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Over a year ago four of us—Andrew Boyd, Nathanael Boehm, Stephen Collins and myself—sat around a café here in Woden, Can­berra dis­cussing the logis­tics of running Canberra’s first BarCamp.

Two days ago, April 19^th we finally ended up kicking off BarCampCanberra1, here at the ANU. With over sixty people we had three streams going through­out the day offer­ing a large range of topics, social net­work­ing and even towards the end a White Wolf Were­wolf RPG session.

Some of the high­lights included:

• Tech­nol­o­gists as rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies—stepping back and exam­in­ing the poten­tials and power we have as users of tech­nol­ogy, by Kate Car­ruthers who came down from Sydney for the event;
• Doc­u­ment­ing open source projects—a detailed expe­ri­ence of one project’s doc­u­men­ta­tion, by Paul Wayper;
• Ruth’s User Expe­ri­ence Night­mates—is Gordon Ramsay a UX expert in dis­guise? Ruth Ellison out­lined the talk on her blog for those who couldn’t make it;
• Ajay Ranipeta also came down from Sydney and ran the famous two-​minute speed net­work­ing ses­sions again—Ruth snapped a great photo of the event.

I also had to chance to present the first version of my talk on typography—Beau­ti­ful Web Typog­ra­phy: 7 tips to de-​sucking the web. I was very pleased with the recep­tion and espe­cially happy to see new users of wp-​typogrify (or similar).

Many of the pre­sen­ta­tions have been made avail­able online at Slideshare. Flickr now fea­tures a good hundred great photos of the event. We also greatly uti­lized a Twitter stream during the event to post updates and status of pre­sen­ta­tions as well as links men­tioned in talks. Audio and video of the talks is coming online slowly—see the Bar­Cam­p­Can­berra blog.
Keith Lang pre­sent­ing You want Grandma Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The event was com­pletely spon­sored by both local com­pa­nies and ones further abroad—thanks kindly to acid­labs, Web Direc­tions, SMS Man­age­ment & Tech­nol­ogy, AussieHQ, Microsoft, Indigo Pacific, Maadmob and Kate Car­ruthers. This meant stom­achs were kept at bay during the day, throats never got too dry and at the end of it all the ‘campers could chat excit­edly over a pint or glass of wine.

A special mention should also go out to AussieHQ who fed thirty two of us at the end of the day at the Turkish Pide House. Thanks guys.

Overall a great turnout for a place like Can­berra. It was a great success and I’m very happy to have seen BCC1 run before I leave for Europe.
Photos by Ruth Ellison (licensed CC-​BY-​NC-​ND).

From left to right: myself, Stephen, Nathanael and Andrew—apparently now the “A-Team”.