I attended BarCamp London 9 during the weekend of 29-30 October 2011 at the City University London Social Sciences Building.

I last attended the event at BarCamp London 6 in 2009, and although the format was the same for this year’s BarCamp, a digital grid was used for the first time, allowing attendees to populate the half hour sessions using the site.

If you haven’t a clue what I’m taking about, see Wikipedia for an explanation of what BarCamp is.

Here’s some of the sessions I participated in during the weekend:

• Lanyrd: From side-project to startup – Natalie Downe and Simon Willison (pictured above) entertainingly explained how Lanyrd, started as a side-project on an extended travelling honeymoon, ended up turning into a startup after spending three months at Y combinator. This was not part of the original plan for the honeymoon! Interesting quote by Simon from the session: “Data is a sympton of design. Watch for duplicates and bad data: these bugs are important to fix quickly because they affect the quality of your data”.
• How does IBM Watson work? – Dale Lane, from IBM, outlined how the Watson learning system works, which appeared on the US quiz show Jeopardy!
• Engaging universities – A look at the motivations for universities to host events like BarCamp led by Kate Reader. This useful session gave me some ideas relating to events I’m involved in organising.
• We are Wikipedians, ask us things – Tom Morris (Wikipedia editor) and Oliver Keyes (Wikimedia Foundation employee) answered questions about Wikipedia and gave an insight into the content editing process, against a current background policy of quality over quantity.
• How we do Agile at the BBC – Jamie Knight, BBC Client Side Developer, outlined how Agile methodologies are applied to the development of iPlayer in BBC Audio and Music. Jamie outlined how user stories (personas), acceptance crteria (defining how you know when a specific piece of work has been completed), 15 day task sprints, SVN, the use of white boards to track progress of sprints, and the pairing of developers and designers, are all used as part of iPlayer development.
• OpenStreetMap developer ecosystem – Harry Wood reported on the OpenStreetMap mapping system. Harry succinctly explained the project development process and how mapping data is served over the web. For some reason I didn’t realise until this session the project originated in the UK.
• Identity, authorisation, personalisation – An interesting discussion led by Tim Nash, which included looking at how confirmation of identity on the web can get confused with authorisation, leading to the unauthorised release of personal data.
• 5 Tips for progressive enhancement and RWD – Jamie Knight talked to two elements of web development: progressive enhancement and responsive web design (RWD).
• Semi-organised Barcamps and WordPress – I gave a session (PDF) on an alternative approach to BarCamps, using a wiki and mailing list, and it’s application to organising an annual two day WordPress conference, along with the WordPress community ecosystem in the UK. I put together this session on the Sunday morning, to address questions I’d been asked the day before, and subsequently ran a session in the afternoon. One of the great things about a BarCamp is being able to respond to events at this speed.

Plenty of other stuff happened during the weekend: including pies for all (pictured above), YouTube bingo, the Saturday evening quiz along with beer and wine.

Regrettably I had to duck out of the traditional crashing out overnight at the venue this year.

Many thanks to the BarCamp London 9 organisers and sponsors for a fantastic and fulfilling weekend.

I participated in the fourth annual UK Government Barcamp on 22 January 2011.

It was a great – many thanks to Dave Briggs and Steph Gray for organsing the day and the sponsors for their support.

You can find reports on the event at GovCamp buzz.

I attended OggCamp at The Black-E (above), in Liverpool, on the weekend of 1 and 2 May 2010.

During the event, which was part BarCamp and part panel discussions (pictured), I led a session about WordCamp UK on the Saturday afternoon.

On the Saturday evening an enjoyable social was held at Studio 2 at Parr Street, a short distance from Black-E.

Many thanks to the organisers, particularly Dan Lynch, who was involved in the panels, and Alan Pope, who gave a couple of interesting Ubuntu related sessions, and the sponsors for a great weekend.

I attended Rewired State: Culture on Saturday at The Guardian offices in King Cross.

The day itself consisted of two parallel strands: a hackday and, in the afternoon, an unconference, both looking at encouraging links between data repositories such as museums, broadcasters and the wider community, eg data.gov.uk.

At the end of the day both strands were brought together for a session where developers showed of the fruits of their hackday labours.

Many thanks to the organisers, including Emma Mulqueeny, James Darling and the DCMS team, along with sponsors ScraperWiki, for putting together a fascinating day.

I participated in the third annual UK Government Barcamp a couple of weeks ago.

The unconference for those involved, around or interested in the UK government’s online activities took place on Saturday 23 January 2010 at Google’s Victoria offices.

The schedule (pictured above) was put together barcamp style at the beginning of the day by those present.

Here’s my report of some of the hour long sessions I attended:

• data.gov.uk – Richard Stirling, from the Cabinet Office, outlined the origins, development and launch of the new data.gov.uk site, which “seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data”. He said the site, publicly launched two days beforehand, does not host data, but is trying to make data easier to find on individual government sites.
• WordPress – Simon Dickson led a session on the use of WordPress in government, outlining its expanding use, starting with the Wales Office, then Number 10, to it’s current deployment in government. Steph Gray spoke on his experience in using WordPress when rebuilding his departmental website in a few days when BIS was brought into existence. The speed of deployment and flexibility of WordPress, though the use of plugins, was a common theme through the session. I, of course, pointed those present to WordCamp UK to find out more and meet WordPress users and developers from across the country.
• Making the political sell: gaining support for innovation in political organisations – a session on making the case for digital engagement against a background of cuts. Steph Gray spoke on surviving 2010, whilst Anthony Zacharzewski presented making the political sell. In the current climate some areas of government might see digital engagement as an easy area to cut back without any significant impact – a mistaken approach in my view.

More reports of the sessions by others present.

One of the outcomes of the day is the possibility of organising an event around internal communications and collaboration.

Many thanks to Dave Briggs for organising a great day, Google for hosting the event at their offices, the sponsors for their support and not forgetting Hadley Beeman for arranging evening drinks in local licensed premises!

Spent the weekend of 28-29 March 2009 at the excellent BarCamp London 6 at The Guardian offices in the swish new Kings Place building in London N1.

Here’s some of the sessions I participated in:

• ABC of the new guardian.co.uk – Nik Silver led a session, based on his Inside guardian.co.uk blog posts, looking the Guardian R2 web CMS and its development since the start of the project in 2006 using domain driven design and agile techniques. It was interesting to note the project is ahead of schedule and under budget.
• The guardian.co.uk API – Simon Willison demonstrated the features of the recently released guardian.co.uk Content API and Data Store.
• Making kick arse video navigation – Chris Jackson gave a presentation on the recently launched URIplay, an open media metadata aggregator. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.
• The challenge of archiving the BBC’s content – Jonathan Tweed outlined preliminary work on bringing the Corporation’s vast archive online, building on the current /programmes and /music architecture.
• What I learnt organising a conference – Dominic Hodgson led a session on his experience of organising Think Visibility.
• The web of data and personal information – A thought provoking session on the semantic web by Mischa Tuffield.

Two days of varied and fascinating sessions, millions of Lego pieces, a great bunch of attendees and crashing overnight after beer and pizza resulted in a great weekend.