There is an inevitability of a concentration on the digital knowledge economy for Northern Ireland. We have a thriving group of developers and designers in Belfast, a huge amount of ambition in the North West and a heap of activity building in the Southern and Western counties of the province.

Last week I went to the Digital Hub along with Momentum, Belfast City Council, InvestNI and representatives from DCAL and OFMDFM.

We heard the spiel about how it brought some regeneration to the area, that they still have a considerable subvention from the government after 10 years (less than €2m a year, but overall investment has been around €30m since inception and may not include transferred assets).

I also spoke to some of the guys in some of the businesses. They said they wish the Hub was one mile closer to the city centre, that the reason they use bikes and public transport is because they don’t want to bring their cars to that area of town and even the big lads feel a little concerned leaving the Hub with a laptop.

It re-iterates my belief that a city centre location for a Belfast Hub is essential. Not least because Davy Sims put together a map of Digital Media companies in Northern Ireland back in February of 2010 and discovered most were within a square mile in the city centre.

View Belfast Media Square Mile in a larger map

I don’t think we want a straight property play like the Hub in Dublin. We’re a small region with a big ambition so we have to think much more strategically about what goes where. We also need to be 100% joined up. I think I have the support of the Digital Circle steering group in my opinions and in my vision for a digital hub-type infrastructure in Northern Ireland. It’s a big plan, an ambitious plan, even an audacious plan and if it delivers, it will bring the concept to the province as a whole rather than just to a small region.

Last night I dreamt of a future. It involved talking to people about my new companies, sailing a little wooden boat and travelling a lot. I woke up exhausted.

Image from http://swallowboats.co.uk

But the present is why I’m not going to be able to commit to being involved in anything new. This includes putting some things (like lategaming and City of Tomorrow) on the back burner and we’re still talking about what to do about StartVI. If I don’t have the time for it, then we need to find someone who does.

For the next two months or so, I’ll be concentrating on updating the Northern Ireland Digital Content Strategy (PDF) with some colleagues both from industry, academia and InvestNI.

The Strategy was launched in 2008 and described the need for organisation within the Digital Sector in the province. It paved the way for Digital Circle.

If you want to be involved in re-writing the strategy document, then please comment below.

My friends Rory and Anita at The Creativity Hub are pretty much the nicest people I know. That’s not entirely surprising considering the work they do in creativity and conflict resolution. I know Rory from a few years ago when he was working in the rehabilitation of prisoners (from our unique political ‘situation’) and I was very glad to re-acquaint myself with him not long after the start of this job – both for work and socially.

Rory introduced me to the concept of “Advanced Civilisation” (which he said is also available on the Internet as Beachhead). It’s something I had used for my creative writing but I had not really considered using it for work-related purposes. I do find now that I use it a lot – that imagination figures heavily in how I want to enact change in the world around me. The secret to achieving things lies in the discovery of great people, not in the funding programmes that are available.

This weekend we will complete the proposal document for StartVI year two and we will be looking for 6 great start-up ideas. We have a much more cohesive programme planned for the 2011 intake, more mentors and a better idea of what can be achieved now that we’ve shown it can work.

I’m also proposing the founding of a new co-working, research based technology centre in Belfast. And a solution to improving the quality of software engineering in Northern Ireland – comprising of a industry-tailored education programme and a community focused technology freeschool. Of course I alone am not qualified to do all of this. That’s why I’ve been looking for great people to help change the world; to steal the future; to get there earlier.

All of this to create a hub of 21st Century Enlightenment.

John Girvin sent this link: Why aren’t we teaching our kids how to code?

So the future is in technology. But what are our children actually learning? Depressingly, the answer is almost nothing useful. Maths and programming will be core to the majority of future innovation, businesses and jobs. Yet maths education in the UK is a joke: the curriculum is outdated, children hate it, and it has little practical value.

The conversation started because of a general malaise about the quality of software engineering and computer science graduates in the UK. I am slightly encouraged by reports that graduates worldwide are pretty rubbish and it’s not just in the UK. But I’m more interested in how to fix the problem and more specifically; how to fix it here.

The original idea for Code4Pizza was to provide pizza in the evening and invite anyone, schoolkids, teachers, professionals, students in to work together, learn together. The problem, as with everything, is opportunity.

But I’m reckoning that time might be approaching.

So, apart from getting some local disgruntled software developers together to try and put together a syllabus for “coders” and then presenting that to local FE colleges and the Department of Employment and Learning, I reckon there’s also room for an industry focused “FreeSchool”. FreeSchools are an actual thing, that any charity, community or industry body can set up. But I’m not really aiming this at replacing schools or even being a full time education alternative – this is about additional education, for free.

Yes, this links into my ideas for creating a hub of 21st Century Enlightenment. Yes, this is another “Change the World” idea. But at some point we need to deliver on this. I’d love to meet some volunteers who would put something in the comments below on what they feel they could teach? Whether they’d want to help out with learning coders? Whether they’d help people make stuff.

I wrote my first business plan for a co-working space in about 2006 – in response to some encouragement from an ex-colleague who was in Investment Belfast. It helped crystallise some ideas I had with regards to not only co-working, but skills, inclusion, business incubation and innovation.

Over the last two-and-a-bit years I’ve been included on snippets of longer conversations regarding the ‘need’ for a Digital Hub in Belfast. It’s something that inspired us to create StartVI, among other things. I’ve been part of these attempts and also witnessed them being opposed by people who should be helping.

But while CoWorking spaces are generally places to “work” and by that I mean write, create spreadsheets, lay out books, edit images, create software and network online. They provide desks, light, heat, WiFi, coffee, armchairs, water coolers and toasters.

is there a way to have a coworking (or co-researching) facility for freelance scientists?

and this article continues:

A coworking space has three important components: the physical space, the technological infrastructure, and the people. A Science Hostel that accommodates people who need more than armchairs and wifi, would need to be topical – rooms designed as labs of a particular kind, common equipment that will be used by most people there, all the people being in roughly the same field who use roughly the same tools.
…
But in the modern world, there can be more of those. There will be vast differences in size, type and economics. Some will be built and funded by large, rich institutions. Others will be cooperative projects. Some will be free, but by invitation only. Others will be open, but charging for space and use of the facilities.

We don’t have the resources in Northern Ireland to create a vast Fraunhofer-style network of collaborative research institutes so we have to be clever. £200m will be spent on this network of elite technology centres and despite our low population, the strength of our two local universities will mean we can expect to get >£10m of this, which would build 2-3 such centres. I would be disappointed if they were just carbon copies of what had gone before or worse, they just extended the duration of stuff that wasn’t working particularly well in the first place.

One of these in Belfast, using the Technology and Innovation Centre model, could provide access to shared facilities and useful knowledge which would help make up for the small population we have in Northern Ireland. The initial candidate areas of energy & resource efficiency, transport systems, healthcare, ICT and electronics, and photonics & electrical systems all require a significant ICT resource, resource which could be shared and which could take advantage of ‘traditional’ co-working models – bringing in our local experts in software engineering, user interface design and content. Just as a co-working centre contained writers, designers, software engineers, journalists, teachers and life-coaches, so a co-research centre could contain biologists, chemists, physicists and other disciplines – harnessing relationships with the universities for particularly specialised equipment but only containing individuals dedicated to the future of scientific progress.

It’s only thorough these collaborations that create “some of the luck and coincidences that gave us huge leaps in science and technology.”

Who’s interested?

I caught a comment on Twitter recently that “a company built on free would be a pretty shitty company”. The author has since deleted that tweet, presumably because some of the best companies are built on free.

Brands like Gillette ($43B), Google ($185B), Apple ($205B) all leveraged ‘free’ in some form. King Gillette gave away his razors and sold the blades a hundred years ago. Google gives away ‘freemium’ access to their apps and services. The foundation of Apple’s amazing operating system is open source and given away for free and they’ve created and given away a world-class web browser engine, WebKit, which is being used free of charge by Nokia, RIM and Google in mobile products that are competing directly with Apple.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary celebrates the notion of free (paying for flights using anciliary revenue – in-flight meals, bag checks, hotel and car bookings, internet and games):
“The other airlines are asking how they can put up fares. We are asking how we could get rid of them.”

Amazing companies are built on free. 20th Century companies were built on the notion of scarcity. They focussed on the shipping of real goods, the transportation of atoms. The scarcity was real. With the exception of High Fructose Corn Syrup, we have a scarcity of many items because duplicating items means duplicating costs. But there’s no scarcity of bits. Bits are the lingua franca of the Internet and we have an abundance of them. Bits enable ‘virtual goods’ to be duplicated endlessly. The cost of duplication is zero so you’re left with the initial cost of creation which, when amortised over the potential millions of recipients, drives the individual cost towards zero.

Now the economics of scarcity keep some people in power – this is the essence of the haves and have-nots. But in a future where the real currency, the currency of bits, is something that is abundant, even more abundant than the air, how can these people retain their power? They can’t obviously and what’s worse, they don’t understand it and it scares the shit out of them.

The scarcity/abundance economics are the reason we’re setting up StartVI. In Belfast there is an artificial scarcity of office space (with over 1.26 million square feet of empty office space in Belfast). The scarcity is created by pricing the office space beyond the means of the businesses which could make use of them. It seems utterly insane that we’re talking about a scarcity of empty space. So, we’re removing the essence of that scarcity. And we;re providing more than empty space. Desk space in StartVI is free. Internet access is free. Light and heat are free. And we’re filling the empty space with people: hopeful entrepreneurs, wise business advisors, savvy investors. And they’re giving their time for free.

Last week there was a public debate on “Monetising Kelvin” held out at the Northern Ireland Science Park. The event was sponsored by MATRIX and Hibernia Atlantic.

Project Kelvin is a joint €30 million initiative between DETI and DCENR and is partly funded through the EC INTERREG IVA programme. The new cable will link Armagh, Ballymena, Belfast, Coleraine, Londonderry, Omagh, Portadown and Strabane to Europe and North America. In addition, the cable will also provide links to Letterkenny, Castleblayney, Dundalk, Drogheda and Monaghan. This build marks another key milestone in Hibernia Atlantic’s history, as the communications company is the first to deploy a cable from North America to this region. This build is also notable for Northern Ireland and global companies alike, as it offers a new wealth of capacity and the ability to directly and securely connect to Canada, US, UK and mainland Europe.

This proposal adds high speed connectivity to the existing Northern Ireland Saturn Ring (NISR):

Locations on the Saturn Ring are already possessing high speed connections but if you’re not in a building sitting on a Point of Presence (POP) then you’re kinda buggered anyway. The cost for laying a 2 Mbit leased line from a very close POP is currently around £6K and a 10 Mbit line can be had for around £8.5K. The further you are away from a POP, the higher the cost.

The problem that Kelvin isn’t resolving is the Last Mile.

This refers to the fact that you can drag a high speed cable three thousand miles across the Atlantic ocean but when it gets here, you’re stuck on a slow upload link. But, I hear you protest, we have 50 Mbit internet links in Belfast? Download yes – which is fine if you want to have a nation of consumers but rubbish if, for example, you want to upload digital content (home-grown movies for example) to content delivery servers in the USA. In essence, if Kelvin doesn’t usher in a new heap of wireless connectivity, it’s not actually as much use. Unless, of course, you own one of the POPs and have a heap of office space to rent out.

So, what’s the solution for getting the data out there?

A few years ago, a group of cheeky folk mobbed around Belfast with iBooks and Windows CE handheld and large Omni and Backfire antennae and played with the idea of setting up an intra-Belfast wireless network. that group folded – people went off and did their own thing – but the concept itself is still valuable. Why don’t we have a wireless delivery system for bandwidth from a local POP? How much does it really cost to buy an access port on the POP and then feed that out to folk who need it?

I guess this is another vote for “who is looking after the little guy?”

Workplace 2010 is an initiative within the Civil Service. I recently met with Mark Bennett, who works for the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) and is specifically charged with OpenDataNI along with a team of talented anarchists within the walls of the Civil Service. Mark took the time to show me around Clare House which is the home of the DFP (as well as other departments including the Strategic Investment Board).

I took a short video:

This shows some of the facilities, including the circular meeting rooms, a glimpse of some of the ‘standing room’ for visitors as well as the copious amounts of hot-desking space and collaboration areas. This, a booth not dissimilar to that found in a restaurant, was my favourite:

A booth with ethernet, power and a monitor. Plenty of room to spread out or work with someone. Perfick!

Did I mention the entire place was flooded with WiFi? (BTOpenZone so not perfect but still, progress, and from somewhere you would not expect).

This came out of two ideas I had.

The first was Code4Pizza – the idea that people, in order to learn, would be willing to spend their time coding for open source projects. I still think this idea is a winner for getting younger folk involved but as an evening class, it fills in many gaps present in the current market for young and really smart folk who want to use computers for more than FaceBook and MySpace.

The second was Tuesday Night Cocoa – something the lads up at Mac-Sys were doing – on a Tuesday evening when the Enterprise Park was open late, they would gang together and learn Cocoa from the books, helping each other through tough problems.

So, the Cocoa Cooking Class was born.

First off, I’m not even sure if Tuesday night is the best sort of time for something like this but it’s catchy, sosumi.

The Background:
Due to my organising of DevDays and generally being loud about the iPhone, I’m inundated with people wanting to learn how to do stuff on the iPhone. How to write applications and generally take part in the gold rush that is the iPhone. I’m working my way through the books but as my time is ‘expensive’ (in so far as as it’s really bloody hard to find ‘free’ time), I’m thinking I need to formalise something in this respect. My idea is that an experienced developer guides a workgroup on a weekly or biweekly basis through an application specification, design and build. The workgroup then owns that app and can do whatever they want with it. I’ve spoken to an experienced developer about it and he’s on board, details yet to be discussed. It’s unreasonable to expect him to dedicate this time for free so we have to take that into account and allow for him to help people ‘online’ in a forum or via email. Holding it on a Tuesday night might make sense but the idea is to get someone who knows what they’re talking about to come in and spend time instructing people and get paid to do it. If it’s not worth the money then we stop paying them and we hack it together on our own time. We even have the option of varying our instructors.

The Pitch:
Take one room with enough seating for 11 people.
Fill with 10 or so eager would-be application developers. Do not over-fill.
Add in one seasoned instructor. Mix for twenty minutes.
Establish base level of capability and break the people into 3-5 groups.
Distribute skills liberally through the groups to attempt to maintain consistency.
Start to build projects, one for each group for 90 minutes.
Break for 15 minutes to check consistency and share experiences.
Return to the room and continue to build knowledge for a further hour.
Stop activity and get each workgroup to show and tell for 5 minutes each.
Rinse and repeat weekly or bi-weekly.

To cover costs, everyone hands the instructor a £20 note. This covers room hire, instructor time and during the week support. That’s a reasonable night out.

Reasoning:
It’s my belief that this will create multiple opportunities for Mac and iPhone developers in the province. It will provide a collaborative approach to building applications with some real potential for IP creation and future revenue generation. Mix this with XCake and other initatives and we’ve got something to talk about. Would be even better if we could get some sort of funding for it (or even just a free room somewhere for the evenings).

What do you think?

Tonight was the Tuesday Night Cocoa group meet. Half a dozen hairy blokes sitting in the Mac-Sys Ltd offices with instructional PDFs up on a projector and open books in front of them. I’m very keen on this – this is a small cadre of fellahs, some of whom work in Mac-Sys and some of whom don’t, taking the time of an evening to fix issues with their coding projects and leaving with homework which they’ll work on during the week. To a degree I’m envious but I’mr eally glad I was able to help them get this started.

None of the guys there had any coding experience and yet they’re tackling the iPhone SDK in their spare time. They’ve buzzed me a couple of times in the last week or so with compile errors which they couldn’t debug (simply due to their lack of experience) but tonight they didn’t need to ask once – the previous nights and afternoons they have put into this have started to pay off.

It’s a great example of grassroots doing it for themselves – this is what I love about the current industry – people doing it without asking permission – whether they’re running a code class for the iPhone, running a coffee meetup for tech-heads just because they’re in the right place and the right time or knocking brains together to create a mashup of two useful services – it’s great.

Kudos to them and I can’t wait to see what they’re working on next.