I've been meaning to do a post-SemanticCamp blog post since Sunday, but have been distracted both by sloppy train services and the death of my laptop's hard drive (don't worry, the vast majority of the data is backed up!). Quite a few people beat me to the punch - including Jeremy Keith, Frances Berriman, Cristiano Betta, Andrew Walkingshaw, Benjamin Nowack and Gareth Rushgrove (among others). There was a steady stream of fun on Twitter and Flickr.
Quite a lot of those pictures are related to Semantopoly, a creation of Jon Linklater-Johnson which takes Monopoly, mixes in a lot of nice, open web technology like CSS, XML and Microformats, social networking sites like Dopplr and Facebook, a fair few in-jokes and references to well-known geeks, designers and developers for maximal win. This may be even better than Werewolf.
Okay, on to more practical matters. Did the event go well? I think it did. It's more of a good first attempt at something we can improve and iterate on. I didn't make my goals for the event clear up front but didn't hide them from people who asked. One of these was to try and get the the microformats crowd in the same room as the SWIG people so they can see that the others aren't insane, evil or malevolent - and that we all believe in One Web. I guess what I was hoping for was a sort of interfaith dialogue for the Web. This was partly achieved, although I think we could have done it slightly better by guiding the sessions slightly and maybe having a whole set of beginners sessions. I hastily slapped together a session called "WTF is RDF" at the request of a number of people asking on Saturday night. I'm glad that Frances and Ben Ward did a similar talk about microformats (even though they invited me to hijack the middle of it and talk about GRDDL and the profile attribute, which probably bored everyone silly).
What would I do if I were organising another one? Firstly, I'm not sure I'd do it over a weekend - I'd maybe do it on one day rather than two, and have a mixture of a few pre-planned sessions for novices and a bulk of free slots. I know this goes against the rules of BarCamp - I don't intend to replace BarCamp, but rather have a lot more events that are marginally more structured than BarCamp but still keeping their essential spirit. I'd like to see us tweak the SemanticCamp model and for other communities to put on similar events. I'd like to see niche 'Camps about everything from Rails and Flash to design and philosophy. I'd certainly recommend organising a 'Camp - although there's a lot of work involved (and even more hard work being done by Ashok and folks at Imperial College), when it all works, it's tremendously fun and rewarding.
Thanks again to all the sponsors, all the attendees and the people following along live on the streaming video and everybody who showed support for the event. When is the next one? Well, I'm quite enjoying not having to check my e-mail for a few days. We've got BarCamp Brighton 2 coming up very soon, which I'll definitely be at. I might also do a repeat of the RDF introduction session sometime soon. As for SemanticCamp 2? I haven't ruled it out at all, but we'll have to wait and see.
