dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

Saturday 29th November - and it's Barcamp Gold Coast #2. This is the 4th Barcamp in Queensland that I have involved with organising. I must have it pretty down-pat now as I did most of this one on my own. I think keeping the venue the same and the details as much the same as possible as the previous ones really helps things.

Sponsorship was must easier this year as I didn't do T-shirts which sucked a lot of our money last time. I also had a lot of stationery & materials left from the last one. Main sponsors were Griffith Uni (venue), MindWorx People (pizza), Apress (great books again), Refactor (internet) and Gold Coast Business (some Media/PR work)

Anyway - we had about 25 people, many of the same uber-networkers we have come to love at barcamps, such as Des Walsh & Michael Rees - but some new ones too. Thank-you to you all.

Our usual photographer DJ wasn't present, but Aaron Spence did an awesome job of photographs and even took one of his uber cool panedia photos. Thankyou so much Aaron.

Just a quick post to say that Barcamp Gold Coast #2 is all pretty much ready to go for 29th November at Griffith Uni! All the info you need is at

http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast

We are doing pretty much the same as last time, pizza is sponsored by MindWorx this time, hardware giveaway and also a book swap if anyone is interested in offloading some unwanted trees (idea copied from Sydney). Coffee guy will be there too and we have the wireless internet like last time.

Not much more to say apart from please register at http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast2 - oh and tell everyone you know.

See you there

Just reposting this email I sent to the bar camp gold coast mailing list in case anyone else is interested:

Thanks for coming on Saturday and judging by all the blogs and twitter posts I have a sneaking suspicion that you all enjoyed yourself and got a lot from it!

Where to from here.... well there will definitely be another barcamp sometime in next 6 months. I would say 3 months, but that clashes with
birth of my 2nd child, so if one happens then - I won't be doing it. Have a look at http://barcamp.org/BarCampGoldCoast and see if you can
see anything you can do.

Thankyou to Steven T & Morgan for helping me organise, Graham for some wrangling on the day and of course DJ for all the awesome photos (lots
of love for DJ going out on twitter this week!). Also thankyou to the Sponsors Linux Australia, Griffith Uni, Apress books and Inqbator and
to Craig Rippon at Custom Tees for doing the shirts.

The photos from the day are all now at http://flickr.com/groups/778799@N23 - please submit any more photos you have to this group and make sure you tag anything barcampgoldcoast.

You can also follow us on twitter - http://twitter.com/barcampgc and there is also facebook and all the other stuff on the wiki page.

And for the Brisbane people - Bar Camp Brisbane is calling you!!!! I hope what we have done so far with the QLD camps has inspired some of you to take the initiative and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN!. There was also talk of doing something halfway at Logan or somewhere.... good idea too.... DO IT

About 30-40 people turned up to Bar Camp Gold Coast on a rainy Saturday at Griffith Uni (perfect weather for staying inside and talking tech). I was really encouraged by the quality of the people that attended... I always knew these people existed on the Gold Coast and I will now double my efforts to get more stuff like this happening on the coast.

Anyway - I'll blog about this in more detail later, but here are some of the things that we did.

• Mobile Coffee Guy - very popular. Thankyou Kerry - I will definitely use you again. I'll find your website and post here.
• Pizza - Eagle Boys were ok. But were pretty late and pizza was a little cold....
• Hardware giveaway.... got rid of a lot of my stuff. Hands shot up pretty quickly - so obviously people obviously wanted this stuff! Lots of other people brought stuff to give too.
• Apress Book/Tshirt giveaway - didn't know how to give these away in the end (best presentation was too hard to judge) so we did a door prize instead.
• Internet - Griffith Uni installed an AP especially for us, and we had use of the uni internet. Seemed pretty fast - although annoying to keep getting the login page after a time away
• Group photo - thanks DJ for getting this together.. good idea
• Linux area - we kept a little area with some Linux magazines, distros and flyers on and the GCLUG people seemed to gather around there and talk to people about Linux, seemed to work well.
• Tshirts - good number of shirts (I think we printed 38) - they nearly all went, and it was nice to see Linux on everyone's backs too (including some MS people :)). Thanks to Custom Tees for those.
• After drinks... we got about 10 people there.... Parkwood Tavern was pretty ok, had a good outdoor area - with heaters!

Well Barcamp Brisbane #2 was a resounding success. We counted 60 people at the peak - and I managed to find a few new Gold Coast people which is always good. I didn't do any unorganising of this one really but ended up doing lots of wrangling on the day, although it was more like herding cats at times.

My presentation on wxRuby was ok - although I think a little too technical judging by the lack of questions.

I did prepare it all at 4am this morning, but I told a bit of a fib in the presentation. I actually know NOTHING about wxRuby, wxWidgets (come on - I am a web developer!) and not a lot of ruby - I just wanted to do it as a bit of an experiment to see if I could get away with it without anyone realising. Sorry for the deception, but it was fun, and gave me some presentation practice. The content of the presentation and demo was correct though - so if you want to use wxRuby - go ahead, it is very cool.

Next challenge - Bar Camp Gold Coast. Pencil in 5th July in your calenders if you are nearby - I promise to do a presentation on something I'm good at this time.

ps. I also succumbed to pressure and joined twitter. http://twitter.com/spidie

Ok, so I've got off my fat ass and released this idea into the wild - here is the email that I just spammed to as many QLD IT people & groups I could find... hopefully it will propagate it's way around by itself now...!

Hello Fellow Queenslanders!

I'm writing to you because I think you might be interested in the
concept of BarCamp: an ad-hoc gathering 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.

http://www.grantslink.gov.au