Smoothing out the close on Fridays

Tuttle runs from 10am to midday. It always has, that’s always been the deal – I had people today trying to tell me it used to be different. Nope, but I understand why that belief has come about.

In all of our previous venues, apart from our beloved #sexfactory, there was some form of catering, we had the space set aside for Tuttle and at 12 o’clock those who wanted to stick around and eat and drink could do so and at both the Coach & Horses and the ICA I just asked people to move to another part of the venue.

Now that we’re at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, we have a slightly different deal – it’s not a public space and there is no catering or serving staff. In addition I personally get overwhelmed by the number and variety of conversations I have at Tuttle. It was rare in the past for me to stick around – I always need some space after Tuttle and since there’s nobody employed here to keep the place open and look after people if I want to disappear I’ve had to chuck people out.

This is particularly difficult when people turn up just before 12 with the assumption that something will be continuing. At the ICA you could do that because the place was open and none of us *had* to stay to lock up and look after the space.

You don’t like this abrupt ending and neither do I.

So I’d like to suggest a different way – a smoother transition from “loads of people” to “everybody’s gone home”. We will have tables and a space set aside for people to have lunch that they bring with them if they want to. We will also make sure that someone from the Centre with a key will be around. At different times this may be me or Brian or one of the other keyholding project people like the Accidental Festival team. I will announce at 12 o’clock something like: “Tuttle proper is over for another week, but some people like to stick around for lunch so please help us clear away the coffees and tea stuff and set up for lunch”

This maintains a boundary around Tuttle but gives some flexibility for people who want to extend their tuttle time. It restores, I hope, the vibe around Tuttle that we used to have. I would then feel able to go away for a bit and get my head back on straight or do stuff I need to do.

Does this work better? What have I missed?

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Social Media Cafes and other Tuttle-inspired events

As you probably know, I encourage people all over to start their own social media cafe rather than trekking to the nearest big city and then moaning about how long it’s taken to get there.

I want to be absolutely clear, I own nothing here. I have no control over or responsibility for anything that these groups or their members do or say. Neither do they owe me or the Tuttle Club any allegiance – any affiliation is purely informal and may be as tenuous as the fact that one of the founders may have once said something to me about being interested in what we’d done. I have a feeling though that if I’d tried to franchise the idea with contracts and fees and branding and such, they wouldn’t be springing up quite so perkily.

We’re all in it together, kid.

Outside the Central London group (that’s us) I am aware of the following social media cafes, tuttles and tuttle-inspired events. I’m sorry if I’ve missed anyone out. If I’ve left something in that died long ago, let me know.

In the UK, working roughly upwards from the southernmost (though my geography isn’t *that* good) …
Cornwall
Devon
Brighton
Hove
Lewes
Tunbridge Wells
Rochester
Twickenham has kukutana
Thames Valley
Oxford
Bath had a meeting and there’s a facebook group but not sure if there’s any more.
Cardiff has Trydan
Cheltenham
Cambridge has Twig
Coventry & Warks
Solihull
Birmingham
Lichfield
Black Country
Derby
Manchester
Edinburgh

In mainland Europe, I’m only aware of:
Barcelona

In the Land of the Free:
Boston, MA
Long Beach, CA
@langley started something in Denver, CO but it appears to have closed…
Chris Heuer has run a social media cafe at Citizen Space in San Francisco, CA
New York City, NY

So who’s going to get going on Asia, South America, Australasia, or Antarctica…?

Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr cc-by

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Tuttle TwitBot, TwuttleBot?

This is the beginning of a call for developers, but I probably need some help fleshing out the spec first.

It started with the sign-up page on the wiki falling into disuse – maybe it will recover, but I think it’s served it’s purpose – most people just turn up, or they don’t.

However there’s still a need for information about who’s going. Some people want reassurance that there’s going to be *someone* else there. Others may want to know which people that they know are going. It’s also useful to know after the event who was there so that you can follow up conversations or connect in a non-spammy way with people you didn’t get to see.

The non-spammy bit is very important, I want the information to be available, but I want to maintain the trust of people who come to twitter that their data won’t be harvested by unscrupulous folk. Of course it’s been possible to snaffle data from the start using the wiki, but it doesn’t seem that anyone’s bothered yet.

So I want you to treat this post as a draft specification for a new tool, a bot for which the principal user interface is twitter. I imagine it working like an irc-bot. I send messages in a pre-specified form with certain parameters and I receive a message back which either confirms an action I’ve taken or gives me some information (where that information won’t fit into a tweet it will need to be stored somewhere readable and linked to).

The core functions I have imagined so far are:

Going – defaults to adding you to the list of people coming to the next tuttle but with optional date parameter, returns a confirmation that your message has been recieved.

WhoIsGoing – returns a list of people already signed up, records (somewhere – where?) the fact that you asked.

IsTuttleOn – returns “yes” except when it doesn’t 🙂

WhatTime – returns 10am except when it doesn’t

WhatIsTuttle – returns standard description. Can take username as a parameter so you can let someone know (for the scenarios where a n00b asks “dude, wtf is a tuttle?”

WhoWent – takes date parameter, returns list of people who signed up.

You get the idea.

As a user, can you think of other functions you’d like to use? Can you think through the implications of such functions and let me know if there’s something stupid in there? Let’s throw this around for a little while – I’m particularly interested in understanding ways in which it could be simplified or abstracted from for use by other meetups or else extended for us to perform other functions than Friday meetups.

As a developer, what are the holes? What else do you need to know to be able to start building a prototype? I’m language or environment agnostic at the moment and would like outputs to be available in multiple forms, not just the existing wiki. Beyond the twitter API you might consider getting this bot to talk to the pbwiki API (perhaps “Going” writes some details from your twitter profile to a wiki page) or you might look at it talking to the Eventbrite API or whatever.

I hope it goes without saying that all parts of the development process should be Open Source – you should be prepared to share your code with others for the benefit of the Tuttle community and anyone else who wishes to use it.

(also, apologies, I’m forgetting to say thankyou to @yellowpark, @evangineer and @robocallaghan for helping me get my thinking this far)

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Standing room only…

Definitely the busiest tuttle so far – we had nearly 70 people signed up on the wiki and although they didn’t all make it, the numbers were swelled by many more who hadn’t said they’d come.

For the first time, for those who still have no idea what happens at a tuttle, I did what I’ve meant to do for ages, I wandered around with my recorder and captured reactions from some of the folk. Mike doesn’t like it being called podcasting, as you’ll hear, so welcome to Tuttle Radio.

This is also for those lovely Lawsons who are clearly pining for something tuttlish.

Download (13MB)

(cross-posted from Perfect Path)

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A Tuttle Solstice Treat

Eeep!!!! For the Friday Tuttle on 19th December, our friends at the ICA are giving us a special gift of a screening of our favourite movie: Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”!

It will start promptly at 10.15 so we should be done by 1pm in time for some lunch (don’t worry, we’ll be going for the original cut, not the “happy ending” US version…). I‘ll have put up a sign-up list on the wiki to keep an eye on how many are planning to come. I’d be surprised if we reach the capacity of the cinema (185) but I’ve given up trying to predict these things.

If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat.

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Tuttle on Tour: Karaoke

****** UPDATED 22/11/08 ******

• The ‘Tuttleoke’ is now being held @ Lucky Voice ISLINGTON
  (Soho was fully booked)
• We’ve bagged two rooms for a total of 20 16 Rockstars;
  (8 & 8 respectively)
• Currently have 13 16 folk confirmed, that means 7 0 places left kids
• Get in touch if you want to play watch – we’ve filled the places now but people are allowed to come along and drink before and swap in and out etc…. Drop us a line and we’ll see what we can arrange.

Original details below…

___________________________________________________

This has been a long time coming…

We’ve talked about it,
We’ve attempted it and
We’ve even threatened to just go out and do it…

Well, the time is NOW folks and Vikki Chowney and James Whatley have stepped up to do the organising.

So… It’s Karaoke Time!

The Time: 7:30pm
The Date: Friday Dec 5th
The Place: Lucky Voice, Soho Lucky Voice, 173-174 Upper Street, Islington
The Event: Can you not READ? It’s Karaoke!

So recently, when Whatley got back from his brief stint in the US, one of the ‘chief learnings’ that he returned with was: From Las Vegas to NYC – The US Tech Scene has a proper hard-on for Karaoke…

…and let’s face it, the conversations we’ve *all* had at Tuttle, London really isn’t that different…

We know you’re out there – we’ve secretly been watching and listening, and every now and then some of you have even threatened to organise a night out… well, here it is.
Karaoke kids, let’s do this.

There is already got a bunch of people confirmed (you know who you are), but obviously – as with any event like this – the more the merrier.
We reckon we need a minimum of 8 of you to really raise the roof (we’re not far from that now) however, the more of you that come, the more rooms we’ll be able to book!
Works out about £15 per head and ideally we’d like to book it ASAP.

Numbers and places shouldn’t be hard, but we may hit a limit eventually so the sooner you can reply, the better. Either leave a comment on this post or email James on james at whatleydude dot com and let him know you’re up for it…

Speak soon Singstars,

@vikkichowney & @whatleydude

PS – If you’ve already said yes to this privately, please reply anyway as it helps with filing! 😉

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Tuttle on Sea

Josh Russell has been along to a few Friday mornings now and has talked about opening up a Tuttle branch in Brighton. Now lots of people do this, they come along and go “Wow! This is great! We should be doing this where I am. Can we?” And I say “Of course”.

And until now that’s all it’s been – until now…

So Josh will be hosting the first Tuttle Club outside of London on Saturday 16th August at 11am upstairs in the Quadrant bar at Brighton’s Clock Tower. The plan is to have it as a regular spot, so if you can’t make it this week (like I can’t), I’m sure there’ll be a weekend soon you can do.

More details than I can be bothered to retype here are at http://brightonsocialmediacafe.pbwiki.com/

So. Next. Birmingham. Calling Birmingham.

Pic by ‘Speculando on Flickr
cc : by

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Tuttle & Co.

As Mike says, the Friday morning tuttle collective aka Social Media Café continues to be a buzzy fixture with new and interesting industries, sectors and cliques represented in the room. It’s easy for me as “host” to get distracted and focus only on the new and occasional visitors, ie the things that keep changing, rather than the emerging, significant core of people who are there practically every week.

Mike and I met up with Bill Erickson and Alex (@emp – eek! I didn’t ever get your surname, Alex) last week for lunch. As well as their organisation of the BIL conference we chatted about Tuttle and the coworking experience at The Creative Space – do I believe their tales of $1 per sq.ft? And I am, no really I am, going to get down to the Werks one of these days. What’s becoming clear to me is that, having created something of a feeling of community with Tuttle, it feels right to tie it in to a concentrated effort to finally get coworking off the ground here in London even in the face of ridiculous property prices.

This is my current vision – that a group (and anyone who dares call us “The Tuttle Elite” will have very very painful things done to them) of us – those already working freelance – commit to renting (or otherwise acquiring) an office space for a period in which we will work together. The working atmosphere will be somewhere between serviced office, cafe and project war room. People who come along will be actively encouraged to collaborate with others rather than simply pursuing their own stuff. To the outside we might look a little like a consulting, resourcing and training company. It will work best if there continues to be a rich mix of people from different disciplines.

When it comes to actually making this commitment it all gets a bit chicken and egg – Me: “Can you commit to paying rent somewhere?” Tuttlers: “Well it depends on where and it depends on for how much.” Prospective Landlords: “So how many people are committed to this?”

So here’s something to throw into the mix.

Tom Ball is, right now, moving Cognac out of their 5th floor 450sq ft office on the Strand down to a larger 2nd floor space in the same building. Tom and I reckon it could house up to 8 people working at any one time (as long as it doesn’t get too hot this summer) There’s a separate little meeting room and a small kitchen. He’s looking for people to take it on, but obviously doesn’t want to hold onto the overhead for too long so this is a current and fleeting opportunity. It costs around £2000 per month – the details are here on their site.

So are there eight of us who could/would pay £250 pm each, like tomorrow? And put down a month’s deposit as well as the first month’s rent? or some other combination of people and cash? I recognise that there’s a difference between getting Yes-es to these questions and actually getting cash out of people but it’s worth asking anyway – even if this just turns out to be an Aunt Sally. Or is there a benefactor or patron who’d put up say, six month’s rent in order to enable it to happen – and probably get some benefit in terms of free consulting help – y’know access to that bright interdisciplinary cohort of super-brains?

I’m looking at doing more stuff, more interestingly all the time. So be prepared to listen to me waffle on about it for some time, until it happens.

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Hyperthrust

Poor dusty neglected Tuttle blog. We promise to never leave you alone for this long again…

It’s probably due to the success of the Social Media Cafe itself that we haven’t had time to blog about the damn thing 🙂 Each Friday seems to go from strength to strength whether it be one of those packed to the rafters affairs or a more low key series of conversations. We’ve had a recent influx of interest from what Gia splendidly calls Classic Media. Indeed, I’ve even seen movie scripts being passed around and each week we get a healthy number of new faces.

I was saying to Lloyd one week that I was expecting a low turn out as only a few people had signed up to the wiki by the Thursday. Because he’s been keeping an eye on this sort of thing a lot more closely than I have, Lloyd was still confidently expecting a full house. He was right. More people now seem to find us via word of mouth which we take to be a very healthy sign.

So with no one doubting that Lloyd’s baby is a success it’s probably a good time to start using the blog a little bit more to chart these highs, meet some of the regular Tuttlers and also throw around some ideas.

But first:

Only one man, federal agent Norman Tuttle, knows Jesse Mach’s true identity…

Thanks to Lee for throwing this our way. It just goes to show that behind every top secret scheme to send a 300mph heavily armed state of the art motorcycle out among the general population there’s a nerd with a great name.

We already covered Harry, but no doubt other namesakes will pop up from time to time. Let us know if you spot any…

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