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 19th 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”.
