BarCamp Oxford 2009
4-5 April, University Club, Oxford
OSS Watch have teamed up with Torchbox, Nearly Done and The Apache Software Foundation with additional contribution from 1000heads to run a BarCamp in Oxford on April. The fun will start on the evening of April 4th with a geeky meal followed by pub, the real action commences at 10am on Sunday the 5th (add your name to the list of attendees).
ATTENDEES: follow @barcampoxford on Twitter (or use the tag #barcampoxford to join in), and join the Google Group. That way we can all keep each other informed, about resources, planning, requests for help/crash space etc.
Details
View Larger Map
Venue and overview
(See the bottom of this page for a map showing walking routes to the venue)
The venue is the University Club, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3SZ, 01865 271 044. It's booked for the Sunday, but we will kick off on Saturday evening with a meal somewhere in Oxford. The unconference will happen during Sunday daytime. For those planning to turn up on Saturday night, the venue offers accommodation at a reasonable rate, but availability is very limited and must be booked well in advance; check availability here. There are also plenty of other cheap options for overnight accommodation in Oxford (including couch surfing for free, see below).
A map showing the centre of oxford, with walking routes to the venue from the rail and main bus stations, the hotels suggested in the "accommodation" section, and from the Park & Ride bus stops.
Saturday Evening
For anyone arriving early, we'll be meeting in Jamals in Jericho for a meal from 7.30pm, and then heading to one of the many nice, nearby pubs afterwards. Do come along!
Meals on Sunday
Food will be provided on Sunday, thanks to generous sponsorship from Nearly Done. More details to follow.
Themes
BarCamps are ultimately themed by the attendees: what you want to present, the BarCamp will host.
We'd love for this event to allow academic/hacker types to meet up with the vibrant and highly active geek community in Oxford, the county and beyond. Our intention is to make geek connections between projects in the academic and business sectors.
BarCamps are supposed to be fun, informative and useful. Whilst we do not intend to limit the kinds of topics you can discuss we are deliberately marketing the event to people with interests in one or more of the following:
- Open development techniques and practices
- Web 2.0 style data mashups
- Use of and engagement with The Apache Software Foundations projects
Schedule
A photo of the schedule board, taken at random intervals, can be found on Flickr tagged #barcampapacheoxford.
Barcamps need you!
Although we have sponsorship, a venue and a date, unconferences consist of you, the attendee! We need:
- People!
- More sponsorship: food, schwag etc.
- Network bits and pieces, projectors, stationery
- Offers of basic help, setting stuff up
- Offers of crash space for out-of-town visitors, on Saturday and maybe Sunday
Attendance at the BarCamp is Free, but normal BarCamp rules will apply, most importantly all attendees will be expected to particpate in an active way. Ways to contriubte include:
- present (informally or formally) about your favourite project
- hack together a mashup with other attendees systems
- play devils advocate in a lively debate
- have a drink with someone you have never met before
Help publicise the event
You could help by telling people about the event, or by putting up this poster.
What to bring
- Laptop
- All the chargers/cables you'll need
- A plugboard to make sure we have enough sockets
- If you're using a Mac for a presentation, VGA adapters
- Spare battery (if you have one)
- Camera
- Sleeping materials - sleeping bag, pillow and toiletries (if you are using our crash spaces - see below)
- An idea for a session, presentation or talk
- A smile
- ...?
Crash space
Geeks from out of town will be in need of crash space on Saturday 4. Please put your name down if you can offer someone a piece of floor. Anyone without crash space sorted should let it be known at the meal on Saturday, and we can pair people up then.
We have also reserved a small number of rooms at the venue for those wanting to pay for their own bed. Contact OSS Watch to learn more.
We have contacted those of you who indicated the need for a crash space and it look like you are all sorted, but if you still need support, let us know!
Attendees
Attendee numbers are limited owing to funding for things like catering. Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors we have managed to increase the maximum attendance from 50, so we're please to report that everyone who has registered below will have a space.
Also mention what you can bring to the party. Everyone at a barcamp will speak or contribute somehow, but if you can offer extra bits and bobs then that'd be great.
Finally, if you don't want to get a pbwiki account, then just email us and we'll put you on it.
|
Name |
Email / homepage |
If you can help, say how |
Crash space? |
Any notes (including comments on topics you want to see discussed) |
1 |
Ross Gardler (OSS Watch / ASF) |
info@oss-watch.ac.uk |
organizer |
|
* Cooperation between academic and private sector projects
* Understanding open development
* Why is a non-profit foundation important to defend standards
* How do we teach open development
(no I am not going to talk about all of them, depends what people want)
* BCS Student Contest 2009
* BCS Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition for 2009
|
2 |
Nick Burch (Torchbox / ASF) |
|
organizer |
|
|
3 |
J-P Stacey (Torchbox) |
jp.stacey@gmail.com |
organizer |
2-3 |
|
4 |
Sylwia Presley (1000heads) |
sylwia.presley@gmail.com / http://sylwiapresley.com |
organizer |
|
|
5 |
Matt Westcott (Torchbox) |
http://matt.west.co.tt |
|
2-3 |
|
6 |
Gemma Hefferon (1000heads) |
the other side of the big scary monster |
|
|
|
7 |
Pete Ferne (Jiva Technology) |
petef at http://jivatechnology.com |
|
|
|
8 |
Clinton Montague (One Ltd) |
clinton@slightlymore.co.uk http://slightlymore.co.uk |
|
(POTENTIALLY) 1-2 |
|
9 |
Jon Leighton |
http://jonathanleighton.com/ |
|
2 on sofas, another 2-3 on floor. |
|
10 |
Tom Dyson (Torchbox) |
http://throwingbeans.org/
|
|
|
|
11 |
James Turnbull |
http://jamesturnbull.org/
|
|
|
|
12 |
Matt Thorne |
matthew.thorne@chilisoft.co.uk
http://chilisoft.co.uk/
|
Projector, Transport on the day if required. |
|
I am bringing a projector. |
13 |
Andrew Godwin |
http://www.aeracode.org/ |
|
|
|
14 |
Amanda Clark |
http://twitter.com/Hedgewytch |
Happy to help
|
|
|
15 |
James Weiner |
www.twitter.com/jamesweiner
www.unicorncreative.com
|
I can supply a projector |
|
|
16 |
Kal Ahmed |
www.networkedplanet.com
www.techquila.com
www.twitter.com/kal_ahmed
|
Can help out with setup/cleanup |
|
Topic: Combining rdfQuery, OpenCalais and some cloud storage to make persistent semantic annotations on web pages. Initial thoughts outlined at http://www.techquila.com/blog/?p=408 |
17 |
Danese Cooper |
|
BarCamp Mentor |
|
|
18 |
Steve Lee (Full Measure, OSS Watch, Mozilla/GNOME Accessibility) |
steve@fullmeasure.co.uk
http://fullmeasure.co.uk
|
2 hands and height that helps ordering drinks at a busy bar. |
|
Can introduce the work of the open accessibility community or how to make your app/webapp accessible to more users |
19 |
Ben O'Steen (OULS) |
bosteen [at} gmail dot com |
General hackery and a couple of arduinos |
|
|
20 |
Inigo Surguy |
http://surguy.net/ |
Can carry things |
|
|
21 |
Ben Weiner |
http://readingtype.org.uk |
Will lend a hand |
|
|
22 |
Drew McLellan |
http://edgeofmyseat.com/ |
Have opposable thumbs. |
|
|
23 |
Alex Dutton |
barcamp@alexdutton.co.uk
http://www.alexdutton.co.uk/
|
|
1 - 2 (all sans furniture) |
|
24 |
Ben Ward |
ben @[cat] crouchingbadger.com
http://crouchingbadger.com
|
|
|
|
25 |
Peter Robinson |
LTG Services, OUCS |
|
|
Would like to speak about Oxford's iTunes University project, and offer some data sources for mash-up building. |
26 |
Prem Ghinde |
http://nearlydone.co.uk/
prem @ the above
http://prem.ghin.de/
|
Sponsoring food |
|
|
27 |
Martin Smith |
http://maniacmartin.com |
|
|
|
28 |
Marcus Povey |
marcus [snail] elgg.com
http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk
@mapkyca
|
Happy to help - shift stuff / meet and greet / etc |
|
|
29 |
Glyn Wintle |
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ |
|
|
Will probably talk about the Open Rights Group |
31 |
Pierre C. |
|
|
|
|
32 |
Tim Guy |
tguy0001 at gmail dot com |
|
|
Interest in
search,solr,droids,nutch,tika and mashups. |
33 |
Nigel Crawley |
http://twitter.com/ni |
|
|
Proce55ing, Arduino, Open Sound Control, The Web and Ambient information. |
34 |
Jon Bahan |
jonbahan@googlemail.com |
|
|
|
35 |
Nic Wilkinson |
nick.w2@gmail.com |
|
|
|
36 |
Dan Hedges |
http://twitter.com/ejarlewski |
|
|
|
37 |
Robert Burrell Donkin
(ASF)
|
rdonkin@apache.org
http://www.robertburrelldonkin.name
http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/robertburrelldonkin
|
|
(now arranged) |
Any Requests? Opinions?
- Freeing The Cloud
- Esme: Ten Reasons To Get Involved (micromessaging in Scala)
- Apache Software Foundation: Ten Years Young
- Hadoop And Friends
- Semantic Content Management
|
38 |
Nick Wicker |
nickwicker@gmail.com |
Can help with non-technical setting up and clearing up. |
|
|
39 |
Eamonn Neylon |
http://twitter.com/eneylon |
|
won't make the saturday evening, but can do sunday |
httpClient and document processing and review components |
40 |
Oleg Lavrovsky |
oleg.utou.ch |
A local so I can help out week before and all Sunday |
1-2 (one couch) |
Funky wikis, mashups and other scriptness, data formats for visualisations of rainbows and clouds |
41 |
Andrew Wood |
andrew [at] gn [.] apc [.] org |
|
|
The death of Facebook?: Opensocial and the new opportunities for small social networks. Progressing a pilot project. |
42 |
Aidan Skinner |
aidan at apache org |
Physically capable but occasionally clumsy |
|
Apache Qpid
Google Summer of Code
git
PackageKit
Philosophy
|
43 |
Martin Ritchie |
ritchiem at apache dot org
http://twitter.com/ritchiem
|
|
|
Develop: Apache Qpid
Interest: Home Media/Monitoring/Control,
|
44 |
Nick Blundell |
nick at nickblundell dot org dot uk |
|
|
|
45 |
Peter McCurrach |
peter.mccurrach at stcatz.ox.ac.uk |
can provide help setting up and setting down, and bring food
|
|
|
46 |
Adrian Sutton |
adrian@symphonious.net |
Happy to help with general grunt work and plan to spend plenty of time taking photos. |
|
Use and abuse of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Anything around authoring or web content management has potential. |
47 |
Richard Morrell
|
richard at linuxtec dot co dot uk
|
|
|
|
48 |
Paul Emsley
|
pemsley at gmail dot com
|
|
|
Could present about Coot. |
49 |
Simon Mather |
simon.mather@zen.co.uk |
|
|
Enterprise development and industry direction. Continuous integration for large scale projects. Lessons learned on public sector projects. E-learning. Happy to consider alternatives to add to the mix as appropriate. |
50 |
Tony Linde |
tony.linde@leicester.ac.uk |
|
No, can prob only make it for Sunday |
Open development and how it can be used in academia, esp research. Open science, open access, semantic technologies, LOD and the like.
|
51 |
Jim Hensman |
j.hensman@coventry.ac.uk |
|
Needed |
Interested in open innovation and research. Can talk about new VRE project, patterns and ways of creating and connecting communities. |
52 |
Keerthan Muthurasa |
muthurasa.keerthan@gmail.com |
|
No |
Interested in Social Networking Services and Semantic web. |
53 |
Julien Buty |
julien.buty@gmail.com |
|
No |
Open-Source enthusiast writing his MSc dissertation on delta-encoding algorithm. |
54 |
Gianugo Rabellino |
g.rabellino@sourcesense.com |
|
No |
Open Development, distributed vs. centralized SCM, Apache Way, Software Sustainability |
55 |
Marco Abis |
m.abis@sourcesense.com |
|
No |
Open Development & Agile, Open business models |
56 |
Justin Davies |
justin.davies@merton.ox.ac.uk |
|
1 (floorspace) available) |
ChemicalMarkupLanguage, ChemInformatics, Mash-Ups |
57 |
Paul Fremantle |
http://pzf.fremantle.org - paul@fremantle.org |
Happy to help out on the day |
|
Apache Member and Committer. Business models, code, SOA, new projects, etc |
58 |
Ross Clegg |
rossjclegg at gmail dot com |
Can lend a hand |
|
Could talk about misuse of Excel spreadsheets/VBA |
59 |
Ben Werdmuller |
benwerd@gmail.com
http://benwerd.com/
|
Happy to help in any capacity |
|
Can speak about running a large open source project, communities, social networking, the open stack, freelancing, running your own tech business |
60 |
Miles Berry |
mberry at bcs dot org |
|
No |
Open source in the schools sector, particularly web based applications. |
61 |
Cliff Skolnick |
|
ASF |
No |
|
62 |
Vijay Bisnauth |
|
Happy to help:- meet and greet, help setup, also I am an Oxford local |
|
Nope, newbee to geek meets |
63 |
Amir Nettler |
|
|
|
|
64 |
Kaliya Hamlinr |
kaliya(at)mac (dot) com,
was registered yesturday but got ereased some how.
http://www.identitywoman.net |
|
staying with danese cooper |
happy to talk about openid, info cards other identity stuff |
Anyone registering below this line should be aware that food may be limited for you. Of course there is an answer to this problem, if you bring some snacks with you there will be more to go around. So anyone below this line will be expected to bring some additional food and drinks. |
65 |
Graham Klyne |
http://www.ninebynine.org |
|
I live out-of-town, but can offer sleeping-space & transport. 2-3 on beds, and more floor space |
|
66 |
Andrew Luke |
drew.luke (at) gmail.com
http://wikiworldbook.com
http://andyluke.livejournal.com
|
extra power cable |
1 bed available |
|
67 |
Ji Ho PARK |
pcs007 (at) hotmail (dot) co (dot) uk
http://livej.blogspot.com
|
|
|
|
68 |
Kevin Carmody |
kevin@skinofstars.com |
|
|
Considering coming down for a few hours. |
Catering
We'll be providing snacks and drinks througout the day. Lunch will be provided with plenty of vegetarian options, let us know via the google group (see above) if you have any special requirements.
There is a bar in the venue and we've asked for it to be opened at 3pm. I'm sure there will be a bunch of us heading off for food and more beer in the evening, so all your needs should be catered for.
On the Saturday evening before, we're going to Jamals for a meal from 7.30pm, followed by drinks in a nearby pub. The curry house is a short walk from the Station, Bus Station and the centre of town.
Accomodation
These are some suggestions for accommodation in Oxford.
1. Parklands B&B: reportedly reasonable. Around a 20-minute walk from the venue, or a 5-minute bus ride plus a 10-minute walk. Around £90 per room per night.
2. Rewley House (University's Continuing Education Dept.): offers quite basic, inexpensive accomodation. Around a 15-minute walk from the venue. Roughly £65 per room per night.
3. Best Western Linton Lodge Hotel: no personal reports, but reasonable location similar to that of Parklands B&B. Around £60-£70 per room per night.
4. Holiday Inn Pear Tree: good accommodation, but less convenient location, on the northern outskirts of the city, by the ring road. The Pear Tree Park & Ride service runs from near the hotel, reaching the centre of Oxford in 10 minutes; the venue is a further 10-minute walk. Rooms are usually over £100 per night. Please note the park and ride service does not run past 18:57 on Sunday, nor after 23:30 on Saturday.
5. The Buttery Hotel: reportedly reasonable accommodation, directly in the centre of Oxford, and around a 10-minute walk from the venue. Between £55 and £90 per night, depending on room type.
If you would like more advice, please contact any of the organisers, as below.
Travel
From airports:
Heathrow and Gatwick: There is a good bus service direct to Oxford's central Gloucester Green station; see here
Stansted: There are indirect services run by National Express, through London or Heathrow Airport; see here
Birmingham: There is a frequent rail service from Birmingham International Airport to Oxford Rail Station; see here
For details of travel from other airports, please contact the airport for information.
Travel by rail:
Trains to Oxford all arrive at Oxford Rail Station. For details of trains, please see here
Travel by inter-city bus:
Buses to Oxford generally stop near the centre of the city, often at the Gloucester Green bus station. Some services also stop slightly further from the centre, in Oxpens Road.
From London specifically:
Bus: two services run frequently; the Oxford Tube and the Oxford Express. Travel time is around 2 hours.
Rail: trains run from London Paddington, and take around 1 hour (though some stop more often, taking around 1.5 hours). See here
By car:
On-street parking is difficult to find in Oxford, and is limited to 1 or 2-hours. Some details can be found here.
There are also some car parks where a car can be left all day for a fee (see the above link). The most convenient locations for the venue are at Gloucester Green and Worcester Street.
There are also park-and-ride services, but please be warned that these stop in early evening on Sunday. See here.
Getting to the venue:
Taxis are available at both the rail station and Gloucester Green bus station. By foot, the venue is around 10 minutes from the centre of the city, 15 minutes from Gloucester Green bus station, and around 25 from the rail station. Please see the map in the next section.
Buses from the rail station to the city centre are available, and cut the walk to around 10 minutes. Services include the S3, which runs from the station to George Street during the day; see here.
Map of Oxford
A map showing the centre of oxford, with walking routes to the venue from the rail and main bus stations, the hotels suggested in the "accommodation" section, and from the Park & Ride bus stops.
Core Organisers
If you've any queries, contact one of these people.
|
Name
|
Organisation |
Email |
1 |
Ross Gardler |
OSS Watch / ASF |
info@oss-watch.ac.uk |
2 |
Nick Burch |
Torchbox / ASF |
|
3 |
JP Stacey |
Torchbox |
jp.stacey@gmail.com |
4 |
Sylwia Presley |
1000heads |
sylwiapresley@gmail.com |
Thanks also to Danese Cooper for keeping an eye on BarCamp Oxford 2009.