Barcamp Webrichtlijnen & web 2.0 - the lowdown

Steve and I just organised our first ever barcamp, and we organised it on behalf of the dutch Home office. It went incredibly well. Sixty signed up for the day and the majority turned up as well. This barcamp had a lot of civil servants and managers from various dutch government ministries attending. So it was not all developers. An important part of any barcamp is sharing, Usually each attendee will bring a presentation to present. At the start of the day it looked like that last aspect was being overlooked. We made some improvisations, helped by Bart Hilhorst. In fact Barts session was my favorite one of the day, but more about that later.

After a small opening speech by Stephen Hay Chris Smissaert and Imke Arts led the first session outlining initiatives been undertaken by their ministrie. Straight away a lot of discussion was generated mainly about sticking to goals and some perceived problems. This presentation was followed up mainly by Chris again with some help from developer Alper Çuğun who had created a number of widgets for them, which were mostly not conforming to the dutch webguidelines!

Later Stephen Hay gave a short demonstration of progressive enhancement based on Chris Heilmann's ‘Generating charts from accessible data tables and vice versa using the Google Charts API’ (demo) at which point Raph de Rooij got involved. One of the main points I took away from raph was that even though the webguidelines might be difficult and even expensive to implement, it is a political choice to include everyone in making the information accessible regardless of disability. And really it's funny that we live the letter of the webguidelines, but that is essentially why we do it and it's easy to forget when you are trying to debug test results :)

This was then followed by Alper's presentation ‘The spirit of the dutch webguidelines’ (All presentaions were in dutch). Alper was probably there to be an agent provocateur and he did wind some people up, lambasting what he calls esotheric standards xhtml, RDFa, WCAG and ARIA. Most of these arguements were pretty vague but it provided lively discussion and some of his points about widgets were an eye opener. While Alper is a fan about Google and OpenSocial, Netvibes was a bit of a broken platform in his opinion. He also mentioned Shindigs, which i had never heard of :p Shindigs is an openSocial container created by Apache to help you host OpenSocial apps.

We were joined in the audience in the afternoon session by Roel Van Houten en Anne van Kesteren. I was then going to present my findings on publishing documents in PDFA-1a and PDFA-1b but let Rob Vlug do the first session after lunch in the hope that Rob would touch on some of the issues that we had discussed personaaly erlier in the day. I'll be doing a blog post about this later as there are very big problems with accessibility and PDF's. Rob described how many documents, forms and file formats they have. Rob work for the dutch tax office (belastingdienst) and seemingly the site (15,000 plus pages) is essentially static and they have everything in Word 97 files as backup (really, I kid you not). Forms are very difficult to put online as there are very many and all the form mutations that take place each year make presenting them on the web under the current internal organisation difficult. They have some paper forms which are nearly 70 pages long, other forms are now ‘Life event driven’ resuilting in one case where 2 forms became 77!

The next session was from Bart Hilhorst. This was a very clever session which invited the audience to ask problematic questions which were then writtten down and then the developers had a minute a question to come up with a consice answer. The sessions were supossed to finish at 4pm, but we went on 20-30 minutes longer so that we could see Roek van Houten demonstrate the challenges of using internet with a braille device. The costs are incredible! A laptop might cost just 600 euros but but with software and the braill keyboard kosting 500 - 600 euro. I have seen similar demonstrations previously, they are still an eye opener and Roels wit is as well :)

So all in all we had a great day.I think everyone learnt something new. We will be adding Barts questions to the Lab web 2.0 site http://www.overheid20.nl/werkruimte/45/LabWeb2.0 (dutch language link) in the next few days and inviting those who attended to offer answers and practical examples to these questions.