BarCamp Barsnley 2011
March 26th, 2011
I’ve just got back from BarCamp Barsnley which whilst being a great day with some great speakers and excellently organised (more on that later) felt a little odd. I realised at the opening welcome talk why this was, almost everyone there was a first time BarCamper and almost none of the usual suspects were around (you know, the hardcore that attend almost every UK BarCamp and are often involved with organising them). It was also the smallest BarCamp I’ve attended (I suspect it peaked at around 50 people) That said, this didn’t detract from the event, in fact it probably helped make it better, for once I didn’t miss too many sessions I really wanted to see and I actually got a real chance to talk to people.
I want to stress, this is no slight on the organisation, everything was very well organised, everything from location, parking and registration to the excellent lunchtime pizza and none-stop tea and coffee was brilliantly handled.
The line-up of talks I chose was excellent. It started with @mkjones on Theme and Template sites, it was probably a good thing there were so many questions from the floor, as I didn’t get to ask his opinions on theme licensing (although it was touched on in the talk) and my bugbear of WP themes containing code (making them exceptionally dangerous beasts for none-technical users) although it did give me the inspiration to finish the Warcraft theme we did for RoA which did all kinds of cool stuff like retrieving info from Blizzard’s website, showed up coming raids etc.
Second on the list was @tomnomnom ‘s excellent demo of an “what if I do this …. ” type project where he used php to read the input from a set of RockBand drums, resulting in a ascii version of the game. He was even brave enough to live code part of it. A great presentation and quite witty too.
Third was Tim (@tnash) giving a great talk on airport security and how to speed the process up, much of which focused on how to avoid being singled out (answer, don’t look so dammed nervous, so it was lots of common sense tips on preparation to avoid getting flustered) and some interesting anecdotes on his time in the forces. It was particulary well done as he threw it on the board as a last minute idea as the board looked a little empty and winged the entire lot.
After a lunch break with an excellent choice of lovely pizza, I headed to a talk on the 7 deadly sins of presenting, which whilst not really teaching me anything new, was, unsurprisingly, very well presented. I was told the presenter (Darren?) did a talk earlier on Time Travel that was excellent and I rather regret missing it.
That was followed by a round table discussion lead by @dchetwynd on organising geek events. This is a topic particular close to my heart as whilst I haven’t organised a geek event since the first UK 2600 meets outside of London, in Manchester around 1990, I’ve organised plenty of none-geek events and I’m very much the type of person TO organise them. But mainly I wanted to get across my position as somebody who felt very much an outsider at seemly exceptionally cliquey geek events and also that one of the BIG failings I see of geek events in the UK is they suffer from a lack of advertising and you only get to know about them if you know people going. It seems I’m not alone, everyone else seemed to suffer similar problems and acknowledged the BarCamp Barnsley itself suffered this (which may have explained the low turnout and high percentage of first timers), they also acknowledge that many of these events are often cliques of existing friends who would probably welcome new input, yet still feel hard to approach. Sadly my usual “if you don’t fix it, you can’t expect anyone else to” attitude got the better of me and I have an idea to partly rectify this.
From here is was time to do a presentation myself and Tim had quickly thrown together on Friday afternoon on monetizing content. Our planned “good cop, bad cop” tag-teaming presentation style seemed to work quite well, but sadly the talk before ran over and we had to rush it rather a lot and couldn’t execute our plan to identify potential testers (be them content providers or developers) for cashApe, but hopefully we encouraged a few people consider selling their content rather than just giving it away. I suspect it’s a presentation we may refine and try again in the future. Oh and in case you we’re wondering which cop I was, you this image on right should give you a clue (one advantage of playing the evil internet marketer was I actually got to talk about dirty subjects like actually making money …. oh and I got to plug our products if only for comedic value).
The remainder of the day was spent talking to @martin88 (plus his dad), @jonnyauk, @mkjones, @davidbatty, @rebecca_parker, @proactivepaul, @tnash, @carolynlyn and others about everything from the WordCamp Leeds that never was, Werewolf, Membership Software, beer and lost mobile phone chargers. Hopefully I’ve convinced @DavidBatty to try something other than WishList, given @lukeb3000 some ideas on monetizing a hyperlocal site, recruited @mkjones for some Leeds geek events and convinced @jonnyauk that he should organise BarCamp Birmingham!
So, quick summary, it didn’t feel like your average BarCamp, but that’s no bad thing. Met some great people, learnt some stuff and had a pretty good day out. Now, if only I could convince somebody to bring back BarCamp Leeds from the ashes.
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