Bletchley Park is the historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during World War II and the work carried out there by Alan Turing and others led to the birth of the modern computer. How did we get from Bletchley Park to modern software engineering? Dr Black will discuss how the use of social media can leverage capability in very diverse areas, from campaigning for a historical site to improving the quality of software.
Speaker: Dr Sue Black, Senior Research Associate, UCL Department of Computer Science
http://events.ucl.ac.uk/event/event:gkr-h9smshux-zhsk26/lunch-hour-lecture-from-bletchley-park-to-modern-computing-the-value-of-twitter
To Infinity And Beyond March 2011 Ammended For Dissemination
From Bletchley Park to modern computing: the value of Twitter
1. From Bletchley Park to modern
computing: the value of Twitter
UCL Lunch Hour Lecture
8th January 2013
Dr Sue Black
Senior Research Associate
Software Systems Engineering
University College London
3. Bletchley Park
• Arguably one of the most important
sites of 20th Century
• Codebreaking in WW2 made huge
impact on outcome of war
• Enigma
158,184,000,000,000,000,000:1
• First programmable, digital computer
Colossus developed to break high
grade German code
• Story kept secret until 1975
• Struggled to survive 1992 - 2010
• Now recognised as a site of truly
international importance
25. The Power of Twitter
•Reach people that you couldn’t otherwise reach
•Build a community
•Build conversations around areas of interest
•Gives everyone a voice
•Breaks through traditional hierarchies
•Adds speed
•See what people are saying about your area of
interest
•Keep up to date with areas of interest
27. A Survey of Social Using Web 2.0 to Improve
Media Use in Software Quality
Software Systems
Development Sue Black and Joanne Jacobs
Sue Black, Rachel
Harrison and Mark
Baldwin
Cite as: Black, S. E. and Jacobs, J. Using Web 2.0 to Improve Software Quality, Web2SE Workshop at IEEE
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Cape Town, May 4th 2010.
Cite as: Black, S. E., Harrison, R. and Baldwin, M., A Survey of Social Media Use in Global Systems Development,
Web2SE Workshop at IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Cape Town, May 4th 2010.
31. What is your gender?
How old are you?
7% 12
10
10 9 25-34
30%
Female 8 7 35-44
Male 6 45-54
No response 4 3 55-64
2 1 No response
63%
0
25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 No
response
Comparison of education and gender
How long have you worked for your
current employer?
10
8
10 6 Female
8 4 Male
2
6
Total 0
4
2
e s
re lor
er
re rs
D
Ph
eg e
th
eg e
Sc igh
ol
D ach
D ast
e
O
0
ho
H
M
B
<1 year 1-2 years 2-5 years 5-10 years 10 years + No
response
33. On which physical continent do you Number of Social Media types used
work?
Number of people
8 7
25 5 5
6 4
20 3 3
4 2
15 1
2
10 Total 0
5
0 2 4 6
0
Asia Europe No response North
America Number of types used
Comparison of Social Media types used
15
Twitter
2
Plaxo
11
Linkedin
13
IM client
6
Googlewave
10
Facebook
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
35. What information do you communicate using
social media?
Social information
Logistics
Marketing data
Total yes
Operational data Total no
Source code and related
information Total No response
System design information
System specification
information
New ideas
0% 50% 100%
37. How many hours per day do you use social
media applications to communicate?
14 13
12
10
10
8
6
6
4
2 1
0
0-2 3-5 6-8 No response
“I use social media the entire time I'm at work - it's on constantly and I use
it concurrently with other applications. If I was to pull out the time on
various forms of social media and put them into one block it'd be about 30
minutes a day on average, spread over an 8 or 9 hour day.”
39. What can your team do now Social media brings many
that they could not do before benefits to the software
social media? development process
“Communicate out of hours,
conveniently and from any • Faster and easier problem
suitable device”
“Avoid having to turn to email as
solving
primary communication tool” • More rapid and
“Communicate rapidly” comprehensive testing
“Work from home to a greater • Ongoing user feedback
degree”
• Easier to share best
“Ask questions without interrupting
each other‘s flow; clarify small practice
questions quickly; chat • More communication
informally while working”
between stakeholders
“work from different locations”
• More information available
“access more expertise”
“ensure transparency” for decision making
“work with open source
community”
43. Tommy
Bill Tutte
Flowers
Inventor of Colossus: Worked out the logical
the world’s first structure of the Lorenz
programmable digital machine
computer
45. Thank you for listening,
any questions?
Dr Sue Black
@Dr_Black
sueblack@gmail.com
www.sueblack.co.uk
www.unbound.co.uk/
saving-bletchley-park
#UCLLHL
Editor's Notes
I tweeted this earlier today and have interspersed my slides with tweeted responses. Don’t just take my opinion, what does Twitter think is the value/power of Twitter? We got some really good responses I asked the audience to read the tweets out as we went along to get a bit of audience participation going ;)
Key facts about Bletchley Park. What a wonderful place! Do go and visit: www.bletchleypark.org.uk and http://www.tnmoc.org/
I had this experience with finding the best fish and chips in Brighton, it was wonderful, 8 responses to my tweet in 5 minutes
I set up BCSWomen @bcswomen and as Chair was invited to a meeting at Bletchley Park, my first visit, 2003. I met John Harper who was rebuilding the Bombe machine with his team. He told me that more than half of the people that worked at Bletchley were women and more than 10 000 people worked there. I was astounded and left wanting to raise the profile of women’s contribution.
I eventually got funding from BCS and the UKRC for women in SET, for the “ Women of Station X ” project. Video here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/video-example.rhtm
This tweet made me laugh. Watching telly together and tweeting can be an amazing experience. Watching the Olympics opening ceremony and connecting with other watching it through Twitter was wonderful. There are also lots of cats.
Bletchley Park hut 6 and mansion house. I had an epiphany outside this hut hearing about the importance of the work carried out there and that it shortened the war by 2 years saving potentially 22 million lives!
Determined to get publicity for Bletchley I contacted all the journalists that I knew telling them I had a good story. Rory Cellan Jones agreed and interviewed me at Bpark, the interview was on the BBC news, Today program, BBC America and elsewhere I got hundreds of emails of support
I set up a blog to help raise awareness and give a focus for the campaign: http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/
I realised the potential of Twitter for raising awareness and forming a community around Bletchley Park, In Jan 2009 Sizemore and Jamillah came to a talk that Capt Jerry Roberts was giving at UCL about his time at Bpark. The next day I took social media gurus @Documentally @Sizemore and @Jemimah_Knight up to Bletchley Park to help me persuade them that using social media was a good idea. @documentally set up the @bletchleypark account and advised Bletchley Park on the best way to engage an audience through Twitter.
I was always on the lookout for ways to raise the profile of Bletchley Park………one evening Stephen Fry tweeted this pic, I thought…hang on! Stephen Fry must be interested in Bletchley Park…I sent him several direct messages through Twitter and the next morning he tweeted a link to my blog http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/
The next morning he tweeted about my blog and I got 8k hits instead of the usual 50!
A few months later Stephen came up to Bletchley Park for the day and has continued to support and promote Bletchley Park
Blog post by Stuart Witts really emphasizes how Bletchley Park used Twitter to great effect. @bletchleypark used humour, responded quickly, were friendly and engaging and got a great result. Stuart became a life long fan of Bpark read his blogpost here: http://stayhappyanddontdie.com/?p=479
Love this tweet, very funny
Did some research into software engineering and social media with @joannejacobs Rachel Harrison and Mark Baldwin
We wanted to find out how much software engineers were using social media so sent out a questionnaire via twitter, using surveymonkey
Respondents were mainly male, 40ish, well educated
Mainly in Europe, used between 0 and 7 social media channels! The most popular of which was Twitter, followed by Instant messaging client, Linkedin and Facebook
Main things they communicated about using social media were: new ideas, specification and design information
When I first read this I thought it said Ni! As in the Knights that say “Ni” from Monty Python ;)
They used social media between 0-8 hours per day, 10 didn’ t respond…why? Too embarrassed?
Our findings were social media adds: faster, 24/7, global, transparency, flexibility, more feedback, more communication, more information
We were very happy to hear that
Ha! Very funny…and true.
Tommy Flowers and Bill Tutte, two names you will hopefully hear a lot more about in 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte
I agree!!!
Check out my book “Saving Bletchey Park” the fastest *ever* crowdfunded book … just 5 days to be fully funded, sign up now to receive a special edition copy www.unbound.co.uk/saving-bletchley-park This talk given at University London as a Lunch Hour Lecture on 8 th January 2013, to an audience of approximately 170 people http://events.ucl.ac.uk/calendar/tab:lunch_hour_lectures/ I made the audience promise to all visit Bletchley Park in 2013 and told them how to get there on public transport. Only 36 minutes on a fast train from Euston and then it ’ s just over the road. There ’ s no excuse ;) http://www.bletchleypark.org/ + http://www.tnmoc.org/