Ewan's Musings
The day to day ramblings and thoughts of a Scotsman in England.
ConConUK Rocked!
Okay I paraphrased Danny O'Brien there, but his contribution to ConConUK shouldn't be ignored. He's blogged the origins of ConConUSA (but as usual, they drop the USA as we'll naturally assume the world defaults to America), and thanks to that, and everyone moaning "why don't we have something like that," ConConUK was born, wiki'ed as an idea, solidified, and "organised" in just under a week.
Okay the Dover Castle wasn't the perfect location for 95 people to turn up and find out what they missed at O'Reilly's San Diego holiday, but I think we all overcame the adversities really well.
As usual, you're at the mercy of the PA at events like this.The one we eventually hired was average, but at least it worked... most of the time. The Dover Castle has two rooms (we had PA Speakers in both rooms), with windows (that don't open) between them. So we made sure the projector and screen could be seen through the windows.
Bingo. Instant class division between the main room and 'the cheap seats.' No irc backchannelling here, but then, we're so far ahead of the USA that remote heckling by SMS was in vogue. And after a few sessions, my congrats to Will MacDonald. With his iCam, he relayed pictures of the ligtning talks onto a 17" Mac Powerbook in the cheap seats for instant video seminar'ing.
The seminars themselves (I've listed them at the end) were varied and interesting - i didn't see anyone nod off during any of them. I also think it was a fair representation of Etech, even to the point that somebody fired up that slide from Nokia so I could do an impromptu rendition of the emotionaly charged Finns.
One point raised in the closing discussion was that the lightning seminars were a bit like a collection of good Movie Trailers. You got an idea of the topic, and what it was about, and you were given a few URL's if you wanted to download the whole talk from Etech, or find out more information online. Maybe O'Reilly, at the next Emerging Technology Conference, should set aside the first two hours after the keynote so that ALL the presenters can do a 5 minute lightning talk to advertise their talks later in the conference?
But I digress. My personal highlight, and I suspect the one that would be voted 'most memorable bolt of lightning,' was Dave Green's "Why am I talking about Chocolate (www.snackspot.org)?" before he proceeded to capture the entire audience and hold them in the palm of his hand like a seasoned stand up comedian. Dave and Danny really know how to do these 'light hearted' tech talks, and every Con should have at least one of them in attendance.
From the feedback, it also sounds like everyone was pretty happy with my M.C'ing of the event. I've no idea myself, as I was watching the clock, watching crowd reactions to know when to move things on, and making sure we all got the bar (and back again) between the talks. I'll let someone else blog about that.
Finally, it seems there was a lot of enthusiasm in the room to organise a one day event, say 10-6 on a Saturday, over the summer. I'll run with that idea in a few days and see what comes up. I think it'd be pretty enjoyable.
Thank you to the following people. Everyone who turned up. All the speakers who gave up their time and sanity. Tom Coates, I'm not really that sarcastic and bitter in real life). Dave and Danny from NTK for starting the ball rolling and providing the one drop of publicity we needed. Everyone who donated some change into the champagne bucket to cover the stupidly high cost of the event. (We made a profit of £4, so that can go to the NTK Geeks Need T-Shirts funds IMO). Paul Hammond and Matt Webb for the background techy stuff. Whoever brought the projector. And The Academy...
Photos from ConConUK are on my moblog.
Lightning Recap of the Lightning Talks
GeoWarChalking: Chris Heathcote's 2D barcoding as one method of location.
Lee Bryant: Uses of GeoURL, illustrated by a content/portal system for Brixton, powered by RSS from GeoURL enabled blogs within a 2 mile radius of the town centre.
Fiona Romeo: Social Software for Children, making the web a safe and fun place for children to interact in.
Will Davies (and James Crabtree, hiding in the cheap seats): Social Software for Skyscrapers, looking at a top down approach to implementing a sense of community through software - I think.
Tom Steinberg: UK Digital Democracy, what do we have and what can we do?
Lee Bryant: Summarising the USA Digital Democracy sessions. (In short: Raise lots of money and you become President)
Tom Steinberg: What happened to the blog fuelled Howard Dean bid for the Democratic Nomination?
Matt Webb: Glancing, and looking at social rules that the software implementations forget to include in the Help files.
Priya Prakesh: Emerging Technology in the Far East and how they solve problems in a different way to the west, but with the same tools.
Ewan Spence: Open Programming Language (OPL), bringing basic programming back to the Symbian Smartphone.
Tom Coates: Three 'highlights' from O'Reilly. Fluid Time (Yahoo for it, it's worth it); Disney's use of RSS; Roomba Robots and falling in love with R2-D2, merging into the sinister US Military infiltration of ETcon/Etech (okay, three and a half)
Ewan Spence: Danny O'Brien's Guide to Running ConCon
Dave Green: Snackpot.org, talking and blogging about chocolate.
Panel Discussion: Should we do this again in the summer? (Which I'll blog about later in more detail).
Phew! Hope you all had a good time! And if you missed it, shame on you!
Posted by Ewan at February 24, 2024 01:30 PM