This week I attended the excellent BarCamp, and just wanted to publish some unstructured thoughts from the event.
I apologise to the people I promised streaming to. Due to the layout of the venue (and my temparament), gonzo DIY conference streaming wasn't exactly appropriate. Perhaps next time. I did put up some small fragments over on my blip.tv profile though. There was some streaming going on though. All good.
I find it very strange - back when this "Web 2.0" thing (whatever that's supposed to mean) was new, everyone would pump their conferences out to the outside. I remember going to NOTCON 2004 in London and doing collaborative notetaking using SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra) and publishing it almost afterwards. I checked on Technorati during the weekend and there was about 20 posts about BarCamp (compared to over 300 Flickr pics) - most of which came from the buildup, not from live-blogging the event. I find it strange that people don't really cover conferences. I'd like to know why. Nowadays, most conference wifi is so appalling that getting the text file out would be difficult - let alone live audio or video stream. At Google this weekend, that was not the case. 600Kbps upload on really widely-available wifi. Great stuff. It's important to do it properly.
We started a conversation (you know, a real conversation - not a Web 2.0 Conversation, where we talk about how zany we are for having a conversation about very little) at BarCamp about the future of BarCamp - which was followed by an announcement by friend and BarCamp organiser Ian Forrester that this weekend would be his last stint at organising BarCamps. Ian has been absolutely superb in binding the London geek community together, and organising three fantastic BarCamps in London - at Yahoo! last September, BT earlier this year and now at Google.
Well, how do we shape the next BarCamp? I'd suggest we have more focus on niches. I want to organise a 'SemanticCamp', a BarCamp that would be like a BarCamp for the Semantic Web (including the 'lower case' Semantic Web, whatever you think that means). There's social engineering involved here in BarCamp organisation, but if it's done right, you don't notice it. It's just called creating a great weekend. So, SemanticCamp would be a sort of mixture of some of BloggerCon rules (the 'no pitching' rule, specifically - because I don't really want guys in semi-suits wasting my time talking about how they are leveraging the social graph for authentic Ajaxy widgety community goodness or whatever the fuck the buzzwords are this week) as well as BarCamp openness. The opposite is the ArbCamp stuff which seemed to me like BarCamp being exploited by seedy marketing types. (Meta: blunt? I am always blunt about these kind of things.)
But SemanticCamp (working title - DataCamp, OpenDataCamp, YourDataCamp, SemWebCamp are all alternatives) is just one possibility. I'd love it if every month in London there were niche one-day BarCamps on all sorts of interesting things to do with computing, the Web and so on - APIs/mashups, accessibility, UI/UX/HCI/etc., design/typography, standards, 'hardcore' software development (the phrasing that people seemed to be using - which makes it sound rather dirty) and the many other interesting things people work and play at.
Another discussion we had at BarCamp was getting this stuff out to teenagers. I remember exactly what it's like being of a nerdy persuasion in a state sector secondary school. It's a little better than having your toenails ripped off with a pair of pliers, but not that much. There's social pressure to conform, and there's IT curricula that sucks worse than all of the Spice Girls put together. We need hack day for the 14-18 demographic (go leverage your social graph and build it, folks) with a handful of experts from different backgrounds to show people that computers are not just Facebook, Half Life and what they teach you on their crappy, government-approved curriculum - but a tool for creative and innovative human expression, just like a paintbrush or piano is. There are specialised art programs and sports camps for kids, but I think something like hack day for teenagers would rock. And it's something we should encourage. Problem is that with the current BarCamps we can't really have kids because of the alcohol and insurance and so on. We need to think about this, otherwise the next generation is going to be fucked by the pseudo-pragmatic PowerPointism of Nu Labour's gormless education policy regarding ICT. I wrote an angry blog post about this last month - so go read it.
Some talks I enjoyed from the weekend - Sheila's discussion of "Should we pander to the iPhone?" (answer: no, we don't pander, but that doesn't mean not building iPhone-specific stuff if we already have our proverbial standards house in order), Leisa Reichelt on DIY user testing, Cennydd Bowles on 'understanding social network' (he's as against the stupid 'social graph' meme as I am). Also good were "What should we be teaching the next generation of web designers/devs?" (simple: Git, unit testing, where to buy mail-order cheese and hasLayout) and what I got to see of Ian's data portability session. BarCamp is, of course, so much more than the sessions. But compared to other conferences, the sessions are actually good and we don't have to hang out in stupid dingy corridors to talk about the stuff that matters and avoid crappy product pitches.
And now for something completely different. Housekeeping note: I am not a werewolf.
The corporate culinary skills at Google are fucking leet. I'm concerned about one company knowing so much about me, but the availability of chocolate waffles and crepes at midnight makes all of that stuff okay. And a Segway? That's pretty darn awesome, especially the bit where really quite drunk geeks zipped around the reception area on it risking awards cabinet and pot plants alike.
I'm quite, quite knackered after having a bit of a sleep deficit from Thursday night (I went down to Bristol on Friday for a Semantic Web conference - and the first leg of my journey was a train at 4.58am), and sleeping in a deckchair in a brightly lit room in Google's offices didn't do masses to improve the situation this weekend.
