I had a great meeting with my community media facilitator, Tim Rooney, tonight. I explained my film idea, we looked at Twitter and a little at some social media sites. My original plan was to create a film of 30-45 minutes, integrating interview clips, screencasts, B-roll film of in-person events. Being the master he is at examining a project and identifying what makes a great film, Tim proposed that I break the project into a number of chapters, each chapter being short, ten-minute absolute max length, and each chapter would focus on a particular form of social media or event. The thread through each of the chapters will be interview commentary, some video+audio, some just voice-over. To begin with I am going to tape two separate interview subjects, one technical, one non-technical. These sessions will provide a lot of the commentary that I will use throughout the chapters. If necessary, I’ll add additional interviews.
Here are some possible chapters that will illustrate the idea:
- The Un-conference: BarCamp Portland is an example of an un-conference that comes together through the energies of local people who live and breath using social media apps like Twitter, blogging, Upcoming.org.
- Two people who have met online and how they have used social media to enhance their relationship as well as their communities.
- Technically-savvy person (or people) talking about using social media to its fullest extent.
- Non-technical person discussing how they have learned social media tools from friends and how they put them to good use for a community of people (or built a community using them).
So, the idea of using chapters will allow me to finish a project in a short period of time, get more practice at making community films and will result in each new chapter being better than the last. Given that this would be my first project outside of the friendly confines of an organized class, I really like this progression! Thank you Tim for the great suggestions! You are a Jedi film-maker and storyteller!
My next steps are to identify the first couple of chapters and to start arranging the interviews. More to come soon! I will also start tagging the posts pertaining to this film series as “SocialMediaFilm”.
I’m doing a new community film project entitled ‘Using Social Media to Enhance Community’ (until I can come up with a better name). This film will briefly explore what social media is (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogging, wikis) followed by interview clips, short screencasts, and some fly-on-the-wall views of at least one in-person meeting of people who are involved in social media.
Right now I’m looking for some non-technical people who would provide a balance to the tech-savvy people who I am interviewing. The focus for the interview and video with non-technical people is to explore how their reaction to using social media applications for community-building. Although the tone of this film is intended to be positive toward the use of social media for communities, hearing some of the difficulties would also be constructive.
I may also explore how social media is used in secondary or pre-secondary education, how it is perceived and used by the leaders and workers of the future, although I haven’t decided if this will make it into this film.
If you are someone interested in participating in this project, to be interviewed or to recommend others, please contact me.
There was a time when I cringed at the idea of having a formal code review of my code. Well, I’ve been programming for over twenty years and my first five years in the business was for a company that was transitioning from startup to sustained business mode, and there was just no time for good process. Since then I’ve been fortunate to work with people who care about the quality of their code as well as the business objectives. I worked on a team that was broken up last year by shifting corporate priorities due to acquisitions. We practiced scrum, some TDD, some pairing, and most importantly, we developed a code-review practice that was comfortable for everyone. Every other Friday afternoon at 3 we meet in a common area in the company cafe building where one person would walk through code. It was usually something they wrote, but we also wanted to select code others had written because we all picked up whatever task was at the top of the backlog, leading to a more well-rounded team. We reviewed comments, design, coding guidelines, all within the scope of the particular piece of code being reviewed. It worked reasonably well. And the late Friday time had the effect of relaxing everyone.
That team was special because we built a product from scratch and we developed a lot of trust in each other. Today was the last day at work for Philippe, a guy who wasn’t on that team but who worked on the security products development group at my company. As I had developed an interest in building secure software, I had some interaction with him during the security code review process that he and his team conducted on our product. I took the recommendations that they made and designed and implemented a plan for handling as much of it as was possible in our impossible schedule . When I said goodbye today, Philippe told me that he really enjoyed working with me back then because I took seriously the engineering of security into the product.
As I was flipping through my aggregator (Google Reader) tonight, I came across Joe Duffy’s blog post on multi-threaded code review. Joe is one of the key members of the Microsoft team building the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework, and is currently writing a book on concurrency development for Addison-Wesley. His blog post is fairly long but then, writing concurrency code is difficult and making sure that it is validated is of critical importance. There is too much to re-state here. Even listing highlights doesn’t give it enough justice. If you’re writing multi-threaded code, go read this blog entry.
Back on security, related to code review I thought I’d point out that the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group has come up with security guidelines for WCF that includes a lot of how-to and application scenario documentation as well as videos. It is crucial to be aware of the common security traps such as buffer overflows and cross-site scripting attacks. With WCF, however, there is a whole boatload of additional concerns because of the C: Communication. A WCF service may need to impersonate the caller in order for a component on the receiving end can authorize them for some activity. The P&P team has nicely written docs for explaining how to do this. Or you can watch the video if you’re so inclined. This is great material for identifying questions and concerns for use in a security code review.