Do Saturday

It started with a shower in the all-wooden block, watching the water drain through gaps in the rough-hewn floorboards, then breakfast talking road bikes and diagnosing creaks from JWT Manchester David’s pedals with Alan the psychotherapist.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke first, telling us how he’s always been just in the right time to surf a wave of technological developments. Through his childhood he tinkered with electronics to create gadgets - from an electromagnetic nail launcher to attack his brother, up to a display terminal based on a £5 broken TV, components from Tottenham Court Road and a couple of new microprocessors (“bugs”) that solved problems that arose just as they launched. His experience with NAND-gate transistors meant hew knew what was happening inside each chip - they saved time and soldering, rather than offering magical new abilities. Nowadays, he worries that computers have become white goods - so complex and impenetrable that a child would have no hope to tinker. He warned that the approach has changed significantly with interconnection - where he designed a thing, we now must design things that work with people, systems and social interactions. Like the first telephones, these rely on the faith of early adopters to say “That looks like it might be fun to play with. Count me in” without care for practicality or return on investment.

His little Do for everyone was that they try to balance the scales at which they interact with the world - from individual (“What are you doing for yourself?”) to global (“What’s in the International Herald Tribune today?”). We should measure where we’re spending our time in order-of-magnitude buckets, and look for gaps and inconsistencies.

His big Do was to get the 80% of the world without access to the Internet, connected. This would bring about World-shaking improvements through education.

I have a hero-worship thing going on with Sir Tim - I owe my career to his invention and I have an enormous amount of respect for his ongoing work on standards, his vision for the semantic web and driving the Government’s open data initiative, data.gov.uk. Spending four days in the same isolated campsite with him (and 100 others) has meant I’ve had a few moments of “Oh my god. I’m [doing X] sitting next to Tim B-L”. The first was sitting on a hay bale around a campfire, listening to murder ballads being sung in Welsh. I looked over and realised Tim was sitting next to me. I hadn’t seen him until then. Quite a first impression. The music was excellent.

After his talk, he had a moment alone as people were grabbing tea and cake. I introduced myself, mentioned who I work for and said we were rebuilding our site on a new semantic web-based CMS. Did he have any thoughts on how we should reveal this to our users?

He couldn’t resist pandas or wrestlers. Did we have interesting population data on endangered species we could reveal? It’s less about the user experience, more about making the information available for reuse. Connect that data with geographical coordinates and show how it’s changed over time. The aspect of time is crucial.

So that was the first bit that alone would have made my year.

Tim’s talk was followed by Ed Stafford - Amazon explorer, Daniel Seddiqui - 50 jobs in 50 states and Craig Mod - publish, publish, publish.

I had a bit of an emotional dip after lunch (leek and potato soup, local cheeses and Laura from Finland who’s researching outdoor clothing for the older generation) - a combination of tiredness, a full brain and missing the family. I skipped the next couple of lectures and restored myself with a phone call home, a walk and a couple of chapters of Richard Feynman’s autobiography. The view across the green valley gave a balancing horizon.

The last two talks of the day were interesting and inspiring, but not the kind of thing I wrote much down from (not that that’s the measure of quality). Darina Allen’s hard work to set up the Ballymaloe cookery school and Gerd Leonhard’s discussion of the shift or organisations from ego to eco, but not in the green sense. He gave a robust dissection of the music industry’s attitudes and approach to their customers. At one point I think he compared them to horseshoe makers during the introduction of the internal combustion engine.

There’s a saying that only half of the Do Lectures’ value is the talks - the rest is in the bits in between. I signed up for a bread making workshop with Tom Herbert, a fifth generation baker from Chipping Sodbury. We mashed together flour, water, sea salt and a handful of his family’s fifty year old sourdough starter. The 15 kilo dough baby we made was grabbed, stretched and cooked into flatbreads on an open fire. Some got burnt, some were doughy and undercooked but they were all wolfed down with the homemade jam and lemon curd another workshop had just made. Yum.

It’s not all just about food, but dinner was a hog roast. I ate with Paula di Dieu (BFI head of digital and petrolhead), Matt Webb (Berg’s visionary genius/mad scientist) and James Brice, whom I failed to realised was the guy who gave an excellent talk at dConstruct on capturing the history of the web in the context of geocities’ death. He’d illustrated it by printing and binding the whole of the version history of the Iraq War article on Wikipedia into a 12-volume set. A proper Do-er.

The conversation about our post-zombie apocalypse skillsets was sensible, logical and flowing. That says a lot about the day.

Later, Fionn Regan played a solo acoustic set in the tiny bothy pub. I was standing six feet in front of him as he played, entranced and happy and a little bit drunk on Welsh whisky.

I got back to my tent and sat under a sky filled with whispy clouds, a bright moon and patches of stars filling the gaps in between.

A good day.