Event tag: BarCampJozi (Flickr) (Technorati) (del.icio.us)
Post-BarCamp
Blogs
BarCamp is over but here are what some of the participants have been saying:
Roger Saner - MacGeek
Mike Stopforth
Pete le Roux - GTD
Andre Ellis - UberEllis.com
Diricia - Pics on Flickr
Summary of the presentations
The Tectonic article
Good roundup by Mike Stopforth
(Please add/modify/rip-out as you see fit, titles taken from the cards)
Saturday
Due to a unplanned quite extended lunch, we didn't get through as many sessions as we would have liked. We covered:
- Elephant's Dream +Open Source Graphics Peter Le Roux showed us Elephant's Dream and explained how far Blender has come since it was open source many years ago.
- Break the Beta, OpenLab 4.2 AJ Venter showed us the latest Beta of OpenLab
- HaiTi! Using comics to spread the love Denis from OpenLab handed out comics that they give to school children in Namibia, which seems to work wonders for getting them computer literate. They are very well done indeed.
- OSS In the business world Anton de Wet from Obsidian told us how to make OSS happen in the business world, a session from someone who has really been there.
- XP Explored A session about Extreme Programming, good questions from the audience. Stellar example of why time limits should be instated for these things.
- Why del.icio.us
gives me ... makes me very happy Mike Stopforth showed us some of his favourite Web 2.0 websites and explained how they enrich his life. Insightful session.
Sunday
A very heartfelt thanks to Diricia for supplying us with coffee on Sunday! Mike couldn't lay of the cookies, which were quite delicious as well.
- Favourite Geek Toys We learned a lot about photography from D and Anton had a very cool hologram there. The surprising toy to me however was piece of metal that you wash you hands with, which removes the smell of onions and fish. Low-tech but very cool.
- System Thinking 101 - A primer for dealing with complexity My personal favourite of the whole conference. Carl Spies is an eloquent speaker and he has me intensely interested in Systems Thinking. He handed out a few books, with the condition that we have to pass these books on.
- Tying up your girlfriend 101 A bunch of cards was on the wall with weird titles, among these was this one. Turns out this was a serious card and not a joke as the others:
- "Female Geeks (n.)"
- .. how to find them
- .. how to keep them
- Male geeks personal hygiene
- Shake demo Dave showed us what we could do with Shake. Dave is an extraordinary character and I hope he will show us more cool stuff next time.
- What are you doing to get your stuff out there? Jaco took us through a session on marketing and how to get things out there. He mentioned a big list of books. If someone has that definitive list I for one would be very grateful.
- Ruby on Rails value preposition A quick, elevator pitch to non-techies and techies alike. Hopefully it inspires someone to have a better look at it.
- The blogosphere in South Africa Mike Stopforth spoke passionately about how all bloggers in South Africa should know about each other, even though we might not be in the same industries.
- Identity 2.0 and sxip.com Carl showed us sxip.org and told us why it is cool. He also touched on attentiontrust.org and the root.net attention vault and a cool Firefox plugin to ensure you know as much about your browsing habits as 'they' do.
- Identity Metasystem - Cardspace Armand showed us Cardspace and how it enables you to easily logging into a website by presenting your identity in the form of a card. Once this technology is in wide spread use, we can all login to systems without having to remember 100 passwords or usernames.
- Torque game engine Cyan Ogilvie showed us the Torque game engine. The low barrier of entry to game creation that Torque represents was an exciting prospect to me. The Indie game market has a new follower in me. Next time, we need Cyan to tell us more about Tcl!
- Taking on Telkom through consumer advocacy Richard Frank talked about the campaign he started against Telkom. They already raised over R50k for a newspaper ad. He promises that this campaign would be something to build on in the future. See TAG for more information.
- Getting things Done - Productivity for Geeks Peter Le Roux introduced us to GTD and to his system specifically. It is moleskin based, with pretty stickers. Danie demonstrated his text-file based system, and Anton showed an app he wrote to run his GTD system (Getting Me Done). Upshot: GTD is cool, everyone should try it and you can implement it any way you like.
- Software as a Service - Salesforce We got a tour of Salesforce, with a lot of questions around how one can use it.
- Git Cyan showed us Git. I am glad that the Distributed Version Control system race seems to shape up.
Lost and Found
- Mike has lost a multi-plug/2 prong adapter
Pre-Barcamp
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering ("unconference") born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.
Registration, admission and participation will cost you zip, zero and absolutely nothing.
If you're going to attend, add your name under Participants!!!
Join the organising groups and lend a hand right over here.
It’s time to get creative with the unconventional, unconference - BarCamp being held in Jozi. Design a FAB logo for this year’s BarCamp and win R 300 Kalahari gift vouchers.
The winner will be announced at BarCamp and the winning design will be printed on the limited edition BarCamp JHB t-shirt - It’s all about culture, technology and media so get cracking!
Competition Details
Format requirements of entries: Freehand illustrator & low res jpeg.
Competition Closes: 7th of September at 16:00
Send all logo designs to: jaco@quirk.biz
BarCamp Johannesburg Event Details
Date: 9, 10 September 2006
Time: 9ish to 17h00 (probably will move to a nearby venue (shivava cafe?) for a beer or three afterwards on Saturday)
Venue: SciBono Centre, Newtown.
Flier:
PNG and PDF
Getting There:
Themes (vision): Technology / New Media / Progressive Culture.
Possible topics (Please add suggestions):
New Media
- The traditional marketing agency vs. the modern digital agency.
- Grassroots journalism, social media, citizen media?
- How blogging is changing journalism - possibly get Professor Anton Harber to talk? Or Matthew Buckland?
- Elephant's Dream. Open-source and open-content short film- all material is available under a creative-commons license. I have a copy of the film with all the content material- we could watch the film and talk about the implications of this way of producing work.
- WebPR, online reputation management (ORM) and the effect of social networks, and user generated content.
Technology
- OpenLab break the beta session. OpenLab the only 100% South-African developed Linux distribution will release version 4.1Beta just prior the BarCamp. This could be a great opportunity to put it through it's paces, basically trying to break it, and report the bugs discovered so they can be fixed for the final release. What better than a bunch of geeks to find out exactly where things need work.
- Can someone do a session on Asterisk?
- The Identity Metasystem - "An interoperable architecture for digital identity" (Related to this will be interesting to discuss the different options available in this space, ie. Microsoft's Cardspace [http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/infocard/default.aspx], The Higgins Trust Framework [http://swik.net/higgins], The Liberty Alliance Project [http://www.projectliberty.org/]
- Mono - A viable alternative for rapid cross-platform development. [http://www.mono-project.org]
- Open Source Software. Tech vs Non-Tech definition and usage of OSS in business.
- Eye Candy - Compiz/XGL vs Vista's Aero. What's with the Wobbly Windows?
- LINQ - Language Integrated Query & C# 3.0. (.NET specific for now)
- Under-exploited possibilities for web2.0 and social software in South Africa- where are the teachers writing open-source textbooks on wikis, where are the humanitarian workers blogging from the KZN midlands?
- Being a geek in a country where it's expensive: who of us can afford to upgrade laptops/iPods/in-car GPS at the same frequency that people do in the developed world? What do you do when the cost of most of our toys is so high?
- Unlocking the SAT3 South African bandwidth monopoly - possibly get Rudolph Muller to talk?
- Favourite Toys: open session: everyone spends 2 minutes introducing their gadget of the moment- cellphones,cordless bluetooth coffee warmers etc.
- Extreme Programming - Would be nice to get the guys from the XP Forum to lead the discussion. (PS. How about some Red-Green-Refactor T-Shirt's for the developers attending ;-)) Spread the TDD love.
- Running Windows, Ubuntu and Mac OS X on a Mac - simultaneously.
Progressive Culture
- Wisdom of Crowds
- GTD
- Long tail - particularly, how social software opens up communication in obscure fields of interest.
- The changing face of the South African Internet user - possibly get Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx to speak?
Bring n' Swap
Bring all those tech bits and bobs you have laying around, taking up space, and swap
for something you may actually use. Gadgets, hardware, software, books, etc, bring it all :)
Rugby??
Will we break for rugby (SA vs Aus at 15h00)? Perhaps show it? Would need an MNet decoder.
Get involved.
If you want to get involved (planning and or attending], pop your name on the wiki [http://barcamp.org/BarCampJohannesburg ] or if 'wiki' sounds a bit like a four letter swear word, send an email to Mike - mstopforth@gmail.com and give him your details (he'll add you to the wiki).
Organizers
Participants
- Sifiso Motha - javasifiso(at)studentvillage(dot)co(dot)za
- Khayeni Ndlovu
- Vusa Dube
- Peter le Roux - peterleroux(at)gmail(dot)com
- Roger Saner - roger(at)tomorrowdesign(dot)biz
- Matthew Buckland - matthewb01(at)mg(dot)co(za)
- Angela Lang - anj(at)icon(dot)co(dot)za
- Stuart Murray – ideanation(at)gmail(dot)com
- Dino Minuzzo – dino(at)hybridevolution(dot)com (Cancelled - can't make it)
- Christof Appel - AppelC(at)bdfm(dot)co(dot)za
- Dinesh Cooper - dinesh(at)devkungfoo(dot)com
- Thea Burger - thea(at)dotnet(dot)org(dot)za
- Kevin Trethewey - kevint(at)gmail(dot)com
- Carl Spies - carl(at)monkeybarrel(dot)cc
- André Ellis - mordrack(at)gmail(dot)com
- Adrian Rossouw
- AJ Venter
- Edward Maluleka - edward(dot)maluleka(at)accenture(dot)com
- Sicelo Magagula - smagagula(at)nwpg(dot)gov(dot)za
- Warren Moss - warrenmoss(at)hotmail(dot)com - CANCELED///i wont be able to make it
- Guy Taylor - guy(dot)taylor(at)gmail(dot)com
- Dave Clark - dave(dot)wondermonkey(at)gmail(dot)com
- Anton de Wet - ascii(at)barcamp(dot)phun(dot)net
- Stefan Lesicnik - stefan(dot)lsd(at)gmail(dot)com
- Danie Roux danie(dot)roux(at)acolyte(dot)co(dot)za
- Donovan van Wyk - donovan(dot)vanwyk(at)gmail(dot)com
- Neil White - me(at)righteousjester(dot)co(dot)za
- Jacques Lindeque - jlindeque(at)gmail(dot)com
- Chris Spring - chris(dot)spring(at)gmail(dot)com
- Bretton Vine - bretton(at)hivemind(dot)net (depending on how well iWeek goes, would love to talk about the hivemind network and changes we've made) PS: contacted Arthur and notified him of the event
- Denis Brandjes - denis(at)getopenlab(dot)com
- Jared Brandjes - jared(at)brandjes(dot)org
- Gertrude Masipa - GMasipa(at)multichoice(dot)co(dot)za
- Marzanne Francis - mwilken(at)absamail(dot)co(dot)za --> What time does it start? Itinerary???
- Jacques Williams - charc-tech@webmail(dot)co(dot)za
- Vanessa De Sousa - vanessad(at)digitalplanet(dot)co(dot)za
- Nick de Klerk - nfdeklerk(at)gmail(dot)com
- Mark Marais - mvmarais(at)gmail(dot)com
- Samuel Francis - samuelf(at)altrisk(dot)co(dot)za
- Marc Wilson - temp9999_61 (at) hotmail (dot) com
- Cyan Ogilvie - cyan(dot)ogilvie(at)gmail(dot)com
- Desiree Ogilvie - supafly(dot)za(at)gmail(dot)com
- Ernst Kuschke
- Kees Snijders - kees(dot)snijders(at)gmail(dot)com - Sunday only
- Hein Koen - hein(dot)koen(at)gmail(dot)com
Sponsors
Task List
- Arrange Freedom Toaster if possible
Equipment required:
- Audio - PA system, music,
- Visual - projectors, screens
- Computer workstations
- Network infrastructure
Services required:
Sponsors:
- Bandwidth
- Design services
- Venue
- T-shirts - Quirk
- Refreshments
- Food
- Workstations
- Audio Visual
