I managed to get a place for BarCamp London 2 which is being hosted by British Telecom. Hopefully there aren't BT employees reading my blog because if they do, I know I'll be denied entry. If you want to keep track of what's going on, check the wiki or add Ian (username: cubicgarden) to your Twitter. There will be more tickets available later on in the week - there are just under 100 tickets still available, so make sure you are quick on the draw when the next available moment becomes available. 
What I really like about BarCamp is that it's a hands-on event and you can actually do stuff. I get fed up of going to events where your only interaction is verbal. We're geeks and we exist to do more than talk. BarCamp is great because people actually do. Last time, Sheila taught me all about XSLT, which was really great. She sat with me, helped me write a stylesheet and tested it, helped me debug it and so on. You don't get that either at a big commercial conference or at a pub or restaurant get-together.
On Monday night, I got chatting with a guy who is a police officer who works in central London. I was telling him about BarCamp and he said it sounded like exactly the sort of conference that more industries, professions and walks of life need. He was explaining that all the conferences he goes to about policing and crime very rarely actually give space to the opinions and ideas of the individual officers who are the folks out arresting troublemakers, dealing with the public, helping homeless people get in to shelters, enforcing ASBOs etc. CopCamp would obviously be very differently organised from the technology-oriented BarCamp. I'm not even sure it would be possible, but it doesn't need to be.
BarCamp is there to raise consciousness to the fact that most conferences aren't very good. My new year's resolution this year is to not pay for any conferences - well, maybe £20 as a top limit (as well as to, you know, stop procrastinating, lose weight, finish my degree, get out to the seaside more often). That's because if you pay for a conference, it tends to be a lot less good than one you don't pay for. This seems highly odd to most people because we've had it pushed in to our heads that expensive equals good. But BarCamp London 2 got 150 signups in 90 minutes. No cost to the attendees beyond their Tube fares (two zone one cash Tube fares eats up half of my conference ticket limit!).
Case in point: Ajax2007 in April. Just saw it on upcoming. Lots of people 'watching' it, a very small number of people 'attending' (and some of those are probably only attending because they are speaking. There's a reason for that. The conference is £1,499 plus VAT. The conference with a masterclass is £2,294 plus VAT. Total price of £2,695.45. To learn about Ajax. I'll plump for the £20 book and if I've got questions, I'll find a JavaScript geek at Pub Standards or Geek Dinner. Tuition fees for a year at university are only three grand a year. Is there anything about Ajax which can't be read about in a decent JavaScript book and subscribing to the Technorati tag feed?
When it's a choice between paying nothing for a two-day conference or £2,695 for a three-day conference, it astounds me that people would pay for the latter. Open source, blogging and the Internet have rendered the Big Conference industry utterly irrelevant. Still, I'm glad they exist. While the big companies are sending their employees off to £2,000 conferences, the small companies are reading weblogs, buying £20 O'Reilly books, going to cheap or free conferences, dreaming big dreams, having enormous amounts of fun and eating dinosaur meat for breakfast.
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