Time for FlashMash

9:13 am in workshops by guest

At IWMW 2010 I (Owen Stephens) am running a workshop on mashups – ‘FlashMash‘. The rather foolhardy aim of the session is to actually build a working mashup in the 90 minutes available.

There’s no nice way of saying this, so I’ll just come right out with it In order to stand a fighting chance of getting something useful done in such a short time we are going to have to cheat! Well, at least do some decent preparation advance. So this is where I need input before we all get to Sheffield. If we can narrow down what we want to do in the workshop beforehand, then I hope in the workshop itself we can do the following:

  • Agree on how we are going to do the mashup
  • Split the work into reasonable tasks
  • Split into groups to tackle the tasks (each group with a mixture of expertise)
  • Pull all the relevant bits together at the end

Depending on the experience of people at the workshop, we will introduce new tools and techniques as appropriate – we won’t be assuming any experience or knowledge of computer programming – the point is that with many mashups you can get stuff done with easy to use tools that are available online – e.g. Google Spreadsheets or Yahoo! Pipes.

A possible starting point is the list of RSS feeds available from previous IWMW events – which are helpfully all listed at http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/about/rss/. However, we can use any sources of information, and I’m not above scraping stuff out of web pages if we need to!

So, feel free to post ideas here – don’t worry (at this point) how practical they are, we can work is out as we get closer to the workshop (you don’t have to be coming along to the session to contribute – all suggestions are welcome).