Andy Piper - Oggcamp and Exploring A Future For Music Unconferences - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom Ray and this is a show where I talk to musicians and people who make things for musicians. And I also have a focus on open source and Creative Commons and things like that. And today we cover this realm but, but it’s going to be in a surprising way and I have a reason for this. So stick around. Because it is related to music, it’ll take a second to get there. Even the guest that I’m talking to is like, what is he talking about? So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do.
Andy Piper: Hi I’m really excited to be on the show. my name is Andy Piper. as you alluded to, I am not a musician. so I kind of have come in through the side door here to be a guest on the show. But I’ve been a follower of yours in Lorenzo’s music and the show for a while. so my day job, I work at Mastodon. So I’m head of communications for the social platform Mastodon for the organization that makes some of the code for that or most of the code for that. I’m an open source enthusiast. I’ve been doing open source stuff for 20 plus years. I think the most recent reason why you asked me to come on was I’m involved with community event here in the UK called OGG Camp. So that’s kind of got an audio based history to it, a podcast.
Tom Ray: I want to get into that too. Yes.
Andy Piper: Yeah. and yeah I’m, I’m, I’m into lots of different things so I’m involved slightly. I’m excited about the, the indie beat, radio and tv, channels on the Fediverse. and, and yeah involved with lots of different areas as a maker and an artist as well. I do pen plotter art and stuff like that.
Tom Ray: So I saw that, I saw that and I’m going to ask you about that too. But first I want to get into the explanation because of why I asked you here. And sometimes when I’ve done shows in the past there’ll be like why is this person on the show? But there’s, there’s a reason to it and I ask people here for things that I use, things that I find interesting and things I’d like to explore that I think have possibilities and avenues. Now I was looking up OGG Camp for this year.
Andy Piper: Yeah.
Tom Ray: And now for the history on that and I’ll start and you carry on to what it is today. Now I am aware of when it did start. There was, and I have spoken to the people back when this was around the Linux outlaws started Oggcamp. Now first and foremost Oggcamp if I remember correctly was because this was at the dawn of podcasting and it was about Ogg Vorbis audio files. It was about the open source version, not open source version, the open source alternative to MP3s which they had not opened up the licensing to, which is a very recent thing.
Andy Piper: So that’s right.
Tom Ray: So that is how it started and that is the way I remember it. I remember it being something that was open source but also audio based in the sense where people were saying release your music under Ogg Vorbis podcasts. They were trying to make Ogg Vorbis part of the RSS standard in the media encapsulation, things like that. And that started. Good Lord. Was that like 15 years ago? 20 years ago?
Andy Piper: That’s about 2010, 2009. Ish. I think was kind of around that era.
Tom Ray: I hate doing that math but okay, yes, that is history.
Andy Piper: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s even further back. Yeah, so it’s, but it’s quite a while ago now. but you’re absolutely right. So There was this MP3 format that lots of people were using but it was rights encumbered. So there was always a fear that they, the, the folks that owned the the license for that format could come and like charge everybody at some point. And that wasn’t happening. But it was always kind of like hovering. And a lot of the totally free open source folks see things like that happen and they see that existential threat because someone will come along with a big stick later and say no, no, what we need is a totally free format. And so OGG Vorbis was an open source audio standard that came around with similar capabilities in terms of the compression, the efficiency of the compression, the quality of the audio that came out from it. And it was implemented by a lot of open source software Linux platforms at the time there was as you say there was a Linux Outlaws podcast and there was also an Ubuntu UK podcast that one of my co workers at the time I worked at IBM. So she was one of the co hosts. and Laura Cohen and her partner at that time, Tony Whitmore was also one of the co hosts and Alan Pope and other people that are still involved in the podcasting and Ubuntu space. and I every now and then would, if they were down a host for that week, I would go and jump on and Tony’s house and sit with air when they were literally we were sat around in a circle with a microphone and had all the setup and we talk about what was interesting about Ubuntu or Linux that week. And yeah, so they were friends with the folks from Linux Outlaws. and I think there was another podcast as well. My brain is blanking on it. So there were three, two or three UK based podcasts, that were doing stuff and they said what we, there’s all these at the time, unconferences, bar camps, other events happening around open source outside of the uk. We want something here in the uk. So they started this thing called Up Camp. And it’s got a camp in the name because that’s quite typical for this format that we know as unconference. And an unconference is usually a format where there is no fixed agenda. There is a topic, Open source and free culture. In the case of OPCamp, in the case of Barcamp, which is another one, it gets a bit even more broad than that. But people come along and then there is a big sheet of paper or whiteboard and a grid drawn out for. There are going to be these five rooms available for these half hour hours or hour slots through the day. Who wants to talk about something? so you show up with a topic and then people can vote or move around and say, or move the things around on the board to get it into a, into a, an agenda format. And then people show up to the, the talks. It can be for really successful ones and long running ones. Something like Ocamp. I mean it has had some, some big gaps that we can talk about. But we have a bit more than that. So we now have a, we also have a talk track which is pre scheduled so people will get some content regardless of who shows up to talk.
Tom Ray: which can be a problem with the format sometimes. especially in an open source community there are things where it’s like there are people who don’t mind talking and there are people who love the format but don’t like talking. It is that kind of juxtaposition.
Andy Piper: Yeah, it’s, it is very inclusive as a, as a community of folks at Odd Camp in particular. but you’re right people, it’s not always something that people enjoy doing standing in front of a room of people. I hated it to start off with. I really enjoy it now. But it was something that I’ve had to very had to learn and adapt to. And But it’s a format where usually the rooms are relatively, you know, small, inclusive. People are encouraged to ask questions and get involved and the topics can be anything from something deeply technical to you know, show and tell of knitting patterns or something. You know, it can be, it could be very much more open to people’s life experiences than I built this thing. This is my shining, amazing home lab that I spent two years building in his every configuration, setting I needed to do. It could easily be somebody coming along and talking about something they physically made, or just trying to get a conversation going about, you know, the next stage in whatever movement that they’re involved in. the last odd camp in Manchester a couple of years ago we actually were sponsored by one of the, one of the unions in the UK and so there was a strong focus on workers rights and people joining unions and supporting them their own rights. Interesting. It was interesting to me because at that time I’d fairly recently left a company called Twitter after somebody bought it and fired everybody. and for tech workers in particular.
Tom Ray: That was subtle by the way.
Andy Piper: For tech workers in particular, they historically have been very poor at joining union unions or paying attention to the rights that they should be entitled to at work. So yeah, it was an interesting talk and time. But there are also sessions about home automation and other cool stuff and I’ve recently been doing a bunch of re. Structuring of my home automation finally after many, many years. So yeah, really broad event. We also have We’ve in the past had live music in the evenings. we didn’t have them last time because last time was kind of coming back after quite a big gap that was caused partly by the the pandemic with COVID and just people having moved on or coming to the natural end of whatever they were working on previously. So yeah, the last event in 2024, we were hoping to, to get one going again last year straight away but
Tom Ray: Oh, I thought you had. But you’re saying.
Andy Piper: No, it was 2024, the previous one. And then we were aiming to do the following, to do it, make it an annual thing again. We, we didn’t do that. it’s happening again in April this year. So in A few months time as we record. And we, you know, we want it to keep going. It’s been, it’s been something annual up until there was a, an in, an enforced break, and a big gap. And it was really great two years ago to get people coming back together, being enthusiastic about having a space to come and talk about topics they were passionate about again and meet one another again. Because it doesn’t happen even in a small country like the uk. we don’t, don’t meet one another very often.
Tom Ray: And here is now, now here’s where the connection between how a music podcast is talking to you about this and also having you explain how it has evolved and what you are doing for this year and how you’re creating it now. My thought here is in the past, we discovered something that actually was. It turned out to be something that was very important to us, and that was the Ubuntu Summit had also come back after the pandemic. And we were asked because of the way that only use Ubuntu Studio for recording and creating music and video and all that kind of stuff. The that’s what our band uses. So I knew the. I, I knew Eric, who is the head of Ubuntu Studio, who’s in charge of running Ubuntu. I don’t know the proper terminology. You get what I mean? And he, he asked us to play at the event because they were trying to find someone who is involved in that community. So that was a fantastic thing. And since then I’ve been looking for conferences. Truthfully, I liked going across to Europe, so I’ve been kind of looking. And also there are more tech conferences like this in Europe.
Andy Piper: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Here, they’re more like. They’re the equivalent of Comic Con. It’s like, you know, sure, we’ll get right back to you after we get done talking to Microsoft and all the other, you know, gigantic businesses. Like, that’s the way our tech conferences are. So I’ve been looking for that. Now here is what I was thinking as I was looking at Oggcamp and I remembered it because I was like, oh, there was that audio one. That was the first reason I looked it up. Then I saw what it had evolved into and saw the statement on the website this year and I’m like, oh, this is more like what the Ubuntu Summit was like. But it’s an unconference now. I’ve been to a bar camp. It was a while ago, but I did not really understand the unconference. Now I was thinking, well, I looked around. Are there unconferences for music? Are there ones where bands can talk about? So this is where I’m getting at. Like, could this be done for music? And I’m kind of thinking that because it would be great to not just like, oh, here’s a person running a music conference and now he’s got to find a bunch of people to specifically talk. Like, what if it was one where it’s like, no, it’s an open conference.
Andy Piper: Yeah.
Tom Ray: What do you want to talk about? How to find people that way. So that’s why I’m. I, wanted to talk to you. Because with Oggcamp how are you running this? How does this work? How do we go about this? And maybe I can glean an idea of like, why isn’t there an unconference for music and collaboration and community and technology? So there you go. That’s why you’re here.
Andy Piper: Love it. This is great. so, yeah, I spend a lot of time at tech conferences, or a lot less than I used to, before the pandemic. But, yeah, a bunch of time, and particularly in Europe at this point. and yeah, there’s a mixture of formats. the next one I’m doing, in about 10 days time, we’re going. There’s a huge event called Fosdem, Free and Open Source, conference, which is in Brussels. It’s been running for 20 years. It’s, I think the biggest open source conference there is. It’s very software hacker based. It takes over the whole of the University of, Brussels for a weekend. but that one is a, Is a planned conference. So they have talk tracks. They have many talk tracks. There’s competition for space for the talk tracks and then how long they’ll be. And you know, I, was all involved with reviewing the talks for one of the tracks and we had twice as many talks as we could fit in. So, you know, we had to do a whole ranking system, so that one’s a lot more structured. but also the side events tend to be where the fun happens, where the. A lot of the unexpected conversations happen. There is another event that I haven’t ever been to and I keep wanting to go to, which is called Chaos Computer Club, Congress, which happens in December. It always happens the week before Christmas and New Year. So, And I, so. And I’ve always been with family in that period of time, so I’ve never gone over to that. But that one I think is a lot. I mean it does also have a, an agenda but I think there’s a bit more freedom to it. And there’s another one coming up in the summer here called Electro Electromagnetic field emf. EMF camp, which is literally a camp. this is just a kind of a summary of some conferences. Then we’ll talk about what you are. Sorry. Okay. Things I’m involved with at the moment. M. So EMF camp, it literally started because some guys in London 15, 20 years ago said wouldn’t it be fun if we got high speed Internet to a campsite in a field and just kind of hung out and hacked there. And it’s Now a Ah, 8,000 people event where people, you know, kind of like the Glastonbury of techies and geeks. and they do have a strong music, usually electronic music focus at that event. in the evenings they have a venue which gets lit up with LEDs and lots of techno folks and it’s super fun. Not exactly my, usually my music style so I don’t spend a ton of time in that space. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s literally a campsite. And the two, four years ago, it’s every two years. Four years ago my wife and I took a tent. two years ago we took a campervan because it’s a bit quieter inside a metal shell, in the middle of the night when people are clubbing, you know, a couple of hundred meters away than it is in a, in a, in a tent. But you know you could do everything at that from soldering small computer boards in a workshop to last time I made a like an aerial for tracking satellites, that some guy ran a workshop on. So super fun things. And my wife and I pen plotter artists. So we sold some of our artwork there and we were planning to do some workshops this time but it’s a bit more, it’s a bit, again it’s a bit of a mixture. You get some tracks, some big tents with some big organized pre planned talks and then you also get some pop up kind of stuff happening around the camp.
Tom Ray: Right.
Andy Piper: so on the topic of how you run an unconference, gosh, how we’re running this one is there’s a small group of organizers, there’s like five or six of us. I’m going to be helping to run and organize the volunteers on site during the weekend. and the reason I’m doing that is because I did it last time. And the reason I did that was because I’d been on the crew to the historic events and I knew the, the guy that had run the crew from the, the previous events. And you know, we need about probably 15 volunteers to help check people in at the front desk on the day when they arrive and make sure that every room has got the right AV equipment and the speakers have got a glass of water and you know, people know where to go and people are safe. You know, all of that kind of stuff. we’ll have a small, small merch.
Tom Ray: Still is a conference, you still need that kind of stuff there for sure.
Andy Piper: You’ve got to do that. And it’s a volume, it’s a volunteer. volunteers run and lead and funded. Right. So we have a few sponsors that are helping to fund us having the venue. But ultimately you know we don’t want people to have to pay a lot of money to come. We want it to be open to, to people. So there’s this suggested donation, price of I think it’s £40 for to come for the weekend if you, if you’re able, if you’re not able, that’s okay. we, we should be able to help and that should be able to be covered by the people that are able. So we want to make it open to that perspective. The unconference element of it. It can be challenging to run because if a bunch of people show up and are told there’s going to be something happening then they expect something to happen. So you need a leader, you need somebody who’s going to be the front person. in our case, we’ve, we’ve got some people that say that help with the actual mechanics of doing, taking the financial payments which is a ah, community interest company in the UK that helps with that. we have me that can help to send, put up a blog post, promote the fact that we need volunteers, send emails to the volunteers, coordinate them on the day. we need somebody to help to look through our main talk track and decide who’s actually going to speak on the main stage. Because again we do want some content that we can guarantee people will come and see and deal with the hotel and stuff that we’re going to have as our venue. The, the challenging part with unconferences is the grid. The, the creating the content for the day.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Andy Piper: so, and it comes in two parts. It comes in the. I’ve never been to an unconference before. So I don’t know what to expect as an attendee. And it comes in the. I know exactly how an unconference works and I need to shepherd and marshal all of these people to put their ideas up on a post it note or a sticky note on a, on a, on a board. So there’s a strange.
Tom Ray: I will say when I went to the bar camp, it is a strange thing. I was a. Didn’t know what to expect and I saw somebody doing that and I’m just like, like at one, not understanding it. At first I was like, who’s this guy think he is?
Andy Piper: Yeah, yeah. Ah, yeah. So we, we’ve had a couple of people, the last one that came along that were familiar with bung conferences and were willing to stand by the board and encourage people to put their idea down. You know, there’s an element of don’t be scared, we’re all friendly. Yes, it’s okay. Your topic is interesting, right? I mean there’s, there’s a rule of two. There’s generally a rule of two feet, you know that, that says that if you’re in the room, and the topic is not interesting, then it’s okay for you to stand up and leave the room and go to find a topic that is interesting. No one’s going to judge you for that. and equally the person at the front shouldn’t feel upset that somebody left because it wasn’t the right space for them. It’s a, you know, the right people, the right people are going to be in the room for your session and you need to trust that, that. So there is an element of trust that the right people are going to be there. I’m forgetting the exact set of words which I might just look up as we, as we talk because there is a phrase that goes with with this whole thing.
Tom Ray: Oh yeah, I don’t remember what it is either. It was so long ago when I.
Andy Piper: Read is the right people or something along. yeah. So, so that can be a little bit challenging to to keep people going, and and so on. But you also, I think need people not to have. It’s best if it’s the open space principles. that’s what I’m thinking of. whoever comes is the right people and the law of two feet and so on. So this is from the From the xpunconf.org is what I’m looking at at the moment. And and they have the. These, these, these Laws, of two feet and so on. whoever comes is the right people. The people who show up are exactly the ones who need to be there. Every participant brings unique value and perspective. Whenever it starts is the right time. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Start when you’re ready. When it’s over, it’s over. Don’t drag things out when the energy is gone. Then move on to something new. And then whatever happens is the only thing that could have. So you should let go of expectations and just be in the moment and trust in the process. And then. Yeah, the law of two feet is another element of it. if you’re not learning or contributing, then move to another session. But you can do that in two ways. You can do that as a bumblebee, so you can pollinate between sessions, take some ideas from something you’ve just heard and introduce them elsewhere. Or you can be a butterfly and actually just kind of hang around and then talk in corridors instead of necessarily having to be in every session. So I think it is a different way of conferencing, being a different set of expectations. I think having people that are not to, who are very, who are very generous to others and very willing to allow others their space is, is important because in open source communities, as much as in any community, we find the people who have an ego, who want to dominate a conversation, who don’t always listen or want to be corrected themselves, that were always there with the correction, you know, because they are, they, they insist that they’re the smartest person in the room. That’s not how good unconferences, work.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Andy Piper: Go along to them to be challenged and to learn new things rather than to only deliver, your knowledge and hammer it into people.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And even the, the, what I liked about it was the collaboration in the event itself. It’s not go sit in a room and listen to this person talk about something smart because they’re in the field of what they do. It is other people who also are in that field and collaborating in this conversation. That’s what I really found, what I remember about it fond. And that’s when I was like, I’d love to see a thing like that for music now. Setting this and organizing it. You talked about how getting a space and if I remember. So I, I looked it up a little bit. But I also didn’t want to be overly like, well, I already know the answer now. So I tried not to learn too much when I was researching before we spoke. But with Unconferences. There’s also a thing based on open spaces. And that’s also part of the actual unconference itself is it’s not just like let’s rent a hall, it’s more. They refer to open spaces. Now can you explain to me more? Open spaces are.
Andy Piper: Yeah. So the, the principles I read out previously are from, from the idea of the open space philosophy. But so in, in the case of Ogg camp I, I know because we did it last time and it’s the same venue so we will have. Let me walk you through it in terms of like the layout and where, where things happen. So we’ll have a place where people arrive, it happens in a hotel. and then we’ll have a main gathering space which is kind of will have a few people with their own projects on tables. So for example, last time we had a lady who I think she’d programmed Inkscape to run her knitting machine. Or I may be getting it slightly wrong but things like that. You have the folks from different podcasts have their own stands to hand out cards and, and so on. there are different software projects so whoever, whoever wants to come and have a table can have a table and a presence and we’ll have a little merch stand there. And that was also where the, the whiteboard will be for us to put a grid up and say these are the topics we want to talk about. We also last time had a big Fedi wall so a big screen with hashtag posts from Mastodon, that people were posting about the event and pictures and so on. So people could, even though they’re in the space, obviously make sense of what’s happening and what people are going to. Then there’s a main talk track room which has all of the kind of the really nice AV equipment. So Joe who is the producer of the Linux Late Night Linux range of podcasts, ran that for us last time and we’ll do that again this time. And then we had three, three breakout rooms. So we had two rooms towards the back of the hotel and then another one near the front. and yeah that’s where the, the unconference sessions happen. So we had essentially two, three rooms which were divided up into I think half hour blocks throughout the day. and then that’s what got got picked out on the, on the whiteboard to, to fill it in. And then yeah you’ve obviously got the corridors and spaces for moving around where people are so that’s really what the open spaces are. There’s spaces for you to come and bring yourself and your topic and community will come along and hear from you.
Tom Ray: So, and that is the concept is that you actually could show up and go, I’d like to talk about this and the possibility that you could and actually run a talk about that is the concept.
Andy Piper: It’s not.
Tom Ray: I’m coming directly just to watch what’s happening.
Andy Piper: I looked up in my blog, I did a search back to, I think one of the first ones I went to, which I think was 2011. 2010, 2011. And at that time I was working at IBM and I was using a technology protocol called MQTT which is now quite well known or a little bit more known than it was in 2011 for connecting small devices. And it’s like a sensor, transmission sensor data transmission protocol if you like in many respects. And I gave a talk about that that time because it was something I knew about and there were a bunch of hardware hackers who were interested, equally. I heard, I saw somebody talk about a new open hardware board that he invented and created. and he got me really interested again in Lego. And now I’m, again I’ve got all my LEGO stuff all the way around here. Yeah, I have noticed example for how he built his his circuit board. So yes, in principle, anybody can come and talk about anything that there is a sufficient gravity of attendees that want to hear about. So there’s an element of, there can be an element of making it interesting, you know, finding an angle that makes it interesting. But you can also just say I would like to talk about RSS or I don’t know, self organizing communities in the troubling political times. I don’t know how, how, how directional you want to go. But you know there’s lots of, there’s lots of interesting things happening in the world and people could show up and talk about any of them. There was a guy last time who had a, Gosh, what was it? It was a, it was a, it was like a disco ball bird. So it was like a, it was like a model bird covered in like the, the mosaic tiles of a, of a disco ball and it had LEDs and stuff.
Tom Ray: Nice.
Andy Piper: I forget exactly what it was now, but it was, it was just really cool. And he did this whole talk about how he built this and how put all these LEDs and lasers and lights and stuff on it and goes around to music concerts with this crazy, weird installation. so, yeah, it’s. Yeah, show up, bring a topic. I can’t tell you what topics have been submitted yet, but for the main track, but I mean, I think we had about 10 or 15 submissions. We’ve had the call for papers open for a few months and people can.
Tom Ray: Submit ahead of time. It’s not just blindly like, we’ll see what happens when we start this conference organization.
Andy Piper: Yeah. And we will have an opinion on, you know, and there is a, some guidance on the website about the kinds of topics that are interesting and the, the kinds of. It’s generally, it’s generally the family friendliness of the topic that is important. I mean, yes, we do live in troubling political times and it is important to talk about that. What we don’t want is people to come up, come along and talk about that with a bunch of offensive, language that will be troubling to, you know, a, mixed community. So we do have a very strong code of conduct, actually, and we have very rarely, if ever had to invoke it. But, we want to make it a safe space for people to come and be themselves and talk about things that are interesting to them.
Tom Ray: Yeah, and you also mentioned before, and I feel like this needs some explanation too, because I know I was very confused by them. You said, and you had breakout rooms. Now explain the breakout rooms. Explain what the concept of those breakout rooms are, how they get one, used and two, how they work once people go to them.
Andy Piper: Yeah, okay.
Tom Ray: Explain the concept of the breakout rooms.
Andy Piper: So you’ve got your, let’s say you’ve got a, a timetable on the wall in one of them in the main room with a, with a whiteboard, with a load of stickies within time slots. And that would correspond to those breakout rooms. So they are the talk rooms. So you will have a, screen, a projector, or whatever you need up to a point. It’s a hotel. We don’t have unlimited budget. So you will have the ability to present, some content if you need to, from a laptop. you will have a space for, let’s say 30 people to come in and take part. There’ll be a member of the crew there as well to make sure you’ve got everything you need. And there’ll be AV set up so you’ll have a mic and things if you need that. so then you’ll have the room for your half hour or hour, depending on what you’ve blocked it for to deliver your talk. I think we Generally have a member of the crew will kind of act as the MC for the room to sort of like introduce people and make sure they’re okay coming on and talking. and then you know, you could if you wanted to come and record a podcast that’s happened as well. I mean like literally we’ve had live podcast recordings happen in front of an audience. Yeah. In the space. We did that last time, with a couple of the podcasts, from the uk. So so that can happen equally if the room is not being used. It’s not. There isn’t a, a talk scheduled for that. The hour between 2 and 3 on the Saturday then it’s an, it’s an empty room. So by all means go in there and bring in a group of people to have a side conversation about a topic of interest. that you haven’t scheduled but you’ve met these folks in the corridor and you want to have a bit more of a detailed, you know, hack on something.
Tom Ray: Yeah. Therefore being the open conversation of what if we talked about this? I know about this. And other people are like, well I’m going to go see this happening here or this group is going here. You can go, okay, well this room’s open. Those people who don’t want to see that and would like to talk about the thing that I brought up. Let’s go talk about that.
Andy Piper: Exactly, exactly. And, and you know, look again it’s, it’s important that people respect one another and you know, don’t try and hog a space that that’s being used for other things. But yeah, no, it’s, that’s exactly the format that we look for and I think that’s quite a common one at unconferences I’ve been to. I’ve done a few bar camps in the uk and quite a few odd camps over, over time now and I, I find it, and I’ve done a couple of other on conferences and I find it a good format. they can be more or less opinionated in terms of the topics. So for example, the gentleman that ran our, a lot of ah, our scheduling for the board last time, James, who I hope is coming this time, he’s already, he did offer to be on the crew again so I’m hoping he’ll be joining us. He’s been very involved in something called UK Gov Camp. So in the uk, there’s a bunch of folks in the the government space. we’ve got this website or this, this movement gov.uk where they, gosh 15 years ago or 20 years ago again they kind of took a much more of a startup oriented approach to rebuilding the UK government’s tech and bringing a lot of the, the websites from all the different departments together and having much more of a, a clean, accessible format for our for our government information. I believe something similar has happened in certain levels in the US at ah, different times. So you’ve got these folks who are very interested in accessibility of information, understanding other people, humans, user centric design, user experience. and James has in the past been involved with GovCamp which is where again a lot of those kind of folks from those technology groups in different government departments get together and talk about how to make things better. Right. Without a,
Tom Ray: or just how to get them off of Windows 95.
Andy Piper: Yeah. Right. And without a. It’s, without a. It’s quite often more of a skunk works kind of almost grassroots organization of. Let’s, let’s, let’s create new ideas, let’s cross pollinate, let’s, let’s just get some brains together in a room with some fun ideas and see what comes from that rather than having it to be you know, fully top down structured. I think that’s fascinating.
Tom Ray: Yeah, no, I agree. And well in with setting up things like that and you talked about how he, how this person set up the Gov, the GovCamp one, the OggCamp one. Now how do you, you said you skipped a year. Yeah. And then you started again. Now how early do you have to start? How long does it take to organize? You worked with six people. Ah, five to six people.
Andy Piper: Yeah.
Tom Ray: And like how do you orchestrate this? How do you, how do you go. Okay, now’s the time we have to start or we’re going to have to wait another year. Like how.
Andy Piper: Yeah, it’s, it’s hard. I mean we, we So what happened was the one that we did in 20, 24, Gary who ran that one, said he didn’t want to run it again. He couldn’t run it again because he had other commitments. so there’s someone else who’s been heading in that, the group up. But there’s a group of us that are still in touch. We have the same kind of set of documents and planning that we had previously. We’ve been able to go back for that 2024 when I kind of came in to help Gary resurrect it because I again I, the, the guy that used to do the crew. Les Pounder, phenomenal, gentleman, I go back a long way and and he’d already, you know, years ago said, oh Andy, you can be the, you can be the next chief of the crew kind of thing because you, you’ve been helping so much. which was nice of him. so I stepped in to help Gary that with that one. And yeah, we did that one. I think with the 2024 one we did fairly fast sort of. I think it was. I’m gonna get myself, get my facts wrong, but it feels like it was about a six to eight month period this time. We’ve had longer. We’ve. We have had 18 months really to get this thing to, to come about. And we wanted to do it around the same time. So a year after would have been in the, in the fall last year. and in the end we, we just couldn’t get the group of people, organizers together to, to make the booking with the hotel on time in, in the time to give ourselves Runway to then advertise for crew volunteers and advertise for, for speakers and give people the time to check that they have the finance to get themselves to Manchester and book a hotel room. You know, so, we, we use, you know, just standard chat platforms to kind of coordinate, have okay, have meetings every now and then, ideally weekly to just check where everybody is in terms of like, how is the hotel booked, have we got the right merch, have we got the right things in place? I think, yeah, we all have our own lives and, and the things get on top of us in different ways and we get distracted. So it can be challenging to. I think that’s the part of the challenge is just keeping that momentum between a group of, let’s say six people that don’t see each other very often or if at all, to keep the thing moving forward.
Tom Ray: Okay. And then. So you do orchestrate more of where it’s going to be, possibly the theme and, or the speakers or even just considerations of that before you put a form up where people can actually submit ideas, talks and.
Andy Piper: Yes, and, and we’ve. Look, we’ve been very fortunate. Our camp was a previously existing thing and it had, you know, we were always able to go back to people like Dan lynch, one of the original folks, and say, you know, Dan, how did you do this in the past? What, what was. You know, what, what how. Who did you talk to to get this to happen? Simon Phipps, who helps us on the much more on the finance side, because he has a community interest organization in the UK that can literally be that, that financial backstop if you like, that can take the funds. Funds and, and so on. it has been a, and he’s got tremendous experience with open source organizing and, and things has been very, very helpful to, to keep everything moving forward as well and, and keep us on the straight and narrow as it were. But yeah, we’ve been lucky in that sense. If I was to stand up a new one conference today, then you know, I think I’d probably need three or four people again to help me with the different elements of it. Finding a venue, planning out the timing. Timing is always a challenge because there are so many things happening in the world, right. That someone will be offended or find a reason to be upset that you didn’t realize about the thing that they, you know, was their personal interest and requirement that prevented them from going. And that is hard. And because we always want to enable as many people to come as possible. so things like that, timing, venues, those kind of things. Right. All right. All right.
Tom Ray: And I think I’m up to speed on that now. There’s another thing I want to while we still have time, cover because of course there are things that you mentioned in your background that you do and I just blindly want to ask you about them because they’re fascinating to me and they’re part of the things that I enjoy and that I’m interested in now. One is you said you’re the head of communications at Mastodon, so tell me, what is the head of communications at Mastodon? One of my favorite and go to platforms right now that I’ve moved to within the past year.
Andy Piper: I’m glad to hear that. So Mastodon, is a free software, ah, open source software product, platform and we have a very strong goal to not be owned by any individual and so about. So it was started by Eugene Rochko, nearly 10 years ago. He created this thing that looked a little bit like Twitter but wasn’t Twitter and could anybody could run their own copy of it. And it was open source and it had all of those other principles baked into it. But we’ve seen what happened with Twitter and we’ve seen that what happened when one person buys a thing. And not only that, we’ve seen what happens when people become very dependent on the thing and the thing is commercially driven. So such that there is advertising, there is a goal to keep your eyeballs engaged. So that the company can make more money and your data can be mined and all of the bad things. So we want Mastodon to exist for a very long time and not be owned by anyone. So at the beginning of last year, made an announcement that Eugene was stepping down from being the owner and CEO of Mastodon. And we have a, we have an organization. We have had this organization for some time in terms of like the ability to hire people through the donations that folks make to the project to work on it full time because it is a full time thing. it doesn’t all just happen for free. And we do need, we want to have some opinions and some direction in terms of the features we add and so on. So we in November announced our new leadership team. So we have a new executive director, a new product director, technical director and community director who kind of are our leadership team. my role is communications. So my past role at different companies has been in a role called developer Relations. That’s more around helping developers work together around open source code usually or around APIs and ability to connect to systems. There’s been a ton of community involvement with that, understanding open source communities, advocating why you should use an API or a software platform. I’ve got somewhat of the communications and community background and I did that with Mastodon for a little while before I became head of communications. What I do now is try to keep the, the messaging clear. work with lots of different organizations. So at the moment we’re doing a lot of, having a lot of conversations with organizations like the European Commission, different public government bodies around Europe especially, but not exclusively with different other conferences, different other communities, different other projects in the Fediverse. So these, these platforms that all work together like peertube, castopod, and pixelfed and Lemmy and other platforms that all use the same standard. This, this technical standard called Activity Pub, which enables them all to talk the same broad language and you to be able to use one platform, one account to post on to another or be seen on another platform. Yeah. So we need to coordinate that. We want to do things together. We want to work together as a, as a community of projects that all have our own goals. and so I’m involved with, with a lot of those things as well.
Tom Ray: And the, the thing that I remember that was the hardest about Mastodon and then Mastodon kind of fixed it themselves. Well, I guess it was always there. It just wasn’t as readily available. But it was the servers. The servers was a really difficult thing to explain to people because it felt like you were going and using somebody else’s thing. And that was. It’s like. But finally having a place just where you could go sign up and. And then if you want to move to a server or once you get it, like, I remember that was really a difficult thing even for me to understand. Like, I knew the concept, but when I finally decided what server I could join, what server was open for me to join, because I didn’t want to host one myself yet, they I felt like when I was on there, I was afraid to post because I was like, oh, if I’m posting something that’s not along the lines of what they want.
Andy Piper: Yes.
Tom Ray: Am I bugging them? Are they going to kick me off of this server? You know, that sort of thing. And that was. And I know now that that’s. I was overthinking it.
Andy Piper: It was, you know, so, Tom, this is something that we’ve got better at, but we haven’t solved for sure. so 2022, when somebody bought Twitter and lots of people said, oh, no, we want to try something else. There was a screen where when you went to Mastodon, you were asked to choose a server. And that. Yes, it was a point at which a lot of people got confused or just kind of bounced off. So we said, okay, well, it’s actually very easy to move from server to server. So we’re going to have everybody join our server initially or suggest to them that they do that and then they can move afterwards. because they have the choice and they have the freedom. But m. We also know the power of defaults, right. So that people, 99 of people, never change the defaults in the systems that they use. Right. They just pick the thing up and start using it. And if it doesn’t work the way they want it to, then they don’t necessarily dive into settings. I do because I’m a techie and I’m interested and I like, why I use Linux and I like to tweak the way that everything works.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Andy Piper: it can be tiring and it can be annoying to have to keep track of. So we also want Mastodon not to be centralized and not to be something that somebody can buy and pick up and just say, right, we’ll have that many millions of users and take them and do what we want with them. That is not our goal. So. Right. I very strongly believe, and I believe, our organization very strongly believes that Macedon to be resilient, it needs to be properly decentralized. It needs to run everywhere. It. We want it in as many places as possible, hosted by different people at different sizes. And that gives you another benefit which is what you were just talking about in terms of, well, will they be upset about what I post. Humans have different personalities and different cultures. I worked at Twitter and there is. When you try to build this global town square, there is the only way you can moderate it is with using the lowest common denominator. Right. You have to say, right. This is the absolute level at which any. Everything is okay globally. Right. But we know that locally in different cultures, in different. Even in different, friend groups, you might phrase things differently because you know, it’s okay to use that word or these, this way of being with this group than it is with, so, so things like moderation, things like your ability to be yourself and to, to be, to be seen locally by the authorities if you want. it differs. So I think that the ability for you to find a home which, which you feel at home at and is. Matches your culture and expectations and therefore moderates it in a way where the things that are acceptable for you are acceptable for. For that group or vice versa, is important. so I think the decentralization, having different cultures on the Internet and on Mastodon and the Fediverse and having, the resilience. Now this afternoon I found that my server that I use all the time hasn’t been working today. I guess, the administrator I know, he’s on the west coast of the U.S. i guess he’s probably having a bad day. but I have another account. I was able to contact you through that and say, hey, I’m over here as well. That’s not to say that that was ideal. It wasn’t ideal. But I do had. Did have a, you know, an alternative channel. I wasn’t totally locked out of the one thing way of doing it,
Tom Ray: Twitter’s down, fail whale type of situation.
Andy Piper: Right, right, exactly. So, so it wasn’t like I was totally stuck in that situation. So, it can be made easier. There’s a really exciting experiment happening at the moment. there’s a podcast actually called Hard Fork, where they created, something called Forkiverse, the Forkyverse, which is a Mastodon server. and they’ve got a bunch of their listeners joining the Forkiverse. And not everybody is very recognizing that you can talk to people outside of the Forkiverse because it’s federated. They think they need to create accounts in all of the different places you don’t. You can talk to accounts on any system that use this underlying protocol. from that one account, you. You should be able to look them up and find them and message them or broadcast to them. it can be complicated. I think that it’s m more different than complicated. And I think that difference is what people bounce off of because we get very comfortable with the way things work. Anything that’s different is unexpected and, you know, a little bit of a. Of a rough edge. And then we. You have to kind of make the effort to try again and keep going into it to get the real benefit of everything around it.
Tom Ray: Well, it’s also, it’s funny because the answer is both of what you said and doesn’t have to be both. That is the thing that is unexpected and also we’re not used to. So my point being, when I first joined, I was fretting over which server do I join? Because, like, for my band, Lorenzo’s Music, before Mastodon Social was open, when I was signing up, at the time, they weren’t accepting any new signups.
Andy Piper: Yeah.
Tom Ray: and so I was going between the Fostodon server, which was about software developers, because I had just been to the Ubuntu conference, and I was like, oh, I know the people on the server or the music one. And I’m like, so if I’m on the foster don one can I only post about open source software? That was the confusion I had. Like, does that mean this is what we’re here to talk about? Not just like, oh, this is like having a, you know, a, branded server name it. It’s just, this is the focus or this is the people that use it, but you still can talk about other things. That’s what was confusing. Now the other thing too is I was going better one, better two, better one, better two much like with what you said, you have several accounts. And that is also like the one that you sent me the message from is one that is of a different tone, of a different. Like, I could have signed up for both on one I could have spoken about. Here’s where we talk about free and open source software. And on the other one, here’s where we just talk about music. But as a whole, I don’t need to do that at all either, because they all talk to each other. That was the thing. There are so many choices. You’re not used to that. And I’m like, oh, I only get to make one Choice and I have to stick to it. And that was the confusion at first sight. And I could see that being a bouncing off point as well. Just the so many choices option.
Andy Piper: It is easy to move.
Andy Piper: A, an official from the European Commission joined Mastodon this week and joined on Mastodon Social and the European Commission has its own Mastodon server. so they could have signed up there and they have moved there now and everybody that followed her in the meantime has also been moved to follow her in the new place because that’s how the system works. I started on Mastodon Social, I then moved to one called McCor Social and the reason it’s called Macaw is an in joke from Twitter. Because, when I was at Twitter a lot of our internal systems were called after Birds and one of them was called Macaw. So it’s a bunch of old, my old colleagues from, from Twitter days that are on that server, broadly speaking, but it’s open to a few other people. We can invite others. I have an account as well for an open source thing, MQTT that I mentioned. I have an account for a hack space, hack Wimbledon that I, that I help with in London, which is a maker meetup. so yeah, there’s, it’s, I, I grown to recognize that I try to be myself and my whole self in most cases, but I also recognize that I am slices of myself in every case. Anyway, you know, I, I, not everybody in my family is interested in all of the tech stuff I do, so I’ll focus more on art or whatever else they might be interested in if I’m talking with them. So, and it’s the same with, you know, if I think about friends I’ve known since I was at school, friends I’ve known since I was at university, friends from work, friends from outside of work, just different sets of things that you talk about. So we live through life, go through life as, as individuals within an entire spectrum of interests and personality, but we very rarely provide that entire self to every person we meet. Yeah, right. and so I, I, it makes sense for me and I’m given the choice and I can be as much or as little as I want to be. Some servers do have, some Mastodon servers do have rules that say, no, no, we don’t want this content at all on this server. and that’s something that they can enforce if they want to. But broadly speaking, I did have to prove to get an account on, fostered on, that MQTT is an open source related thing. but it wasn’t that hard, but it was invite only because people very sensibly don’t want to be drowned with folks that want to come and cause problems on the Fediverse. They want to control and understand who the people that are signing up for the system are.
Tom Ray: And that’s the other option as well too is you can host your own server when you’re like this is all I want it to be. And that is also a choice you can make. Yeah.
Andy Piper: And I run a couple of small things. I don’t run Mastodon at home on my home lab, but I run a couple of other smaller, things that I that are literally single binaries that I can just run on my Getting Technical Proxmox server that I have here. So there’s one called Snack and there’s another one called Honk and there’s another one called Sorry, another one called Gush. They’re all single words weirdly, but they all but, but they’re all small enough that I can look at the code and understand it. I can look at the Mastodons code and I understand it at the broad level. But I’m not a Ruby, I haven’t done Ruby development for over 10 years. I’m not a specialist in the protocol. I know again, I know enough about all the things to put it together, but I’m not somebody who spends all my day on it. Whereas if I look at something that someone else has just spun up with some interesting new ideas in it that’s written in a language I might m. Be more familiar with and I don’t mind if it breaks on my home server because I control that and it’s not right then I get a lot of fun and joy from that. I really, I’ve said a few times in different talks that I get. I find joy in the, in the small things I can do online. As a techie I, I love to tinker ah with software and hardware because it gives me new experiences and helps me to tell other people new things. yeah.
Tom Ray: So, well, and even much like what we’re doing here, it’s like I like to do that too because it gives me ideas of like how can I apply this to something else that I do? Much like what we were talking about with the OGG camp. I mean my whole thing is like, well, are there. I tried looking it up and I mean I could be totally wrong and it may have happened and I hope it did and if it did, somebody tell me your Experience and how you did it. But I have not seen an unconference or open conference like that. That was with music.
Andy Piper: Yeah. So.
Tom Ray: And that’s why I was really curious about having you.
Andy Piper: I feel like there was, I feel like there’s been music hack that was a thing at some point, but that was the techies to hack on stuff around music. I don’t know whether it was an unconference for musicians.
Tom Ray: That’s what I’m saying.
Andy Piper: Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting at FEDI Forum which is an unconference format as well an online on conference, Fetty forum which is a thing about meeting about the Fetty verse, about. They do that every six months and I think 18 months ago was when Ben from Bandwagon Emissary showed up. Showed up and talked about Emissary and then the same event Kirsten talked about, Kirsten Lambertson talked about wanting a space for creatives. And so through that I think they then ended up starting to do the indie beat together as, as Radio Free Fetty went away. And I spoken with both of them during the course of those, those sessions and I, I’ve had some great conversations since then with Kirsten especially around. I built this little Gnome applet for tuning into the indie beat Radio.
Tom Ray: I wanted to ask you about that before we left today. So. Tell me about that.
Andy Piper: It’s just, it was just a fun thing because I, I use Gnome desktop and I like to hack on things and I’d seen other people build these kind of radio player, menu bar apps. So I, I honestly borrowed a bunch of code from some of those initially and just plugged in the indie beats, indie beats URL. But the way that it’s set up is because it links back to the artists on Bandwagon or Merlot so you can get their actual content. Yeah, there’s a few extra little things to do. You couldn’t just use an existing radio player with it because you want to do the extra hop to get to the, get to the good stuff. So I built that little thing. I had a few calls with her about it and then since then I know in the last six months the community’s put together the, the tv. I had a challenging end of last year so I was kind of a distracted for most of sort of October, November, December. so I didn’t really get to, to engage very much with it yet. But I mean I just love.
Tom Ray: It’s fun to hop in to know.
Andy Piper: The artists through the indie Beat, and listen to them and in a few cases then message them on Mastodon and got to know them a little bit. And it’s just been a joy to see creatives who have been struggling and, or you know, directly attacked by big tech, who are trying to, you know, diminish their audience and algorithmize everything and make it harder for them to actually make money from the stuff they create, for them to self organize to find these small spaces where they can have fun together. I mean you could look at some of the forums where these conversations have happened that have ended up creating, you know, the indie B FM and NDB TV and all of that stuff as being an unconference. It’s just been drawn out. And in a forum, right, folks have been having these ongoing conversations. If, if you’ve been able to get all of those people together in a room, maybe it would have all happened more quickly or in a different format or more things would have come out of it.
Tom Ray: And that, that is definitely the inspiration too behind me wanting to ask this question. Because I am a member of a lot of those forums and I’ve seen the evolution of the indie Beat tv. Thing is for me is those are hard for me to not collaborate with, to work with. I have a hard time looking at forums and under, and keeping following the chain of what’s going on because one conversation will be like, I’m referring to this one four, four steps back, I’m referring to this. Even if they quote them, I don’t know, for me it’s hard to keep my brain wrapped around it I guess. And it’s just my own personal way of digesting it. Whereas talking one on one to person, with people, that I can do and I see it happening and then when it finally it’s like, oh, that’s what they were talking about. I’m like, oh, I missed the entire concept.
Andy Piper: Well yeah, I mean it’s cool though that the, the things emerge organically anyway. And yes, I agree with you that people do have different ways of digesting information, following conversations, engaging with one another. So I do find I have found unconferences exciting. One of the things that I’ve been labeled in the past is a so called social bridge builder because I tend to have conversations with lots of different people in lots of different spaces and then occasionally I’ll make some amazing connection between two people that’s enabled something else to happen. So yeah, I mean I joked, I think with you on Mastodon, when you contacted OggCamp to ask for somebody to come on. Ah, that this is my side entrance. To come and end up being on indie B television is through your shows being shown on there. this is really fun, you know, it’s just nice little sidekicks.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And now for people who want to check out oggcamp, learn more about it or know when it’s happening, if they happen to be in that area or traveling to the UK.
Andy Piper: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Where can they go do that?
Andy Piper: So oggcamp.org is our website. it is happening in Manchester on the weekend of April 25th and 26th, of this year. it’s family friendly. it’s in a single hotel which you can stay in if you want to, but you don’t have to. There’s other places to stay nearby. we have a, call for talks if anybody would like to do a main stage talk and submit. that’s still open at the moment. I have a call for people to volunteer to take part on the crew. And what that means is I mentioned some of the tasks earlier. Things like helping with check in, making sure that everybody knows where things are happening, making sure that the rooms are manned at the right times, that, that the merch stand is man. But we’re not gonna take all of your time for the weekend. My goal is not to have five people and say, right, you, these are your full time tasks for the whole weekend and you don’t get to see the conference. That’s not the point. What we want is a group of, let’s say 15, 20 people who each do a couple of hours shift at a time so they all get time to go see the things they want to do, even present a talk if they want to. it’s entirely up to you. And we’ve been pretty successful with this in the past where it’s a friendly group. It’s not going to be a ton of hard work. I hope it’s going to be a lot of fun. And we also get these fancy custom T shirts with crew on them so at least you have something to take away with you afterwards. So, there’s a form to do that. So yeah, we’re on Mastodon, we’re on Blue sky, we’re in Matrix, we’re in Discord, I think, and a few other chat channels if you want to ask questions. And that’s, that’s where it’s happening.
Tom Ray: And if people wanted to learn more about you and what you do where can they do that?
Andy Piper: So I am Andy Piper in most places on the Internet. AndyPiper me is my kind of links page, which has got logos with links on all the different platforms further down. My blog is andypiper.co.uk, which I constantly wish I was writing more frequently on. And, andypiper.org has got most. It’s got my kind of main open source things I’m working on at the moment. So, yeah, bunch of places.
Tom Ray: Great. Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been fantastic.
Andy Piper: I am such a fan, Tom. I really appreciate the opportunity and, appreciate you reaching out to ask us to, talk about OggCamp and lots of other things. So it’s been really fun.