BarCampMelbourne 2009

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 05:18pm

Two weeks ago, from the Saturday morning to the Sunday afternoon, I immersed myself in BarCampMelbourne. It was a great weekend, but I was a tiny bit disappointed. But that was because I couldn’t help by comparing it against the awesome StixCampNewstead.

As this is an unconference there is no way to know ahead of time what the talks will be about. As it turned out, the topic that people wanted to talk about was hacking hardware, in particular using Arduino hardware and getting together at the melbourne HackerSpace.

This re-kindled my interest in hardware, once I cross off some other items from my list (such as downsizing my computer collection) I will return to a specific box of bits in the cupboard, the one containing LCD character displays and temperature sensors.

If you want to know what you missed you can check out the photos on Flickr (my set or from others tagged bcm09 (also includes a Miami BarCamp) and barcampmelbourne) or watch the talks that were recorded such as Paul’s now infamous talk on Facebook Privacy.

But what didn’t I like?

Unlike at StixCamp where people had to stay the night (mostly camping), about half the people went home on the Saturday night. This diluted the intensity of the event and resulted in a lot less interaction. Another issue I had was that a lot of people, when they weren’t listening to talks (and sometimes even then), seemed to be glued to their laptop screens.

Sometimes two at the same time:

Although I’m only writing this post now, I did dent/tweet as the event unfolded and I managed to get my photos up on Flickr the day after.

I now cannot wait until the next event, be it a BarCamp or a StixCamp. Something that should tide me over is MXUG, a monthly meeting where the talks can be on anything technical.

Tagged with: barcampmelbourne, community, people, unconference