First WebCamp to be held in India (on Web Frameworks for the present and the future)

I’m happy to say that the first WebCamp event in India will be held next month. It is being organised by Prahbu Subramanian, who previously ran the successful PipesCamp event in Chennai last year.

The topic of the workshop is web frameworks for the present and the future. This event will provide an opportunity for interested parties to talk about the web frameworks that they currently use, how a particular framework solved particular real-world problems, which others didn’t provide solutions, how much productivity gain they have produced, etc. There will also be a debate on how to choose the right framework for various common real-world problems (e.g., Rails, Python, ErlyWeb, Java).

If you’re interested in organising your own WebCamp event, you can visit the new Spread WebCamp page to get our CC-licensed logos and the WebCamp Template page for a basic new event layout (inspired by BarCamp).

BarCamp Galway aftermath

Had a brilliant day on Saturday: great talks and panels, quality food, good weather, and fun networking in the Westwood afterwards. Overall, I enjoyed BarCamp Galway, and I want to again thank our helpers, speakers, attendees, and especially our sponsors – without whom the day could not have happened in the manner it did (t-shirts, pens, paper, coffees, buns, lunches, biscuits, drink and nibbles).

Now…

To the thirty or forty people who didn’t show – I know some of you have explained why you couldn’t come – but to the rest, why didn’t you e-mail, or take your names off the wiki so that we could plan accordingly? I’m pretty annoyed, and to be honest, I won’t organise another BarCamp for this reason.

Talk streams for BarCamp Galway

After some brainstorming with Conor and Ed yesterday, we came up with the following “streams” for BarCamp Galway, each of which will be held in one of our three rooms:

1. Tales from the Front Line (Share Experiences)
2. Boot Camp (Gain Expertise)
3. The Great Escape (Breakout Sessions)

So far so good, and we’ve nearly filled all our talk slots (see image below). Don’t worry if you’re a speaker and the chosen time doesn’t suit you as I just assigned slots to see where we stand overall, so it’s still flexible. (Also, we still have the Breakout Sessions room in case we get more talks than slots.)

Three panels for BarCamp Galway

We’re organising three panels for BarCamp Galway, one or all of which hopefully will appeal to various audiences:

• Academics – “If I’m so smart, why am I being paid so little?” – What it means to be a computer researcher – Organised by Ed
• Practitioners – “I’ve got this great website, but nobody’s using it” – How to grow a community presence – Organised by Ina
• Developers – “Send lawyers, guns and money, Dad” – Issues faced by Irish technology start-ups – Organised by Aidan

We still have space for around five more talks – please add your name to the wiki or e-mail us if you want to participate.

Five days until BarCamp Galway…

…and I’m buoyed up by the success of the Web 2.0 events last week.

I’m looking forward to catching up with lots of people (if there’s time between rushing around the place like a headless chicken), including Alastair McDermott (who enthusiastically came a week early) and John Collison (whom I first met for dinner at MIT in February along with his brother Patrick and mutual friend Fergus).

Press release: "Sharing knowledge on technology and business at the BarCamp 'unconference'"

The “BarCamp Galway” event will be held at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway from 10 AM on the 22nd of September. BarCamp is a technology-focused, informal gathering of people from technical and business backgrounds, where information and experiences are exchanged. The event is geared towards sharing knowledge and learning from others, and there is a policy of encouraging active participation in all discussions.

BarCamp Galway extends from other successful Irish “unconferences”, most recently the BarCamp Dublin and BarCamp Belfast events. The term unconference is used as BarCamp allows anyone to present, and talks can be technical or non-technical. The BarCamp ethos is simply about sharing information, with no overriding theme. Speakers and discussion panel members who have signed up to talk so far include:

• David Lenehan, PollDaddy: creator of the very popular online polling service.
• John Collison, Auctomatic: the young Irish student who along with his brother Patrick received significant venture capital funding from Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley.
• John Breslin, boards.ie: co-founder of Ireland’s largest discussion community.
• Conor O’Neill, LouderVoice: editor of Blognation Ireland.
• Ina O’Murchu, DERI: writer of Galway First’s TechTalk column and speaking about the Social Web.

The event is free and is being sponsored by Microsoft, Blacknight, boards.ie and Logon.ie. If you wish to attend, simply send an e-mail to barcampgalway@gmail.com

Been a busy B…

…for the past few months, hence the lack of regular blog entries. Most of my summer has been taken up with proposal writing for research funding here at DERI, the first of which finished up around the end of the June and the second ran from then until the end of August, so unfortunately I haven’t had time for much else…

Anyway, here are some updates about future social media / social software activities I’m involved in:

• I’ve acquired socialmedia.net (and socialsoftware.net). I’m planning to run a social media news and views site there along the lines of R/W Web or Mashable. Suggestions welcome…
• social.ie is in testing phase; we’re just migrating some functionality from boards.ie (friends, blogs, and soon albums), and then we can start adding new stuff.
• Thomas, Tom and I are organising BlogTalk 2008, the international social software conference, which will be held in Cork in six months time. More about this soon.
• It’s teaching time again; my course on Emerging Web Media to the Masters in Digital Media starts again tomorrow. Our Moodle is currently offline but you can see my previous notes on SlideShare.
• I’ll be on a discussion panel next week at an event about “Social Networking in Games” in the Digital Hub. I’ll blog more about this shortly. I had hoped to attend Mashup Camp on the same day, but the date has been moved.
• I want to go to the Future of Web Apps road trip in Dublin event, and possibly pop along to the Paddy’s Valley meetup beforehand.
• We’re getting closer to BarCamp Galway, and Damien has put out a call for new faces.
• I’ll be attending the International Semantic Web Conference in Korea and the Tokyo Web 2.0 Expo in November. Really looking forward to this…