Fifth Barcamp Sydney, Saturday June 27th

BarCamp Sydney is on again. This is our 5th BarCamp Sydney and as we are in the midst of the GFC and a recession we’ve decided that this BarCamp is the Recession Edition or “the BarCamp we had to have” (to paraphrase Keating from 1990). 

In keeping with the Recession theme of BarCamp there are a few changes to this year’s BarCamp. Firstly a new venue, whilst we loved UNSW it was quite expensive. Thankfully the Australian Technology Park (ATP) Innovations Centre is giving us access to the space for free! Yay!

Secondly, we need to spread the load of the cost of running BarCamp across more people so we are asking for individual sponsorship as well as our traditional corporate sponsorship. So what do you get for your individual sponsorship? Nothing really, just the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from helping run this fantastic community event. Hopefully there will still be T-Shirts but that will depend on how much money we raise in sponsorship. However, if you are a corporate and would like to sponsor the event please contact us ASAP.

Finally, we have a new idea for a few of the sessions – the Think Tank room. The Think Tank room is a small room with no projector and no tech – just enough room for a small group of people discussing ideas. And what better ideas to discuss than ideas about the future. As a result of the recent FutureSummit attended by a few of the local twitterati, @liubinskas has suggested we keep the ideas coming with a FutureCamp! There will be a real FutureCamp later in the year but we can start the future discussion right here at BarCamp Sydney.

There will be more details forthcoming about the venue, the logistics and how you can register and sponsor, but for right now please block out Saturday June 27 for BarCamp Sydney and put your thinking hats on to present a ripper of a session.

Keep up to date at the BarCampSydney Blog or this email list.

Thanks to Jodie Miners for driving this Barcamp. Community is fun

Barcamp Melbourne 2008

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On Saturday I flew to Melbourne to attend Barcamp.

Very different to the Sydney Barcamp: more FOSS people, more code.

Managed to score a 5 minute slot near the end of the day. After a long day of PHP, eee PCs, Open XML and other depthful things – and being the last official presenter before beer-o-clock (kindly sponsored by Microsoft) there was a distinct lack of lulz. Time for – LOLCODE!

When asked if the next revision of Windows is based on LOLCODE, I had to sadly admit the answer is no. However, future Windows: who knows?