It's been so long since I wrote.  Mostly due to being super busy helping the data.gov.uk team work on their strategy for engaging the open data community.  It's a great role and the team I'm working with are so passionate, it's fun to be a part of something like this.

2009 has been an extraordinary year for me.  I've watched my little girl grow from approx 55cms to 85cms in under 12 months, and double her weight.  I've worked on some exciting open data roles for both the Guardian and the government.  I've attended some very interesting workshops, including those by NESTA and Nokia, to help define the future of technology, and I've even been a judge and an award presenter (on stage and EVERYFINK) within the games industry.

And now, as 2009 draws to a close, I find myself in a very interesting position.  My contract with the government has been extended until April 2010, and so my husband and I have chosen to switch roles for 3 months, to see what it's like.  Jake has quit work and from mid January he will be Nemi's main carer, whilst I work mostly from home enabling me to still be a daily (big) part of Nemi's life.  It will be a very interesting change, and one we hoped one day we might be able to achieve.  He's also going to be able to be focussed on his own technical development, and pushing forward on some ideas he's been having this last few years since iPhones and Android OS came about.

We also moved house in November, and have a lot of work to do here, which starts in January (hey, why wait.. ack!) which I feel may be the dominating thought vibe until Spring next year... All in all, a fairly hectic year!  

Thanks for reading, and if you've been around me during this year, thanks also for your support and friendship.  I'd love to know what your year has been like, so if you'd like to bullet point, paraphrase, or go all novel in the comments, please do.  Or, link to your year end post.

Here's to 2010, good health and love to you all.   

Last week I had the fortunate occurence of a friend of mine being one of the 100,000 first users of Google's new Wave.  Being the lovely person he is, he duly sent out his invites to people on Thursday, and I was one of them.  Hitting F5 on my inbox continuously for 5 minutes to welcome the invite home got kind of boring, so I went off and had lunch. 

After lunch, still no invite.

Next day, still no invite.  

Thankfully at this point others who had been recipients of the invites also mentioned theirs hadn't come through either, so at least I knew I hadn't been over looked (heh) in the invite sending process.

After some digging online, I have found very little in the way of fact, but it seems that the invites aren't actually invites - they're nominations for people to potentially come in and use the service.  And no one knows how long you have to wait to hear from Google at all.  The best blog post I found was Why You Haven't Got Your Google Wave Invite Yet where some Google employees comment and confirm that they should probably maybe come out sometime in the future.

I need me some clippers this is all waaaay too wooly!

Seems strange to me not to have some sort of auto mailer saying, "Hey, gratz! DING DING! You got an invite, and as soon as we've got chance you'll be in, expect to hear from us in the next 2 weeks!" or you know, perhaps something a leetle more professional.  But you get my point.

As it stands, to me, it just causes confusion - was I actually invited?  Has Google messed up on spam filters?  Is the invite system broken?

A little clarity would go a long way.  Just gets frustrating and obnoxious otherwise.  

Got to say, not overly impressed this end, and I haven't even seen what Wave can do for me yet.  Why start us out on such bad feeling Google?  Is it really that hard to just politely let us know our nomination has been received, and an approximation of when we might expect to get a look?  As it stands, I'll be wary of sending my invites out for fear of people thinking I'm bullshitting when I say they've been sent...

Hello!

Today I'm writing about something that I've been wanting to do for some time.  I want to give back, and my last set of commercial mentees are now all flying solo without the need for me to be cramping their style.  So, I'm after a new one.

I just want to make one thing REALLY REALLY CLEAR - there is *no experience required*.  If you have experience already, that is fantastic, but to me, the most important thing in sales is the ability to be adaptable, strong willed, friendly and above all - self motivated.  If you have those characteristics, please read on :)

This particular apprenticeship also has a sales job that comes with it, up to 3 days a week (flexible, depending on the person) and a very nice £150 per day for your efforts.  The start date will be asap, but ideally no later than the New Year.  Perhaps a few days before Christmas could help ensure you get all the pressies you're after?

What I'm after is thus:  

• Keen to learn
• Enthusiastic
• Good command of English both spoken and written (lots of phone and email work in this role)
• Someone who wants to make a difference in a small business
• Big ambition - I want you to be heading up the sales department eventually!

What I can give you is this:

• Free training in London, passing on knowledge you'll need to succeed in sales (honestly, it's really simple stuff)
• A job!
• Continuous support throughout your career until it becomes clear you're way better than I'll ever be.. :)
• Some good contacts in the industry

If you're interested in this opportunity, please email me on thayer at thayerprime dot com and tell me all about yourself, a CV, and why you're going to totally nail this job I want to give you.



 

Yesterday me and some other folks descended upon Sun Microsystem's offices for a spot of Email Yoga, as tutored by Gavin O'Carroll. It was really interesting, and involved loads of being out of chairs, and visualisation - not something I've done on a couse before, but once you get into it, very useful and positive.

The course started with some jiggling of body parts (I kid you not) before moving onto a quick counselling session of our bad habits - we ranted, Gavin listened.

The hour involved lots of moving about and thinking about our future, and habits - both good and bad.  

All in all a thoroughly enjoyable course, with some really lovely people on it.

A great big thank you to Sun Microsystems for letting us use their office space to run the course. They provide fantastic services for start ups, and if you'd like to know more please contact Stewart Townsend (@stewarttownsend).


If you'd like to find out more about the Digital Health Service or the Email Yoga course please get in touch with Gavin O'Carroll - gavin@digitalhealthservice.com

I'm starting to think about work for the new year, as my current contracts will run out by then.  

I'm up for working anything between 1 day a month up to working 3 days a week. I currently work as a consultant, but would consider a perm part time role if the right juicy role came along. If anyone hear is interested or know anyone who could be would love a hello :)

(You can download my full CV here or get in touch thayer at thayerprime dot com)

Summary from LinkedIn:

I'm working for a new client - Digital Health Service - founded by Gavin O'Carroll. It's been really interesting finding out about the services Gavin provides. His training courses "help people maximise the productivity and well-being from the digital technology they use to get things done". It's a holistic view on reducing your stress from technnology, and making it work on your terms - I like that. More of us should be doing that.

It reminds me a bit of when I went offline from my social media style communications for a month in January last year. It was hard due to the addiction that builds up around those services, but ultimately it did relieve the stress of fighting inboxes and pokes, tweets and tags :)

If you're interested in your Digital Health, or think your company could benefit from me giving your HR or training manager a poke, drop me a line on thayer@digitalhealthservice.com and I'll tell you (or them) all about it. 

Event parenting (v) - the ability to attend an event, with your child or children, either in a Free Range* approach, or by use of on site childcare facilities.    (* thanks Alice ;-)

Well pheeeewweeeyyyy!  My post about taking Nemi to a tech conference opened up the debate about childcare at events, and hurrah!  That's exactly what I hoped would happen, but didn't actually expect.  Great!  Thank you everyone for your comments - even the ones I didn't agree with, this is exactly what we need to start moving forward.

One thing that raised some eyebrows was the tone of those opposed to it.  Although I value the opinions, I think the delivery could do with being a bit more considered (try not to make this personal, or insulting) - I want to have a discussion with everyone, and those who are against it - that's really useful - let me work with you to produce a solution (or set of solutions) that bear you in mind, and make the next steps along this path ones that include your views.  I want to win you over.  I want to make this something that works for you too.

With that in mind, if anyone who is opposed to the idea (for whatever personal, or greater good) reasons, please do keep commenting, but if you could keep it as constructive as possible, you're much more likely to get taken seriously and have your views taken onboard by everyone.

Ok, that all said and done, let's see what yesterday brought up:

• The amount of blog post retweets and comments showed there is a large interest in this area
• A lot of both Mums and Dads contacted me personally to say childcare facilities at events would be of benefit to them
• Those against the idea expressed noise (specifically crying) as their main issue, and bearing related extra costs as another - we need to ensure these views are taken in to account with our solutions
• There are companies doing event childcare (Rachel found one for weddings) already - can we tap into it? (thanks @racheldorman)
• There are tech events already providing childcare facilities (BlogHer, reboot, Geekyoto and more)

Next steps then:

WIKI

I have created a wiki that any interested parties can view, or contribute to (contribution will require approved membership) - if you're interested in contributing please sign up.  If you're interested in watching this progress, please bookmark :)
http://eventparenting.pbworks.com/

I will endeavour to write up everything that's come to pass so far, and start adding topics with:

• solutions
• best practice examples
• potential childcare providers and their costs and details
• potential pit falls (and hopefully - how to negotiate them)
• child friendly events listings (and hopefully, reviews!)
• .. and more as I think of it.

We can then use this information as event organisers, parents, interested parties to break down any perceived barriers and hopefully work through ways of event parenting.

[ NB Bear with me, as a full time Mum and part time consultant, it may take me a week or so to get this going.  Thanks for your understanding. ]

EMAIL LIST

I would also like to start an email list for contributors to post details of child friendly events they hear of.  If you'd like to join please email me - thayer AT thayerprime dot com.  This will be a pre-moderated list, and your details will only ever be seen by me (I promise never to pass them on, or use them for anything other than signing you up to this list).  I would like this list to be global, so please do join in wherever you are.

Ok, I think that covers moving forward - if you have any other suggestions or comments, I would love to hear them.  Thanks again to everyone who has contributed to this idea, I hope to see some of you over on the wiki.

Just got wind from the Guardian Open Platform team that tomorrow at 10am they will be selling 25 tickets at half price to the first 25 people who manage to grab them.

When I tweeted about the conference earlier this year, a few replies were that it looked great, but too expensive. Well here's your opportunity! Grab 'em! :-D

From the site:

"The Guardian will be offering a half-price discount for Activate Summit 2009 tomorrow. It will open at 10am GMT for the first 25 delegates to sign up. We'll announce the code in the Open Platform Google Group here:
http://groups.google.com/group/guardian-api-talk"

Here's all about the event if you're interested: http://www.guardian.co.uk/activate

Here's the bit about the offer starting tomorrow at 10am: http://tinyurl.com/odqn82

Good luck!  If you do grab a ticket, come and say hi, I'll be there (but sadly, not with Nemi ;-)

UPDATE - Nemi's hack made Cnet! :-D

Yesterday I descended upon Open Hack London, pram and all, to find out what it was like going to a technology conference with a baby, and also to join in and see what it was all about. Neither of us has ever been to a Hack Day before, and being the owner of some very rusty Perl and PHP skillz I was pretty nervous both as a Mum and a developer to even show my face at the event.

We decided to go to Open Hack London in the first place as a friend of ours, Tom Coates (who works for Yahoo!), was in town to speak there, and had invited a bunch of friends to come and visit. We thought it would be the perfect opportunity to test the waters of conference parenting when we knew there would be some buddies around to look out for.  It also co-incided nicely with Mother's Day weekend in many parts of the world (not the UK...) which was a cute co-incidence.

Taking Nemi to a tech event has been something I've wanted to do for a while now. Some of my professional life is organising, sponsoring and consulting on events in the technology industry, and a question that frequently comes up is "What about childcare facilities?" - it's often a heated debating point amongst Mums (interestingly, never had a Dad say it) and event organisers from my experience. Mums want to come to weekend or evening events, but often struggle with finding childcare, and from those I've spoken with, can feel let down and left out when there's no option for bringing children along and thus missing out themselves. (My personal views are identify events you want to go to early, and arrange for childcare in your normal way if possible; but I realise for some people this isn't always an option for whatever reason.)

In the past, I've struggled with the health and safety aspect of allowing children to the events I organise, as there has been access issues, or alcohol involved. I'm ashamed to say that it's always been easier as an event organiser to just rule out having under 18s there than investigate ways of getting around that. From now on though, I will be taking the Yahoo! approach.. Which goes a little something like this...

I registered for Open Hack London via their website, and put in the special requirements box (great first example that made me feel bringing Nemi might actually be possible) that if I was accepted to come, I would be bringing my 6 month old baby daughter, Nemi, along, and would there be access and nappy changing facilities? I got a swift response from Anil (one of the organisers) saying we were in! And that both access and nappy changing would be no problem at all. His email then went on to ask if we intended to stay the night! I was fairly surprised and impressed at the fact they would even consider this, let alone how included it made me feel. I felt staying over would be a step too far for this new Mum on her first event-with-baby-excursion, so we declined the sleepover gracefully, and starting planning our trip out the following week.

With a buggy loaded to the hilt, we set off. Arriving fashionably late for the Tech Talks but just in time for the Hack Day, we were greeted by two super smiley chaps on the door who helped us find a lift down via an alternative entrance, and shared a few jokes about Nemi signing away her code rights.. ;-)

Once in, we were again greeted very warmly and infact, made quite a fuss of by the Yahoo! staff on the event reception who genuinely couldn't help us enough, and coo'd at and engaged with Nemi whilst telling me all the event details, giving us our welcome pack, and explaining about the nappy change options (one being, "Why not just do it on stage? Give the devs a dose of reality?" heh, a fun idea, but I'm not sure Nemi would appreciate knowing the dev community had seen her bum in 2009).

Once we were in came the hardest part of the whole day - walking into the lobby with a pushchair. Not because of any physical barriers, but mentally I found it emabrassing - "Why is that woman bringing her baby here?", "What the hell?", "Oh God, a BABY!" etc - none of these were in any way said or intoned, but they were the voices in my head as I glided Nemi across the room and found a corner to hide in whilst I found my nerves again.

A quick feed in the corner, and a scope of the room, and I was feeling a bit more confident. At that point, a very friendly and kind hacker came over (whos name I didn't catch - if you're reading this, do comment!) and said hello to Nemi and me, and was so welcoming and warm that we felt right at home within the conversation with him. The icing on the cake for me asking if he'd just take Nemi a sec so I could hoist myself up. "How do I hold a baby?" was the reply, "Oh, just under her arms like this" <holds Nemi at arms length smiling, whilst she gurgles and smiles at him/> "Great, thank you" "Wow, that was the first time I've held a baby, I'm really glad I didn't drop her!" :-) This was great, Nemi had just taken her first baby-holding-cherry, and both Nemi and Lovely Hacker Man looked proud and slightly shocked.

Spurred on by our experience so far, we went into the Tech Talks to check it all out. At this point I realise a sling would have been good as well as the pram, as pushing a pram round a packed out event is much harder than just carrying your little dude/dudette - so if you're planning on trying this yourself, do pack a sling. Once inside we hooked up with our buddies before they scarpered for lunch. We decided to take lunch inside, get chance to work out if we could join a hack team, and talk to some more developers.

Lunch was yummy, and Nemi had a play in her pram whilst I chatted to some devs and found out their plans. I worked out pretty quickly we were going to be more of a hindrance than a help to any team, so we decided to just be the mascots for the day and cheer everyone on from the sidelines. We also had a charming chat with a young hacker Dad who's son was away for the weekend with Mum, and he came over for some baby hugs as he was missing the little dude. He showed us some photos of his son, who had the most *gorgeous* smile ever :) If you're reading this lovely hacker-dad, do say hi in the comments :)

After lunch, we did a quick nappy change, and then chatted to a few of the Yahoo! folk, who were genuinely really happy and glad that Nemi had come along, and frequently offering help, and checking in that we were ok and didn't need anything. Nemi was loving all the attention, and thankfully, in a great mood - she had a lot of fuss and photos taken (even by a chap from Cnet at one point!) and was even videoed interviewing me by Y! Studios. Although by that point (it was late afternoon by now, and we'd been there 3 hours) she was getting hot and a bit tetchy. But still managed a raspberry and an attempt at eating the mini boom mic. (I'll update with a link to the video and photos as I hear from people)

All in all it was a great day, and we really enjoyed ourselves. The Yahoo! staff really went all out to make us feel welcome, included, and confident from the minute I sent the first email asking to come, until we left the building.

Points to take away for any parents thinking of taking their baby (under 12 months) to an event would be:

• check with the organisers it'll be ok, and if there are the facilities you need and if not, ways to work around that. I know, totally obvious, but thought I'd best put it in here.
• could be wise to check people you know are going, it was quite intimidating walking in - it was nice to know friendly faces would be there if I had felt uncomfortable.
• sadly, don't expect to be able to participate as much as a non-babied up person. Again, obvious, but just want to point that out :)
• take a sling. Babies get heavy after an hour or so of constant carrying.
• plan ahead that baby may not eat/sleep as much during the event by stocking them up on both before going. I made sure Nemi had a few ounces more milk before we set off, and a good morning nap before getting to the venue (we arrived around noon).
• take toys. Perhaps not a Sophie Giraffe that we did, which made a very cute squeaking noise throughout some of the more quiet bits of the hack afternoon ;-)
• be prepared to leave early, and don't forget to listen to your baby - when they're hot and tired, it's time to go. Even if you're not done yet, chances are they are. It's a lot to take in for the little flump! This may mean planning to have whatever is the most important part of the event happen half an hour after you arrive, so you have chance to get there, do a feed and settle, and then having a happy baby whilst you see whatever it is you wanted to.

Also, a last point - I took Nemi along on the understanding there would be no childcare there, and although there were many willing baby holders, this doesn't really help the debate around professional childcare at events such as these, which would in turn help the parent to participate whilst being able to check in on little sausage every so often. This is something we could do with addressing - with future tech as a leading economy, it seems only right to me we should perhaps lead the way in every facet we can. Perhaps if more of us do join in with our babies and children, the need will then become clear for a more structured approach and we can work with event organisers to provide the facilities that would help everyone who wants to, attend. Not forgetting single Dads, or even Dads who just want to make sure their weekend time (which is for a lot of Dads, their only time) with their child can be inclusive to their hobbies and professional lives (pretty much every hacker I spoke to (all were male) couldn't wait to show us photos of their little one, and tell us how great they were).

Nemi and I are available to test your event for child-friendliness if you want us to - drop me a line. I'd also welcome any discussion on how to help events cater for parents and their children, and would be very interested in helping set up or find out about childcare options at events if you run an event and would be interested.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to the staff at Yahoo! (especially Anil, Sophie and Havi) for making it such a fun experience.

EDIT - TRAVEL - for interest sake to other Mums, we travelled in to London from Kent, which is an hour train journey, plus central London travel time, and back again all via public transport.  You may find it easier to stay longer at events than we managed (3.5hrs) if you live more local to your chosen event, or if you own a car and are able to drive to your event.

FURTHER EDIT - I've been coming under fire from some people on Twitter and other places (sadly, not addressing me personally, but just bitching behind my back) that taking a baby to a conference makes me a Bad Mum.  That I am Selfish.  That I am Not Considering The Baby's Needs.  Utter rubbish.  Nemi loves being out and about, and prefers to be with her Mum (and meeting lots of cool new people) any day than cooped up inside, or I would imagine (she's never been, so I don't know) being in childcare from 7am - 7pm which she would have to be if I wanted to keep my income coming in to support us.

As anyone at the Hack Day will validate, she didn't cry once, was full of smiles, and other than guzzling a bottle of milk and a snooze on me was playful and engaged the time we were there.  When she got a bit too hot and flustered around 3:30pm, we left to go and have a walk round Soho Park.  So please, if you have an issue with my parenting, feel free to address me directly (with either @Thayer if you're Tweeting, or email me) and I will be happy to respond and set your mind at rest.