Had a brilliant day on Saturday: great talks and panels, quality food, good weather, and fun networking in the Westwood afterwards. Overall, I enjoyed BarCamp Galway, and I want to again thank our helpers, speakers, attendees, and especially our sponsors - without whom the day could not have happened in the manner it did (t-shirts, pens, paper, coffees, buns, lunches, biscuits, drink and nibbles).
Now…
To the thirty or forty people who didn’t show - I know some of you have explained why you couldn’t come - but to the rest, why didn’t you e-mail, or take your names off the wiki so that we could plan accordingly? I’m pretty annoyed, and to be honest, I won’t organise another BarCamp for this reason.
After some brainstorming with Conor and Ed yesterday, we came up with the following “streams” for BarCamp Galway, each of which will be held in one of our three rooms:
- Tales from the Front Line (Share Experiences)
- Boot Camp (Gain Expertise)
- The Great Escape (Breakout Sessions)
So far so good, and we’ve nearly filled all our talk slots (see image below). Don’t worry if you’re a speaker and the chosen time doesn’t suit you as I just assigned slots to see where we stand overall, so it’s still flexible. (Also, we still have the Breakout Sessions room in case we get more talks than slots.)
We’re organising three panels for BarCamp Galway, one or all of which hopefully will appeal to various audiences:
- Academics - “If I’m so smart, why am I being paid so little?” – What it means to be a computer researcher - Organised by Ed
- Practitioners - “I’ve got this great website, but nobody’s using it” – How to grow a community presence - Organised by Ina
- Developers - “Send lawyers, guns and money, Dad” – Issues faced by Irish technology start-ups - Organised by Aidan
We still have space for around five more talks - please add your name to the wiki or e-mail us if you want to participate.
…and I’m buoyed up by the success of the Web 2.0 events last week.
I’m looking forward to catching up with lots of people (if there’s time between rushing around the place like a headless chicken), including Alastair McDermott (who enthusiastically came a week early) and John Collison (whom I first met for dinner at MIT in February along with his brother Patrick and mutual friend Fergus).
The “BarCamp Galway” event will be held at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway from 10 AM on the 22nd of September. BarCamp is a technology-focused, informal gathering of people from technical and business backgrounds, where information and experiences are exchanged. The event is geared towards sharing knowledge and learning from others, and there is a policy of encouraging active participation in all discussions.
BarCamp Galway extends from other successful Irish “unconferences”, most recently the BarCamp Dublin and BarCamp Belfast events. The term unconference is used as BarCamp allows anyone to present, and talks can be technical or non-technical. The BarCamp ethos is simply about sharing information, with no overriding theme. Speakers and discussion panel members who have signed up to talk so far include:
- David Lenehan, PollDaddy: creator of the very popular online polling service.
- John Collison, Auctomatic: the young Irish student who along with his brother Patrick received significant venture capital funding from Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley.
- John Breslin, boards.ie: co-founder of Ireland’s largest discussion community.
- Conor O’Neill, LouderVoice: editor of Blognation Ireland.
- Ina O’Murchu, DERI: writer of Galway First’s TechTalk column and speaking about the Social Web.
The event is free and is being sponsored by Microsoft, Blacknight, boards.ie and Logon.ie. If you wish to attend, simply send an e-mail to barcampgalway@gmail.com
We had a very interesting invited talk last week from Jan Blanchard of TouristRepublic / TouristR, giving an overview of TouristR and a forthcoming project called TripPlanr.
I first met Jan when he visited us here in March, and since then at various events such as the Galway OpenCoffee meetups, but we had about 25-30 people from DERI at the presentation on Wednesday and also had some good questions / answers and discussions with Jan and TouristR developer Conor after the talk…
(Thanks to Uldis for the photos.)
Ina is organising the next Galway OpenCoffee Club.
As usual, it will be held in the Forster Court Hotel, near Ceannt Station, at 11 AM. The idea is to have it on the first Friday of every month.
As mentioned previously, I will be taking part in the “Talk Digital” panel discussion on “Social Networking in Games” on Monday at 1 PM, which is part of the GAME :ON Cyber Games Festival in the Digital Hub, Dublin next week. The panelists are:
The event will be chaired by John Collins from the The Irish Times, and the where and when details are:
- Date: Monday, 10 September 2007
- Time: 13:00
- Venue: Presentation Room in the Digital Depot, Roe Lane, The Digital Hub, Dublin 8 (map)
Published in BarCamp,
Boards,
DERI,
Education,
Galway,
Games,
Internet,
Ireland,
Japan,
NUI Galway,
Semantic Web,
Social Networks,
Social Software,
Web and
Web 2.0 .
…for the past few months, hence the lack of regular blog entries. Most of my summer has been taken up with proposal writing for research funding here at DERI, the first of which finished up around the end of the June and the second ran from then until the end of August, so unfortunately I haven’t had time for much else…
Anyway, here are some updates about future social media / social software activities I’m involved in:
I attended the yearly IT Association of Galway Barbeque on behalf of DERI last week - it was an enjoyable night, and you can check out the ITAG website for other forthcoming events including Managing Teams Remotely, Borderless Ireland, and the ITAG Industry Awards 2007.
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