2005–2006 · 9 sessions · Bristol and Brighton
SkillSwap Events, 2005 to 2006
Before the Brighton evenings settled into the two-talk format that ran until 2013, SkillSwap was a different sort of thing: a way for a local group anywhere to put on its own sessions, with its own curators, its own venue and its own list of members. Two groups actually did it. This is their record.
These sessions were longer and more workshop-shaped than the later evenings — three hours rather than two, often a single subject worked through in detail. The subjects are a snapshot of what the web industry was worrying about in 2005: web standards, CSS layout, XML and XSL, version control, typography, intellectual property.
Bristol
The Bristol group ran 3 of these sessions at Waterside 1, curated by Laura Griffiths and Oliver Humpage, and listed 32 members. The Bristol page has more on that group.
| Session | Date | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| Web Standards Workflows | 15 May 2006 | Waterside 1 |
| Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) | 10 April 2006 | Waterside 1 |
| Plone skinning workshop | 27 February 2006 | Waterside 1 |
Brighton
The Brighton group ran 6 of these sessions at BBC building, curated by Andy Budd, and listed 44 members.
| Session | Date | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| Web typography | 9 May 2006 | BBC building |
| An introduction to version control | 28 March 2006 | BBC building |
| CSS Design: Building Blocks | 19 January 2006 | BBC building |
| An Introduction to XML and XSL for the Web | 2 December 2005 | BBC building |
| The Interactive Media Industry Explained | 23 September 2005 | BBC building |
| A Practical Guide to Web Standards | 6 June 2005 | BBC building |
A Different Shape from the Later Evenings
These sessions were built on a different assumption from the two-talk evenings that followed, and the difference is visible in the times recorded on the pages. Where the later Brighton evenings ran from seven for a couple of hours, several of these are scheduled from six until nine. Three hours is a workshop, not a talk, and it implies one subject worked through in detail rather than two speakers describing their own work.
That shape asks more of everybody. A three-hour session needs a leader who has prepared material, a room set up for people to follow along, and attendance held for an entire evening. It produces something a short talk cannot — you can genuinely learn to use a tool in three hours — but it is markedly harder to run every month, and it does not manufacture new speakers, because nobody watches a workshop and thinks they could lead one next time.
The subjects reflect the era exactly. A Plone skinning workshop, an introduction to version control, XML and XSL for the web, CSS design building blocks, web standards workflows, web typography, and a session on intellectual property rights. Two of the ten are about process and rights rather than about code, which is a fair picture of what a working web team in 2005 needed help with: not syntax, but how to organise the job.
How the Groups Were Meant to Work
The platform behind these sessions was more ambitious than the evenings that came after it. Any local community could register a group, and the group got its own page, its own venue list, its own member list, an events feed, and a way for members to suggest topics or volunteer as speakers. The model was that the software would remove the organisational friction and communities would appear.
What the record shows is that the friction was never the software. Brighton and Bristol both held sessions and both had named curators; the third group had members, a page and the same tools, and held nothing. Between having the means to organise an event and organising one there is a step that no amount of tooling covers, which is a specific person deciding a specific date is their responsibility.
The later Brighton run is the same lesson from the other direction. It had no platform at all by then — just a page announcing the next evening — and it ran for five years. The apparatus was not what was doing the work.
What Happened to the Other Groups
A London group was set up and listed 15 members, but no session was ever held under it. That is worth recording rather than tidying away: the pattern of a group that forms, gathers a mailing list and then never quite gets a date into the diary is the most common way this sort of thing fails.
The Brighton group carried on and became the long run documented in the Brighton archive. Its earliest handouts, from 2003, are in the lecture notes archive.
Bristol is the more informative case of the two that did run, precisely because it stopped. Three sessions in the first five months of 2006 is a real start — a venue found, two curators named, thirty-two members listed, subjects chosen and delivered. Then nothing. Whatever ended it is not recorded, and the honest reading is the ordinary one: two volunteers ran out of the surplus energy that a fourth session needed, and no fourth date was ever fixed.
What makes that worth putting on a page rather than tidying away is that it is the normal outcome. A series that lasts a decade is the exception in this record, not the pattern. One group out of three reached a second year. If you are starting something, the useful comparison is not with the decade-long run but with Bristol, and the question worth asking is what would have had to be different in month six.
Why These URLs Still Exist
The individual session pages from this period were thin even when new. Each carried the event name, a date and time, a venue, a city, and a speakers section that was frequently left empty, plus the line “this event has already been held” once it had. There was no write-up afterwards and no abstract beforehand.
They are therefore published here as rows in the table above rather than as ten separate pages. Reconstructing them individually would produce ten pages of almost nothing, and filling them out would mean writing an account of a 2006 workshop that nobody documented. The addresses themselves still resolve — anything linking to an individual session arrives at this index, which holds that session’s actual recorded detail.
One of the ten is excluded from the table entirely. A session titled “a crazy event”, dated December 2005, is test data left in the system by whoever was building it. It is mentioned here rather than silently dropped, because a record that quietly removes what it finds inconvenient is not a record.
Reading the Two Eras Together
Taken with the later run, this period reads as a first attempt that got the ambition right and the mechanism wrong. The ambition — local communities running their own free training for each other — is exactly what the Brighton evenings went on to do for five years. The mechanism, a platform with groups and member lists and topic suggestions, turned out to be answering a question nobody was actually stuck on.
The format changed too, and in the direction of less. Three-hour workshops became two-talk evenings. A speaker-nomination system became somebody asking somebody after a session. Groups in multiple cities became one city that kept going. Every one of those changes reduced what the thing required in order to happen next month, and the version that survived is the one that required least.
What a Three-Hour Session Cost to Run
Worth spelling out, because the trade-off is the whole reason the format later changed. A workshop needs someone who has prepared teaching material, not just someone willing to describe their own work. That is days rather than an evening, and it is unpaid.
It also needs a room set up so people can follow along, which in 2006 meant machines or laptops and a network, and it needs everyone to hold three hours on a weekday evening. Every one of those is a point at which the session does not happen. The later two-talk evenings removed all three: a speaker describing work they had already done needed no preparation beyond deciding what to say, the room needed only chairs and a projector, and two hours is a manageable ask.
The pay-off was real, which is why it was tried. You can genuinely learn to use a tool in three hours and you cannot in twenty minutes. But a format that delivers more per session and runs a third as often delivers less in total, and it produces no new leaders, so it cannot outlast the people who started it.
What Is Missing from This Period
No handouts and no recordings survive from 2005 or 2006, which is a gap between the 2003 series that published its notes and the later evenings that recorded some of their audio. Whatever was shown in a three-hour Plone skinning workshop is simply gone.
The speaker names are gone too, which is the more frustrating loss. The session pages had a speakers section and it was left empty on the ones that survive, so ten sessions are recorded with their subject, date and venue but not with who led them. The curators of each group are known; the individual session leaders are not.
Attendance is unknown, as it is for every period in this record. Member counts exist — thirty-two in Bristol, forty-four in Brighton, fifteen in London — but a member list is a mailing list rather than a register of who came, and the difference between the two is precisely the thing that separated the group that held sessions from the group that did not.
Reading This Index
Sessions are grouped by city and listed newest first within each. The date, venue and city on every row come from the session page itself; where a page recorded a start and end time, those confirm the three-hour shape described above.
The city links matter more than they look. Each group had its own page with its own curators, venues and member list, and Bristol’s still exists here because other sites cite it. Brighton’s redirects into the later archive, since the two describe the same group at different stages and maintaining them separately would split one story across two addresses.