Request For Proposals – Over the Air website update
If you haven't heard of Over the Air (OTA), it's an annual mobile developer event that brings together 600+ mobile developers, designers & enthusiasts for two days of technical workshops, inspirational talks, and an overnight Hackday. The 5th annual Over the Air 2011 will be held on Friday & Saturday the 1st & 2nd of June at Bletchley Park - the home of the WWII code-breakers who decrypted the German Enigma machine, the base of Alan Turing 'father of Computer Science', and final resting place of Colossus, the first programmable computer.
The workshops are put together by and for the developer community, featuring new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs; and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases, new insights and a healthy dollop of inspiration. Attendees are invited to stay overnight so that they can work on ideas, apps and hacks on the fly – to be entered into the various Hackday competition categories and demo’ed on the second day. It’s a great relaxed vibe of bean bags, gadgets, knowledge sharing, hacking & geeking out.Over the Air is run and managed by it’s co-founders: Dan Appelquist, Matthew Cashmore and Margaret Gold.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The first three Over the Air events were completely boot-strapped, and as such we built our website on a simple self-hosted Word Press template, and patched it together ourselves as best we could. With the huge success of the fourth year (a record-breaking 600 attendees and our first time in the black) we would like to give back to the community by hiring someone from amongst our midst to help us update the website to something much better than we are capable of ourselves.
PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES OF THE WEB SITE
- The website must primarily communicate all of the event details for registering, attending and participating in Over the Air.
- The clarity of this information, and a logical structure to support it, are foremost
- The Over the Air logo must have a strong position on the site throughout, and ideally we’d like to make good use of the pool of high quality photos we have from the last event.
- Naturally, the website must also serve as a Sales Tool for the event, attracting registrations and participation, as well as the involvement of financial sponsors.
- The secondary purpose is to support the community before, during and after the event via discussion Forums and Groups and other appropriate social media tools that reflect their existing digital presence.
- The third purpose is to provide our sponsors with a prominent presence on the website in order to showcase their involvement.
- Finally, we have four years of content on the existing website which we want to maintain on the website as an archive of past events.
SPECIFICATIONS
- WordPress - The website needs to be maintained by the three of us (mainly Margaret actually), and it needs to preserve the body of content we’ve built up over our four years of existence - it is therefore a requirement of the project that the website remain based on the WordPress platform.
- But we’re not wedded to any templates or themes. The upgrade can be an interpretation of an existing WordPress theme, a commercially available theme, or a new one designed from scratch.
- Static front page - or the ability to assign sticky posts
- Mobile - Understandably, the website has to be mobile-friendly.
- Facebook & Twitter - The website must incorporate community communication tools (such as BuddyPress or better), and integrate with both Facebook and Twitter.
- Community tools - These should support discussion forums, and other sharing mechanisms such as wiki functionality.
- Potentially BuddyPress if it can be implemented well, but we’re open to suggestions here.
- Excellent SEO
- Live ‘Help Me’ Form - that is activated during the event only, and can connect straight to the organisers in some fashion for a quick response.
- Badges & Buttons - That can be incorporated in external websites to link directly to event registration and to the event website (use case = Sponsors & Media Partners).
- Basic Stats - the site must be able to track and report on traffic to the site and where it comes from, across all of the posts and pages
- Google Analytics - must be integrated
TOOLS AND FUNCTIONALITIES
- Essential Details:
- When, Where, Getting There, Register
- Menu Items:
- Programme, Speakers, Hackday Challenges, Sponsors, Blog, Resources
- Front Page Content
- news
- latest article
- sponsors
- latest tweets
- dates
- quick links to
- register to attend
- venue information
- programme
- workshop proposal submission
- speaker information
- more news
- articles (think longer form entries created by our speakers, combined with video - like TED)
- Videos (uploaded in wordpress and brought in from YouTube by tag)
- photos (brought from flickr automatically by tag)
BUDGET & TIMELINE
- Our budget is between £1,500 - £2,500, depending on the scale of the redesign proposed
- Once we’ve made a selection, you can dive right in right away, and we’ll pay you half up front and half upon completion of the project.
- There is no particular deadline, but reasonable speed will be appreciated.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
- Over the Air Events Ltd must own, have full access to and have the right to customize site code.
- Please submit your proposal to all three of us: margaret@overtheair.org, matthew@overtheair.org, and dan@overtheair.org
STAFF RESOURCES
- Margaret will be your point of contact/ project manager, but all three of us will be involved in all final decisions.
- There are no other technology staff, vendors or internal staff that you need to work with.
FORMAT FOR PROPOSALS
- Choose whatever format you feel does your ideas and proposal justice
- Make sure you cover all the basics: design, costs, testing, number of iterations, time required
- Please attach your CV or biography, some links to your portfolio and at least one reference
WhyMCA hackday in Bologna – Feb 4th
On 4th of February 2012 in Bologna reality is going to be hacked. WhyMCA, in collaboration with Microsoft and Nokia, is proud to announce the first Italian hackaton focused on interaction between mobile and reality.
It has been 3 years since Ricardo, Alfredo, Andrea and Paolo (who many of you will have met at OTA10 and OTA11) founded WhyMCA in Italy as a Mobile Barcamp where professionals and passionate can meet together in an informal event. Since 2009 lot of things have changed and their main focus has moved on to mobile developers and designers - resulting in two developer conferences, four happyhours about cross-platform topics (from mobile gaming to in-app monetization and OpenData) and the first Italian mobile hackathon.
Now the team are ready for the next challenge: Hack Reality, a hackathon where attendees have the opportunity to create hacks on real stuff, mixing together mobile devices with controllers (Arduino, OpenPicus, Netduino), Augmented Reality (Wikitude), games (LEGO MINDSTORMS, Kinect), 3d printing, domotic systems and more. Everything will interact, everything will go mobile, everything in just one day.
The aim is high and tickets have sold out, but we thought you might enjoy watching what more than 80 Italian developers and designers will come up with at the CNR of Bologna on the 4th February.
Visit their site http://www.whymca.org and stay tuned!
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Riccardo Bosio: @ riccardobosio |
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Alfredo Morresi: @ rainbowbreeze |
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Andrea Piovani: @ andreaaa_p |
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Paolo Sinelli: @ pasine |
Up for a bit code-breaking with your code-making?
The 5th annual Over the Air will be held on Friday the 1st of Saturday the 2nd of June at Bletchley Park - for two days up to 600 mobile developers & designers be based at Station X, hacking in the shadows of the WWII Enigma & Lorenz code-breakers, and hanging out at the home of Colossus the world's first programmable computer....we're planning on launching the Alan Turing Centenary Year celebrations in style!
Over the Air is a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs; and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases & new insights. Last year we explored the themes of security and encryption, and this year we'd like to make a strong connection with Alan Turing's legacy.
On Friday evening there will be a series of inspirational Ignite Bletchley Park talks, which we invite the community to make proposals for. Attendees are invited to stay overnight so that they can work on ideas, apps and hacks on the fly – to be entered into the various hack-a-thon competition categories and demo’ed on the second day. It’s a great vibe of bean bags, gadgets, knowledge sharing, hacking & lots of good geekery.
It's free to attend, other than a small £5 donation to charity (yet to be deterimined), and a breeze to reach from London Euston Station. Keep on top of the latest news by subscribing to our RSS feed or following us on Twitter.
Hope to see you there,
Margaret, Matthew & Dan
Mark the Date – June 1st & 2nd, 2012
We've booked a date for the 5th annual Over the Air, so get it in your calendars now!
Boistered by enthusiastic cheers of approval, we'll once again be holding the event at Bletchley Park, launching the Alan Turing Centenary year celebrations in style...
Mozilla Festival discount for OTA Attendees
The Mozilla Festival — Media, Freedom And the Web is on it's way to London town, and Dees (@cyberdees) is offering attendees of OTA11 a 50% discount when you choose the Student & Partner Community Member option when registering to attend.
The event will be held at the fantastic Ravensbourne College opposite the O2/Millenium Dome during November 4-6. Think 400+ developers, designers, journalists and kids looking at the Future of Journalism...
And you gotta love their byline: "Less Yak, More Hack"!
Power of One discount for OTA Attendees
As an attendee of Over The Air, the organisers of the Power of One Conference are offering a special 50% discount, just use the code OTA when booking at http://p0wer0f1.com (yes, the newsletter said 20% - it's now 50% FTW!)
Power Of One is a celebration of a tipping point. The power is now with the small agile organisation that through technology can change the world. This one day event is designed to motivate and inspire entrepreneurs and developers.
The event will be looking back at past experiences of starting tech businesses from scratch and looking forward to new possibilities and opportunities that abound, and will help you find the best ways to get your ideas heard and how to get funding to turn them into reality.
Tickets are only £99 + VAT (minus 50% with your discount code), which includes the conference, plenty of coffee, food, and a party at the venue after the talks with free beer.
You will also be one of the last people to set foot inside the iconic Battersea Power Station before it closes for long-term for redevelopment.
And that’s a wrap.
It's taken us a couple of days to catch our breath - Over the Air 2011 was a truly amazing gathering of creative and talented developers, informative and passionate speakers, and companies that are wonderfully supportive of the whole community. Not to mention the weather. Wow, the weather! (An October record apparently)
It's exactly this buzzing combination of community & creativity & energy that makes all of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes absolutely worth it. When I see that first stream of attendees arriving at the registration tables, I always think "it's yours now, my part's done".
In fact, we hit a new record ourselves: over 600 people came to the event over the weekend, with nearly 500 with us for lunch on Friday. For any of you that were at the Friday evening Ignite Bletchley Park talks, I think you'll agree that an epic amount of pizza was consumed as well! The head-count in the Mansion at 2:00 am (which doesn't include those in the Marquee or in tents on the lawn) was 120. Amazing.
Although OTA11 was free to attend as always, we did ask attendees this year to make a small donation to the Bletchley Park Trust, and we're thrilled to announce that we managed to raise (at the time of writing this post) £2,293.77 on their behalf. (Please note that the National Museum of Computing is a separate charity, who would very much welcome your support as well.)
We're also chuffed that the BlueVia team chose OTA11 as the time and place to not only debut their new BlueVia t-shirts, but also to launch ConnFu (which is still in closed beta).
There is an Over the Air Group Pool over on Flickr, if you've taken photos, please add them there.
Many of you have taken Instagram shots, like this glorious view of sunrise over the tents on the lawn taken by mdales - we hope you upload those as well.
We've asked all of our speakers to upload their slides to Slideshare and tag them ota11 and overtheair; as well as adding them to Lanyrd.
Feel free to add stuff to our Facebook Page as well.
For those of you who missed it, you may want to check out the Twitter feed to get a feel for the goings-on.
Blogs
Adam Cohen-Rose's Workshop Session Notes at OTA11
Ubelly's Interview with Lyza Danger Gardner
Ubelly's write-up of Day One at Over the Air
Simon Judge on Over the Air and Kirin
Caroline Mockett's blog post about attending OTA11
Stephen Nicholas on his QuickR entry
Giorgio Venturi on Cracking the User Experience at OTA11
Ashley Burton's OTA11 Mobile Web Notes and Wrap-up
Dan Murphy's post on the Pearson Blog
Novoda on their Wearable Build Status Bot
Andrew Savory on Over the Air 2010, 2011
Tom Hume on Andrew Betts' talk about the FT iPad web app
Tom Hume on Open-sourcing Kirin at OTA
Franco Papeschi on One Day at Over the Air
Dale Lane on his competition entries at Over the Air 2011
Dale Lane on using BlueVia APIs
Media
photo by spiritquest on Flickr
Forbes - Bletchley Park Coders take on the Mobile World
BBC Internet Blog - Camping in a Digital Public Space: Over the Air 2011
The Fonecast - I'm no developer, but I still fell in love with Over the Air
Huffington Post - Hackers get Hired at Bletchley Park
TechCrunch - Mobile devs need to get to Over the Air this week
Guardian Apps Blog - London to become mobile centre of the world - for a week
Video
David Vella's "hastily put together video" on Vimeo.
Bill Thompson's Ignite Talk on YouTube
Terence Eden's Ignite Talk on YouTube
Podcasts
Audio report - The Fonecast - Interview with Dr. Sue Black, Daniel Appelquist & Paul Johnston
The OTA11 Competition Entry Form
The OTA11 Hackday competitions have now opened and the entry form is live. Your submission needs to be made by lunch at 13:45 so that the judges have time to discuss all of the entries before the live demo's at 14:50.
Mobile apps, mobile web, mobile widgets, mobile device hacks... pretty much anything with a mobile spin is welcome. If you've gotten a brain wave for something that doesn't quite fit - let us know about it anyways, we have an 'other' category for just that purpose.
The demonstrations slots will be 90 seconds - that's right 90 seconds. You have a short time to show us what you've built so go straight for the good stuff. The Marquee will not have wifi, so if this is a crucial part of your hack - let us know in advance so we can set up with a hotspot.
You will be called on stage one at a time to show your stuff, after which the judges will leave to deliberate.
Bring the Kids to Over the Air and visit Family-Friendly Bletchley Park
Kids have always been welcome at Over the Air. One of our young attendees famously helped to demonstrate an accelerometer-based “sword fighting” game on stage during the competition presentations at our first event, and returned in 2009 to participate in a “teenage dragon's den” panel.
Kids are especially welcome at our Competition Presentations on Saturday October 1st starting at 14:50 in the Marquee Tent. Kids are free to register. Just bring them along to the registration desk when they get here and we will give them an all-access badge for the event. Besides the Over the Air sessions and competition, we are also running free tours of Bletchley Park, and you are also free to visit the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley.
The weather forecast for Friday and Saturday is looking beautiful, making Over the Air 2011 an excellent opportunity to bring the whole family out to Bletchley Park. (Many have told us already that they will be bringing their kids - including the organisers!)
Although we have the Mansion booked out for the event, the Park is situated on 29 acres of lovely green trees & lawns (now just starting to turn), and there are plenty of other things to do and see - for children of all ages as well as adults.
With this weather, you may find yourself spending more time in the children's corner or walking the grounds than in the various museums, but it will still make for a great day out.
Bletchley Park - Block-B Exhibition Centre
Officially opened in June 2004 by HRH The Duke of Kent this exhibition centre, housed within one of the original wartime buildings, tells the 'Complete Bletchley Park Story'. The museum depicts the incredibly complex processes of interception, decryption, translation, interpretation and analysis that were needed to produce the vital intelligence that proved so important in ending the war. Block B houses Stephen Kettle's famous Turing statue, and there is also the orientation room were you can view a short film that offers an overview of the site. It is also home to admissions and the Bletchley Park gift shop.
Check out the Young Codebreakers Zone for some great resources to inspire kids before hand.
The Toys and Memorabilia Collection
A large varied collection of playthings and domestic artefacts related to everyday life in the 1930's to the immediate post-war period. There are toy soldiers, model trains, model vehicles, Britain's lead farm and garden, and make-do-and-mend toys, dolls and teddies. Those who are studying or are interested in the National Curriculum 'Britain since the 1930's' will find this collection of much interest.
Model Railway
Always popular with all our visitors this display 
features a working model railway, complete with tunnels, miniature trees and junctions.
The Society's club room is open to the public from 12.00 - 16.00 (12.00 - 17.00 in Summer) on most Saturdays and Sundays throughout the year. There are usually two or three layouts in operation, including a 'Thomas' layout which is always popular with children. There are also modelling exhibits and displays about the real railways' contribution to the Second World War.
Bletchley Park Garage
There are two 1930's Austins on show from the film The Eagle Has Landed featuring John Standing, a direct descendant of the Leon family. The Talbot and the 1938 Ambulance (now owned by the Trust) were both used in the film Enigma. A 1940's garage forecourt shows the cost of fuel, etc, and tools used during this period. Some post-war cars are displayed to compare design styles and are of much interest to visitors. The garages were built to house the numerous vehicles that came to Bletchley Park every day during WW2, including the vast number of dispatch riders who brought the originals of the coded mesages intercepted at the Y Stations across the country.
And much more:
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The National Museum of Computing
Free train tickets to Bletchley Park
Photo By stevecadman on flickr
We have some good news. London Midland have kindly worked with us to offer 150 free train tickets to Bletchley Park from London Euston. We have 75 tickets on the Friday and 75 tickets on the Saturday. They are returns that will allow you to travel out on the Friday or Saturday and come back on either day - magic.
There will be a team of Over The Air Runners (look out for the people wearing black t-shirts with the OTA logo on the front and STAFF written on the back) who will have the tickets and details of the trains. They'll be stood right in the middle of the Euston Station just in front of The Body Shop. They will be at the station from 7am until 1pm on Friday and Saturday.
The tickets will be released on a first come first served basis - so get there nice and early for your free train ticket.
If you've not registered yet there are a few places left - head over to the registration page - and remember, you can register at the event and make your donation in cash.
OTA11 was on 30/09 – 01/10/2011
Gold Sponsor 2012
Organisers
Recent Posts
- Request For Proposals – Over the Air website update
- WhyMCA hackday in Bologna – Feb 4th
- Up for a bit code-breaking with your code-making?
- Mark the Date – June 1st & 2nd, 2012
- Mozilla Festival discount for OTA Attendees
- Power of One discount for OTA Attendees
- Audience Vote – The results are in!
- And that’s a wrap.
- Thank-you to our amazing Sponsors
- OTA11 Hackday – Audience vote
@overtheair
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