Barcamp Ottawa wrapped up yesterday, with a lot of smiles and a what looked like a unanimous vote to do it again. Cool!
We had 90 people turn out, exceeding even our own expectations. There were probably a dozen folks from out of town, including several groups who drove up from Toronto. There was also a broad range of ages, including a couple of enthusiastic grade 8 students from Glashan Elementary in the Glebe. We had press from CTV, the Ottawa Citizen, and National Capital Scan. Most importantly, though, we had a solid agenda of 20 or so sessions, with content ranging from legal issues surrounding open source programming, to product demos, blogging, AJAX, and more.
The Barcamp Ottawa Wiki has a number of write-ups of various sessions.
In addition, you can find other blog posts about Barcamp Ottawa by searching Technorati with the tag Barcamp Ottawa. You can also find photos from the event on Flickr, tagged BarCampOttawa. There area also 30 blog entries to be found on Google using the search term Barcamp Ottawa.
At the end of the day yesterday, I promised to set up a Google Group for BarCamp Ottawa discussions. It’s called BarCamp Ottawa, and it’s open to any and all to join. The URL is http://groups.google.ca/group/BarCamp-Ottawa. I also offered to host Ottawa’s first DemoCamp at iotum’s office. Stay tuned for the date.
Many thanks to all our sponsors: Gowlings, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Macadamian, Royal Bank, bitheads, iotum, devshop, jaded pixel, KAYVIUM, InGenius, wendykennedy.com, inmedia, and Axionic. Without your generous support, this event wouldn’t have been possible.
Lastly, I want to say thanks to the folks who helped organize the event. Late in November last year, I went to the Torcamp event organized by David Crow. I was completely taken by the event, and blogged about it. Peter Childs contacted me shortly after, and wanted to help organize an event in Ottawa. A couple months later I had coffee with Ross McLeod, who was also enthusiastic. Shortly after that, David Keys and Craig Fitzpatrick expressed interest in helping out too. Although I expressed interest in seeing an event in Ottawa, and have been the most visible promoter of the idea, it was really Peter, Ross, David and Craig who made it happen. Thank you!
Stay tuned! We’re going to have more events like this.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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You should start setting up the next one 6 months from now
Congrats!
Thanks Randy! Sorry you couldn't make it. We missed ya!
Awesome! We had a grand time at Barcamp Bangalore as well… Looking forward to reading up on Ottawa!
Don't start planning the next one until closer to when you want to run it. But you might want to do something lighter weight on a more regular basis. Part of what's great about BarCamp is that you don't need to do a continual planning cycle.
The Toronto crew had a fantastic time in Ottawa. It was very different than BarCampToronto and BarCampTdot will be different than both of these. The people make these events unique and exciting.
Thank to all!
David, I am not sure of the date yet, but there are a bunch of folks here, locally, that want to do a Voice 2.0 conference. The thinking is to have something like the ingram/evans/hyndman Mesh, but for voice. Perhaps we'll put BO2 the weekend before, the way you folks in Toronto are running it.
I know a few of us Bloggers are hoping to hook up more often and get things going thanks to BarCamp for that.
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