Barcamp Brighton roundup

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the first ever Barcamp to be held here in Brighton. For the uninitiated, Barcamp is a grass-roots ‘unconference’ where all the attendees are also the speakers, and is a great way to meet those interesting, passionate and creative geeks who are busy shaping the digital world.

Thanks to the contributions of the organisers and sponsors, the event was a great success, with around 70 attendees, including representatives from BT and Yahoo! as well as a host of people from local companies. There were nearly 100 talks over the weekend - my only regret is that because there were 5 streams running at once, you didn’t have time to see all the things that looked interesting.

Highlights of the talks I managed to attend included:

• Jim Purbrick on why everything is web-enabled (and he does mean everything)
• Mikel Maron on OpenStreetMap
• Paul Downey on interesting phone hacks
• Tom Morris on querying the Semantic Web
• Paul Annett’s great Magic Trick
• Alkesh Vaghmaria on how BT is QAing its Rails applications
• Powerpoint Karaoke