website.

The resulting file is downloadable in CSV format here (http://www.sendspace.com/file/mw59f7).

So with these values I tried running some experiments:

1. Clustering:
An interesting experiment would be see if there are clusters of users among commentors. I used the Markov Clustering Algorithm (http://micans.org/mcl/) for clustering graphs as it does not need the number of clusters as initial input.

Unsurprisingly enough, most of the Hacker News community belongs to a single cluster. This makes sense as Hacker News is quite a focussed community interested in practical hacking related to the web, entrepreneurship and startups.

Other explainations are that users who comment are themselves quite interested in the stories and the community and are hence closely connected and similar. The users who are dissappointed with the website, might not be commenting at all... Again, using voting statistics would have been better.

2. Trust-Rank:
Second, I tried applying a variation of the TrustRank algorithm ( http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF ) to the trust values data.

The result here was also unsurprising. The ordering of users was very similar to what is generated using Karma on Hacker News website.

Further work:
1. The method of calculating trust values (based on comments) is very basic and needs to improved (like taking into account threads and opposing opinions).
2. I want to see if this information is actually useful in tasks like News-Story Recommendation.

Conclusions:

Without the availability of voting data, it is hard to say if users on a focussed site like Hacker News have diverging interests. I am sure, as the community grows people of different interests are bound to join. But, the whole idea of a democratic voting site only allows stories that are interesting to the most active users to be selected. And so, other users will find the website boring, and not contribute and maybe leave. This might be an example of a community maintaining itself...

Giving highly trusted users down-modding power will strengthen this emergent behaviour, and the community will become more focussed (towards these users) than it is now. This might be both good and bad depending on if you are in this majority...

P.S. Thanks to Xirium for sharing the dataset.

FOWA: Matthew Haughey - Creating communities

This is part of a series of posts with my notes on various talks I attended at the FOWA conference in London. Here are my notes from Matthew Haughey's talk on Creating and managing communities:

Creating communities - Matthew Haughey (Metafilter)


Matthew Haughey talked about the lifespan of communities, and mentioned that they follow a graph like this one:

He mentioned that a community site has to become a third place for the user, after home and office. If has to compete with pubs, sports teams, TV and other such attention keeping things. The internet, Facebook and World of Warcraft are examples of this.
To do this we need to have a compelling idea.

He suggested that online community developers should have a basic model of a social toolkit in mind, and websites like Flickr is a good example of this.

He also emphasized that one must use their app themselves, and force oneself to use it even if it is bad.

In the beginning (and even later), Highlighting the best (features and content) in the app is very important, and we should make it easy for users to find this. One should also elevate the power users. Not just the content writers/submitters, one should highlight/award the readers too. The best contributors can be made moderators.

Once the community starts growing, one should get out of the way and let the users carry it the way they want. One should build in flexibility and allow for unintended uses of the your site.
It is very important to find and build out of the edge cases, or the weird ways in which your users are using your site. This will give us new ideas and maybe new directions.

Instead of rules, there should be guidelines from the beginning that define how to be a proper member of the community. While making decisions, emotions should be kept out of the decision process.

Happiness for users is ephemeral and one downtime can kill lots of goodwill. Every community suffers a revolt.

You'll spend more time on customer support than on coding.

How to avoid disaster:

1. Be transparent. Be honest and responsive with the community and explain things to them.
2. Have a dedicated place to talk about the site and its issues. Otherwise the talk will be all over the web.
3. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it and be quick in the response (same thing said by Kevin Rose of Digg).

Legal issues: Find a lawyer/expert who knows the internet. You should have a Corporation LLC, TOS, Privacy Policy and DMCA(copyright) policies in place.