Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - barcamp

BarCamb 3

2010-04-25T12:48:00+01:00

This weekend has mainly been filled with BarCamb 3. I had a modest part to play in it's running (watching doors, carrying stuff) but still had plenty of time to attend a number of interesting sessions.

This will be my third BarCamp event and it's nice to attend one on my home turf. What I like so much about the format is the shear serendipity of discovery. While a lot of the speakers have some sort of idea about what they will present there is plenty of scope for last minute presentations or contributing to sessions like Lightning Talks.

So far I've attended a number of interesting talks/discussions. The first one was a discussion about the relative merits of micro vs monolithic kernels. This led onto discussion of if the benefits of isolation of components could be achieved with a JITing Virtual Machine and if that would solve some of the performance problems that micro kernels traditionally suffer from.

The next talk was an interesting history of Babbage's Difference Engine including a number of the implementation details. The talk included a demo of the engine written in Flash. Unfortunately time didn't allow for delving deeper into the "Method of Difference" from which the engine derives it's name.

Another interesting talk was Eva Amsen's discussion about scientific communities and the un-conference concept. It started with discussion about the plurality of science social networks that exist and the problems that fragmentation causes. This is slightly surprising given scientists were one of the first groups to use the 'net extensively for collaboration. The discussion then moved on to musing about why scientists haven't taken on to the BarCamp style meet-ups. A lot of practical issues surrounding not announcing research before publication and worries about presenting partial data and work in progress. Events have been shown to be successful (by for example inviting them to a "normal" conference and then cancelling the schedule once they had arrived). There also seems to be a thirst for normal tech people to meet scientists which may not be reciprocated by the science community. I left the discussion feeling a little sad that the ad-hoc collaboration that is so natural in the Open Source world still has some way to go in the realms of science.

All in all it's been very stimulating so far and I'm looking forward to the closing sessions this afternoon. There is going to be some 80's computer nostalgia which I'm quite looking forward to.

It seems to be the season for BarCamps as I've got another one next weekend when I'm attending OggCamp 10 up in Liverpool. Anyone want to join me?

Manchester BarCamp2

2009-11-09T11:59:00+00:00

I didn't even know there was a BarCamp event running in Manchester until I happened across Dan's post the night before I was due to head up for a party I was attending. My previous experience with the un-conference style of organisation was limited to OggCamp which I had attended a few weeks previously. Seeing as the event was free I thought it was too much of an opportunity to miss to visit while I was back in Manc.

The scope of the event was a fair bit larger than OggCamp with a lot more rooms/areas available for people to gather together. It was also not as tech focused as a number of people were coming from "new" media perspectives as well as other non-coder types. As a result I was involved in one talk about the future of newspapers in a digital age and attended another on the concept of coworking as a way for individual freelancers to share the collaboration potentials of a shared office. There was also a good selection of more tech related things going on. Things I learnt about included: automated grammar based text generation, the 20 minute Android App as well as a quick demo of some N900 frameworks. The final session was about the perennial problem of getting more women involved in technology and computer science (a trend that has been going the wrong way since the 80s).

Sunday's sessions where a more muted affair (which may have been due to the sponsorship of the previous evenings drinking?) but seeing as I was also a few bars down from Lee's party suited me just fine. However the primary draw of the BarCamp shouldn't be judged purely by the number of sessions it holds. I met and chatted to a number of really interesting people over the event and the collegial atmosphere is one that really encourages people to jump in an explore.

The venue should get an additional mention for providing a nice environment for the event as well as providing numerous wireless access points throughout the space. While there was still the odd connection problem this was probably inevitable with the number of laptops and netbooks competing for the limited RF space, usually a little patience was rewarded. All in all a happy confluence of geek and synchronicity :-)

LUG Radio Live and OggCamp

2009-10-26T13:03:00+00:00

I spent the weekend in the company of fellow geeks in Wolverhampton at LugRadio Live and OggCamp. As can be expected the ratio of connected devices to attendees was over 1 and we successfully saturated several WiFi routers to death.

While LugRadio was a more typical conference type event with scheduled speakers OggCamp was a more informal BarCamp style affair. Both had a number of interesting speakers and discussions including presentations made by the Open Street Map people discussing their ambitions to map the world in an open and re-usable way. An interesting suggestion made for the Free the Postcode campaign was to skip adding postcodes to Christmas mail replacing them with FREE THE POSTCODE on the last line. It was suggested it would get the Royal Mails attention very quickly as it would increase their cost of routing mail by more than the money they make selling the database. Other people pointed out making lives harder for the workers on the ground was not the right way to campaign. I'm in two minds about the idea but I suspect the Royal Mail have other concerns higher up their agenda at the moment.

I finally signed up with cold hard cash to the Open Rights Group who I've had plenty of warm words for recently. I even volunteered some time for one of their projects which I shall talk about more when I have something to show. However it was pleasing to find out that the plans to widen electronic voting and counting have been effectively abolished although slightly worrying to hear some of the stories from our brief flirtation with the technology. Their report on voting can be found on their website. For now their current campaigns include petitioning against the 3 strikes proposals and the mass surveillance of peoples electronic communication.

Some people who were following my Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook status feeds may have been confused by the preponderance of #lrl2009 and #oggcamp hash tags in my updates over the last few days. These were the conference tags which were being followed by attendees as well as several live projectors which were displaying messages posted with the tag. This was the source of much hilarity to people at the conference although probably made less sense to people following the stream from the outside world. It seems that micro-blogging is quickly overtaking communal IRC channels as the way to keep in touch with conferences.

I came home on Sunday evening tired but having enjoyed a lovely weekend of geeking out and looking forward to a 2 day OggCamp sometime next year!