BarCamp Ljubljana 2, post mortem

Posted by BigWhale on May 18th, 2009 in Editorials | 0 comments

Friday, May 15th. It was the Bar Camp Ljubljana day. Bar-what? BarCamp. An ad-hoc user generated conference. You know the place and you know the time. The rest is up to visitors. Upon registration you get to make your own name tag, you stick it onto yourself and then you go and find a session slot. At BarCampLjubljana sessions were 20 minute talks with 10 more minutes for Q&A.

Here’s how I got my BarCamp cherry-popped with second BarCamp in Slovenia. Yes, it was a first time for me. *blushes*

Ljubljana, where BarCamp was happening is about one hour drive from where I live. Taking this into consideration and the time I’ll need to park my car, get on the bus and then get to the venue, I figured that I need to be on the road approximately two hours early. Everything would work out fine, my timing was dead on spot, but then I realized that somebody put the incorrect bus station in directions on how to get there. Lovely, lovely, lovely. I knew where I was going and how to get there, but I didn’t actually pay any attention while riding the bus, I was just listening to announcer. They never called my station and when I heard the name of the station that was in the wrong direction I had to bail out and quickly. It was a 15 minutes walk to the Inštitut Jožef Štefan, where BarCamp was held.

Schedule board, confusing?

Of course I was late and there were only few time slots left that I could pick for my talk. I booked my session for 14:05, second slot after lunch. I knew that the whole thing will be ad-hoc and I had a general idea on how BarCamp looks like, but schedule board was really confusing. Geekishly kind of cute and utterly disturbing at the same time. It lacked cohesion, order and orientation, it even failed miserably at Feng Shui guidelines. This was the first thing I noticed. Then there was registration desk and three female members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Amazing! ;) So, I registered and got my name tag. Scanning the board I didn’t find anything that would really, really, really interest me. Picking a subject and them committing myself to listen to it for more than 15 minutes is quite a challenge. So I scanned the board a little, considering things here and there and after some time I made a list of things I want to listen.

BarCamp Introductions

I started with opening talk and introductions and then followed with this:

10:45 – Electronic Communications Survival Guide by Alesh.

11:20 – Introducing Hacker Space “TP1″ by Simon.

11:55 – Web Design for Localization by Karmen.

13:30 – How to destroy your community by P.

14:05 – Linux Rules, Windows Suck by BigWhale¹.

Talks were all interesting enough and I didn’t need to flee in the middle of them. At the end of BarCamp people got the chance to participate in 5 minute lightning talks which were more funny and amusing then informative and educational. :) There was also a lot of hanging out with all the people there. Turn up was quite nice; around hundred people. The crowd was mixed, geeks and non geeks. My talk went quite smoothly and the audience responded nicely. Slides for my talk are available publicly on google docs. After the event there was a party at a club nearby. One of the fanciest places in Ljubljana, Klub Top and they failed to provide me with Pepsi. So much for fancyness! Organizers did a fantastic job with the whole event. Kudos to everyone! After party extended into midnight pizza snack and then it was a departure time for me. I had to catch the last bus to the parking lot on the outskirts, where I left the car. Obligatory pictures from the event below.