Nick Weldin (tinker.it)

Nick had many jobs including pyrotechnician, for companies like Theatre of Fire and Le Maitre, he helped set fire to the Fourth Bridge for its centenary celebrations. He ran an adventure playground for disabled children for Kidsactive and set up a project in the London borough of Westminster developing multimedia work with people with profound learning difficulties and the people who support them, and has played around with electronics since his teenage years.

He works at Tinker as Senior Technologist and at the Rix Centre based at the University of East London developing multimedia work with people with profound learning difficulties.

Nick runs many of the Tinker workshops in London and further afield, including Reboot 10 in Copenhagen.

Nick will be running an Arduino workshop for us.  Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

Mark Birbeck

Mark Birbeck works on standards and applications at the juncture of rich user interfaces and the semantic web. To help these two worlds communicate, he invented RDFa. He's an invited expert at the W3C where he is deeply involved with XForms and XHTML 2. Alongside his standards work, he has instigated a number of open source projects, including the Ubiquity XForms and Ubiquity RDFa Ajax libraries. His commercial work involves consultancy, development work, and training, in XForms and RDFa.

Mark's talk: RDFa: The semantic web's missing link

For years the semantic web and the clickable web have existed in separate silos. RDFa bridges the gap by allowing anyone who can publish a web-page to join the semantic web. This has profound implications for everything from user-interfaces to search. In this session we'll look at some of the ways we can use RDFa.

The Guardian Open Platform

The Guardian Open Platform is the suite of services that make it possible for our partners to build applications with the Guardian. We've opened up our platform so that everyone can benefit from our journalism, our brand, and the technologies that power guardian.co.uk.

The Open Platform currently includes two products, the Content API and the Data Store:

1. The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content. You can query our content database for articles and get them back in formats that are geared toward integration with other internet applications.

2. The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

Tech Talk: The Guardian Content API – Simon Willison

The Guardian's Content API provides access to over a million articles published on guardian.co.uk, with full metadata and numerous ways to search, filter and explore the content. Get an API key, learn how to use the API and find out ways in which the content can be used for mashups to enhance your own site.

Tech Talk: The Guardian datastore and datablog – Simon Rogers

We are drowning in data - but how many of us know where to get what we want? The Guardian datastore and datablog are new projects designed to free up the key numbers that news organisations use every day, and publish them for developers and the wider public in a form they can use. If you are looking for key bits of data, the Datastore is going to become the place to get it.

BBC Backstage

BBC Backstage is the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent, using content feeds and APIs from across the BBC's network. 

Rain Ashford will be joining us to tell you all about it.

Joe Walker (Mozilla)

Joe Walker works for Mozilla on the Bespin project. He is also the founder of the DWR framework. He is a frequent speaker at industry events like JavaOne, FoWA and The Ajax Experience. He is an author of Ajax in Practice by Manning, and blogs at http://directwebremoting.org/blog/joe and also at http://cometdaily.com

Joes' talk: Introduction to Bespin - Mozilla's Web Based Code Editor

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs Experiment to build a code editor in a web browser that Open Web and Open Source developers could love. We asked ourselves what the editor of our dreams would look like, and set out to build that editor using the latest HTML 5 features like canvas, web-workers, and web-sockets. When you have the luxury to take off the shackles of old browsers, it is amazing what the engines provide.

After a few months of development we have working collaboration and version control integration. Find out what we've learnt, what we're working on next and see what features you would love to see (and maybe contribute? ;) with Bespin. This being Mozilla, everything is open source including a reusable editor component that you could embed and use.

Paramount are sponsoring two tickets to the UK premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the eagerly anticipated sequel to the summer blockbuster of 2007; the battle for Earth is not over and the Autobots are in a race against time to stop the Decepticons from destroying the planet and the universe.  Both the Autobots and the Decepticons are on a world wide search for the remaining pieces of the AllSpark and the location of the Matrix of Leadership. Once again Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) must become a hero and team up with the Autobots, lead by Optimus Prime, to stop the Decepticons in this global, epic battle to save the world from destruction.

The Winner's prize includes two tickets to the UK premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

For more information please visit

www.transformers2movie.co.uk

Skills Matter provides Europe's largest selection of open source technology and agile software process training and events.

Their aim is to support grassroots innovation and idea sharing through supporting the open source community via training, user groups, seminars, tutorials, workshops and conferences. Their training courses and conferences are authored and taught by innovative world-leading experts and thought leaders who are usually the technology creator. Attendees to Skills Matter events are passionate enterprise developers, architects and project managers who want to learn 'from the source'.

Skills Matter is delighted to partner with Yahoo! to provide the home for YDN Tuesdays – a monthly meetup for grassroots developers to meet and hear experts talking about the latest innovative technologies, APIs & Web Services and projects from the Yahoo! Developer Network.  

To find out more and join their exciting and innovative community go to http://skillsmatter.com or follow them on http://twitter.com/skillsmatter

Skills Matter are arranging to film the tech talks at Hackday.  Check back here after the event to find out the URLs for the vodcasts.

A HUGE thanks to all our partners for planning to give up their time and energy for the event

Sophie Major

May 07th 2009