Hi,
This weekend I went to London to participate in the latest Barcamp which took place in the IBM offices.
A Barcamp is an unconferences where the topics and flow of the weekend is dictated by the participants upon arrival.
There were people from all disciplines of IT, from designers to developers and even users.

What a cool time I had!

Upon arrival and induction (IBM security WILL shoot us if we open certain doors..) we broke off into smaller groups to just get to know each other a little and see about our team building!

We got to play with lego and were collectively asked to build a bridge.
Unfortunately our bridge was not going to win any awards and people were singing "london bridge is falling down"



After this rather eventful start, we spent some time planning our presentations and getting to put them on "the grid". I was amazed at this grid, for those that know my software will realise its close to a real world version of my calendar!
it certainly gave me some ideas..



There was a lot of buzz as people discussed and got to know each other and tried to find their locations on the (puzzlingly upside down) map!

We began to break off to go and participate in the meetings and people hurried off into the respective rooms.
The N900 was played with by a number of people who were both surprised by the device and the sheer range and flexibility of the software running on it.

I was booked into a 17:20 slot for my presentation so I got to participate in a load of cool discussions.

The most innovative meeting I was involved with was a packed out non relational databases BOF which started with a simple text document on the projector and the presenters outline.
This document was linked up with etherpad which is cool collaborative software which allowed some of the participants to join in and edit the document live whilst the BOF was ongoing (much to the amusement of many)

We learnt many things and by the end of the BOF his simple outline had been fleshed out with many more options than at the start.



Some of the presentations I went to were not quite so crammed and I enjoyed hearing about the evolution of a digital church organ project which used a combination of visual basic and BBC Micro computers! Makes me smile when I realise not everyone has given up on old tech!



After this, I found someone roaming the halls with one of the new Touchbook devices from AlwaysInnovating, I think this is a really cool ARM touchscreen device and it seems to have all the right features to make a perfect wall mounted machine for my liqbase stuff

All too suddenly it was time for my presentation (gulp!), so I setup my projector and (to the surprise of iphone and android developers alike) started giving the presentation live from the N900 itself

I had chosen a room with about 20 seats and gave the presentation flawlessly to the room and was able to give a good run through of the N900 and its abilities. Everyone was impressed and there were lots of questions (30 mins was not enough!).
People were especially interested in the onedotzero code and some even downloaded the identity onto their own laptops (from http://code.google.com/p/onedotzero-ident/)
it works best when linked to the n900 though

After the presentation I realised it was time for evening meal which meant my day was nearly up!

Next time I will stay for the weekend - well recommended

Damn, I didn't know about this event!

Sounds like it was an amazing day, nice to hear that you worked the room with your N900! Congrats Gary!