A few people have asked me recently what I have been doing at past Glastonbury festivals. So I thought it would be worth posting:

1992, 1993, 1994

I went for the first time with my girlfriend Jenny Beasley because the Cud band were in the advert in the NME. Truth is I didn’t actually get to see  Cud play but I did have an amazing time. Too many stories to tell, mostly more suitable for over a beer than a blog. I think my favourite tale is as it was my first time camping since the scouts I’d borrowed a hopelessly impractical tent from a friends Mum, it was a big 3 room frame tent thing and all orange nylon - nice! Back in 92 the bus used to drop you on the main road and you walked about 2 miles down the lane to the site. I’d already been introduced to the very strong Glastonbury serendipity earlier in the day - when begging Jenny to lend me some money (i wasn’t proud) I showed her my empty cashpoint balance - only it wasn’t empty there was a random £340 paid in - this was “holiday pay” a totally new concept to me that I had no idea was coming and being paid in that day and in the end I lent  Jenny money. So anyway  we arrive, we choose a spot, I look at this 50KG 70s marvel I’ve carried all the way  here and remember that I don’t actually have a clue about putting tents up, I hadn’t thought about this part until  now at all. Luckily Jenny was fairly sublime in nature and agreed with me that the best plan was to have a beer and think about it. We’d also  carried quite a lot of beer quite a long way. The weather was nice. It was a holiday. Why rush? So another beer, as no ideas had yet come. If Jenny was getting stressed she wasn’t showing it. After 2 beers nature takes its course and so I head for my first Glastonbury toilet experience. I had no reason to fear anything, I had never heard stories of Glastonbury toilets before. As I queue and await my turn and naturally get to the front of the queue the next door to swing open ejects a character that I know. In fact in the most bizarre of coincidences ever it’s my old room mate, a man called Andrew Demster, known as Demo, who had often shared a room with Jenny & I. More fantastic was the fact that Demo was something of a Venture Scout. He wasn’t just good at camping, he loved camping and tents and that sort of thing. If there was one thing that could improve a less than dreary day for Demo it was some idiot with a random tent they couldn’t put up. I had no idea he was going to be there. He did  come, he did help, we did have a tent. I was sold. Glastonbury was the most amazing place on earth. The bizarre events continued, the amazing coincidences abounded. We had a wonderful time. It opened our eyes to a world we knew was there but didn’t know was so real. I returned in 1993 & 1994. Each time we bought tickets at HMV on the way to the festival. In 1993 I had my boots, money and car keys stolen in a tent slashing on the Friday morning but had an amazing festival living entirely on the charity of strangers.

1995

I played bass guitar in an Irishy folk rock band called Reincarnation. It was great fun, these were great times. Reincarnation was a vehicle created by fiddler Peter Miln and singer / guitarist Dan James. There were many often bizarre lineups and gigs. The glastonbury lineup was Dan & Pete, Neil Baker later of Flipside on latin percussion, farrier Garrick Nelson on Bodhran, Steve Paul (a man like myself and half the band with no convincing surname) playing rock kit drums, plus a couple of friends who danced on stage. At glastonbury we were booked by Arabela Churchill to open the outside theatre stage at 10:30am each day, and to play in the fire procession on the saturday night that was arranged to celebrate this being the 25th Glastonbury festival. This procession gig was awesome and we played, carnival style on the back of a truck, for about 3.5 hours to 10,0000s of people and they all danced. The absolute high-point of my musical career

1997

My very dear and deceased friend David Fleetham & I went as guests of Dubstar. I think on paper we were the woodwind section, and we took my flute and David’s clarinet with us as props in case there were any awkward questions. Now David was haeomophilliac with many extreme complications including terrible arthritic ankles that made it incredibly difficult for him to walk. So I spent a fairly intense weekend with him, he was far too proud to use crutches and so most of the weekend I was his crutch, and also his drinking buddy. I think as usual we drank most of Dubstar’s fairly substantial rider, just to help save Christian from liver failure. I have hazy memories involving David Baddiel and Hanson’s Mum’s who were camped next to us. I got very clear insights into being at Glastonbury with a disability too. It was extremely muddy. We did get out to see Radiohead and that set was lifechanging. We did also see Dubstar on the other stage and that was lifechanging too in a not so manic way.

1998

For the first time I bought tickets in advance, framed them put them on bedroom wall and then had them stolen at quite a good party, so again bought tickets on the way down from HMV in Reading. Again an incredibly muddy year. By the time I got there all of the friends I was meeting had left. I spent the time with my new South African girlfriend Shaldean Van Der Merwe her French friend Nadine and her American boyfriend, I felt like a cultural attache explaining everything that was going on. We made some amazing friends in the campsite, we worked together and kept a massive fire going all weekend, and I will always remember the Sunday morning Hothouse Flowers set (I think) where he started “WELCOME TO THE SURVIVOR’S CLUB” it was electric and great fun. That year the website had been run by the Guardian and I’d found it very annoying as it really wasn’t very updated, there was very little of  the information I was looking for and I started thinking I could do a better job.

1999

With my friend Travis Pedley we worked  on this idea of a much  better Glastonbury Festival website. We wrote some quite detailed proposals and essentially the idea was to create something that today you’d call Social Networking and Content Management. It’s name was a terrible pun (glastonline.com) but it still  makes me smile. I wrote an application that was essentially a networked database that could output web pages via FTP and could be contributed to by many people. We had an agreement with Andy Thomas who, had spoken with Michael Eavis about it, to have six people in a space in a portacabin in the acoustic field to take photos, write, get data, upload stuff and generally capture the richness of info available and make the internet a little bit less boring. The guiding creative principle was that in the way I had just stumbled into the festival 7 years before, someone could stumble  into  this website and confront some ideas that may inspire or entertain or maybe educate them. There was a new official website at www.glastonbury-festival.co.uk that had been put together by Simon Glinn of the JazzWorld stage and Neil Greenway of eFestivals.co.uk - when we sent a link to them for them to link to us and vice versa all hell broke loose. Essentialy we were threatened with a lot of “heavy shit” if we did this and compromised the festivals rights agreements with others. At one point I was told a photo of my face from my personal website would be distributed to all gates to stop me entering. On the Tuesday night before the festival I had a mobile  phone conversation of over 2 hours with Simon Glinn that we both laughed about afterwards, especially as  we don’t even know how it was possible for the signal to hold out that long never mind distract  him from the setup. In the end I had to let my friends down and it didn’t happen. But I went to HMV in Swindon, bought a ticket, came to the festival and had a fantastic time at the best festival I can remember.

There are three different aspects to building any website and when these are working together harmoniously a great website is made. Creative can mean the primarily graphical  creative tools,  but also bending and using the tools  and  technologies to provide more insight into the message. Content is the message itself, but the medium is the message too, it’s important to remember someone using a website is trying to find some content, the creative is useful for making it easy to find and easier to understand once found, but the content is the meat (or textured vegetable protein). The coding is the part that should be invisible, it should work and will only be visible when it is not working, you need it though  and without it you don’t have the page. Ideally these three jobs should be  done by three different people who are good at working together and their conversation will cultivate a fruitful answer. A three way conversation is also idea as we’re mostly born with two ears and one mouth and should use them in that proportion, all other things being equal then a three way chat should enforce that ideal. I’ve been using XML since 1998 and have really loved how it can bring flexibility without sacrificing purpose, so if you start by using extensible markup language as the way to join these disciplines together you have an answer which is inherently extensible and can then grow is novel ways, giving a life to the project to  develop on it’s own path free of restrictions created on it  before  it was born.

So in summary the meaning of c3x are to make web implementations from the harmony of creatives, content authors and coders using tools that support  xml and xslt to allow the sum to exceed the parts.

OK please be gentle on me. I am going to  write my first ever blog post and it’s been a long time coming. I feel on paper I should have written many blog posts, but this is not  on paper is it. I want to as briefly as possible get out of the way all of those questions like who am i, who are  we, why are we here, what sort of things have we done, what sort of things do we do, and will we do. You know those sorts of question. Then  once those are out of the way I can deal with lots of much smaller questions. Context  - that’s what I’m talking about  - I want to post a kind of context introduction to our  brand new blog.

Who Am I?

My name is John C Scott  and I was given it on the 13th January 1972. It wasn’t until 25th December 1981 that I got  my  hands on my first computer of my own in a Sinclair ZX81. Luckily my brother and sisters were very tolerant of me using the only TV in the house to write programs in 1KB of memory. I was hooked on that first day and would happily write the rest of  this post about how I learned to use memory and the 256 bytes of video RAM etc,  but this isn’t that story. I’ve carried  on taking an interest in how computers work, and allowed them to inspire my imagination ever since. I’ve done other things too, but usually brought computers into it somehow. Unkind people might call me an obsessive Internet geek, kinder people would call me it  to my face with a big reassuring smile.

I took a route from ZX81, ZX-Spectrum, to Mac IIse, Atari ST, DOS 5, Win3.11, NT4 and at the same time Z80 machine code, Hypercard, DBase3, FoxPro, ASP, and currently C# .net. From 1986 onwards I did a great deal of DeskTopPublishing starting with Letraset’s ReadySetGo!  then electronic Typesetting and from there got into databases, and then combining  the two with content management from 1995 onwards. I built my first web pages in 1995 using iHtml, then Coldfusion, ASP classic and currently working with .net.

I  got quite excited about “Web Applications” in the mid to late 90s, I’d built a few office LAN based applications around databases and and really saw the power of having lots of people contribute to different parts of a  database, and started developing around the idea of websites where the user didn’t need technical skills to contribute their thoughts and ideas. Throughout this my ideas were very abstract  and about inspiring others to contribute, whilst providing the  tools and the training and supporting those I worked with.

In 1998 I thought a good exposition of all of  this would  be building a  site for Glastonbury Festival  and this became an all encompassing undertaking for the next 10 years. It had meant to be just a side project to test and develop some ideas to use in a commercial product. It was clear that the festival couldn’t financially support what was needed and so I worked on some interesting 6 month contracts and then had the rest of the year to work passionately on Glastonbury. We pulled together some great achievments for that and  to do it justice this needs to be blogged separately too. Now the festival needs a new  approach  to it’s website and it’s time for me to climb aboard the leading-edge again after a period of learning, listening, growth, development and recuperation.

The world’s moved  on a lot  since 1981 and many  of the things since then I thought of  as  science fiction are now very much fact, yet some are still to have their day. One thing to come about is blogging.  It’s definitely better for me to use someone elses tool to start publishing my varied thoughts, plans, hopes and reminisces than to spend  time building and maintaining a  tool for  other people to do the same. In a few rare spare moments I’ve speculated what I would write if I had time,  and now I do, and now you’re reading it.

I believe passionately in free (as in free and fair elections, as well as free beer) software and that the challenge of our times is how  well we can work together. The truly great art of the past may have been made by a single artist but the great pieces of our modern times, such as movies like “Slumdog Millionaire”, are harmonic works between hundreds of collaborators each enabling another to exceed  what they could do alone.

I’ve mostly shared in the past by getting passionately involved in message board communities and always trying to answer at least one question for every one that I need an answer  to. However these contributions live mostly only in the context of those boards and if everyone is blogging it  then maybe it’s time to admit I should have a go at this medium. So there are a couple of very specific projects I have in mind for this blog and some more random  ones, and I look forward to finding  out which fly.

Who Are “We” ?

c3x associates are people who enjoy working together. I recognised a long time ago that it was no longer possible to have an expert level of understanding of everything in computer, databases, operating systems, languages, design, publishing, the web etc. For example  I couldn’t produce the  graphical treatment for this blog but that was provided by Wojciech Wawrzyniak. Across all the disciplines needed for a major  project we have associates who can provide stress-testing, clustering, hosting, content, copy writing, original music, photography, illustration, cartooning, database tuning, needs analysis, training, documentation, requirement gathering, project planning, security, encryption, design and graphical realisation plus many other things. The important thing is we have a track record of working together effectively, the tools to make projects work, the experience to advise if  a project can work and the honesty to say what needs to change to allow it to work.

why are we here

I really believe there is more to life than another day another dollar,  that every day is a conscious opportunity to  allow us to learn something new and to develop and that by this approach  we can deliver work that constantly exceeds expectations. We are here to understand what needs to be done and then to deliver it on time and on budget.

what sort of things have we done, do we do, and will we do. 

This certainly needs to be the focus of many  more posts. Things we’ve done include content management systems since 1995, logistics and financial applications, and solved many challenges. That includes an understanding of how best to achieve change and what tools can best help the people at  the centre. Presently we are supporting Ektron CMS and Umbraco for a number of clients.

We will continue this collaborative approach and intend to form more relationships in an increasingly open world where you will continue to  be only as good as your last recommendation.