Thanks to the Sponsors of Barcamp Cork 2009, Microsoft, Assembly Point, Reilly & Co and Nitrosell, we have some freebies what we’d like to give away.

We’d like to run a fun competition which a few people can win, we’ll be giving away some great free techie stuff. We’d like if the competition promoted the sponsors too since they helped make Barcamp happen.

Any fun ideas for a competition?

Thank you to all of those who gave talks at Barcamp Cork 2009. Here are some of the presentations from the day.

Roland Steinmetz from meeting.ie streamed a couple of the talks from the day too, “VideoConferencing & Webcasting success” and “Green Washing and Green Future”

For those who can’t make BarCamp Cork in person, you can tune in to some of the talks online thanks to meeting.ie

Just click the image to join in.

Click to join in online

A few people attending BarCamp this week will be dusting off some no-so-modern pieces of hardware from their attics and bringing them along to show them off.

Check out Randy’s collection of toys on his blog, since he can’t carry them all on the day, let him know if you’d like to see any of them specifically.

Have you any computer hardware in the attic or garage that you could bring along?

Over 50 people are attending  BarCampCork in November so far, are you going? If you can, please register your interest so we have an idea of numbers and know how much coffee to pour on the day.

19 people have registered to give talks on the day too so far, Thank you all for giving these talks. If you know anyone that would give an interesting techie talk, can you give them a little nudge to talk?

If you have any topics you’d like to see covered on the day, please let us know.

Related articles by Zemanta

• My Barcamp Presentation: “What You Need To Know About Eye Tracking” (90percentofeverything.com)
• This one time at BarCamp… (atomicpoet.wordpress.com)
• Jure Cuhalev: On BarCamps, unconferences and why we shouldn’t do BarCampLjubljana3 (jurecuhalev.com)

Lady Barcampers – the Girl Geek Dinner is happening the night before Barcamp Cork III.

Table booked for 8 and there’s a bar next door..

Head over to the official Girl Geek Dinner website and leave a comment if you can attend.

This years Barcamp Cork is taking place in the Cork International Airport hotel.

We have 3 large rooms booked for the day for concurrent talks with the option of splitting one of the rooms into two medium sized rooms.

There is a tiny little room too, off one of main rooms which might be good for smaller talks or demos.
When the talks have wrapped up for the afternoon we can all wander across the hall to the bar for a couple of drinks and watch the match.

30 bed rooms have been put aside for those wishing to book a room to stay over on the night with rates of €75 – €85 per room. Don’t forget to mention ‘Barcamp’ if you are contacting the Hotel.

Cork International Airport Hotel, Cork Airport, Cork, Ireland
Tel: +353 21 454 9800 or email reception@corkairporthotel.com

Planning Barcamp Cork the 3rd is underway!

The venue is Cork International Airport Hotel.

The Date is Saturday November the 14th 2009. (CorkMeet2009 is running the preceeding few days, 11th to 13th)

Watch this space for updates and the @BarCampCork Twitter account too.

Blacknight have covered the cost of hosting this site for another year, Thank you Blacknight.

Meet the organisers of this years Barcamp:

From left to right, Ciara Feely, Gordon Murray and Ciara Crossan. Talk to either one of us if you’d like to speak at Barcamp or help Sponsor.

If you attended BarCamp Cork and thought you’d like to run an unconference yourself, below is just a quick idea of what is involved.

• Try to have 2 and preferably 3 organisers. It’s possible as a solo run but can add to your stress level.
• The venue is the number 1 priority. If you can get it for free then you’ve done 75% of the work already. EI, Howard Holdings, Integris and Damien came up trumps with Webworks for BarCamp Cork.
• A blog. Get it up there day 1 and start telling people what you are doing.
• Sponsors. You only need a small few to cover the basics. How much do you think BarCamp cost to arrange? What would you say if I told you that BarCamp Cork 2 with 110+ plus people at a day long free conference cost less than €800 in total? 
• Why so little?
  • You don’t need t-shirts
  • You don’t need banners
  • You don’t need printed badges
  • All poster printing should be done on your 8 year old inkjet at home
  • Beg, borrow or steal a Musgraves card and pay pennies for
  •  
    • plates
    • cups
    • plastic cutlery
    • fizzy/flat water
    • markers/whitetack/name-stickers/post-its
    • etc
• Pizza and donuts will feed most people (unless it’s a FoodCamp ). Bulk ordering from a local place should get you up to 20% discount
• Mics are expensive but often necessary (€120 per setup)
• Borrow projectors. We had offers of 5 but you may have to order screens for them.
• Most venues won’t have enough chairs (Webworks did luckily). They cost approx €1.80 each
• If the event is even remotely geeky, you will need wifi.

Every BarCamp is different and I hope we can learn each time from what went well and what didn’t. I’m going to kick off with a few of my thoughts about last weekend but I’m much more interested in hearing all of your thoughts.

So in no particular order:

• The venue – still amazing and just ideal for an event like this
• Rooms – two is not enough. Even the addition of the small third room was insufficient. Three decent sized spaces with a few break-out areas appears to be ideal
• The 20 minute experiment was interesting. It was perfect in some cases but it looks like 30 minutes is the sweet spot for most talks.
• I have no opinion on the 40 minutes for tutorials as I missed them all. Thoughts?
• BarCamps need self-appointed timekeepers. The overruns were not disasterous but still annoying for some. People were far too polite about stopping the overruns.
• The no-schedule approach of BarCamp worked well. It’s something that seems to scare a lot of people but I’m 100% in favour of it. An empty grid where anyone could grab any slot. We just needed to make the system more clear in advance. I still had people asking if there “was a slot available” right up to the morning of the event. Earlybirds always do well at BarCamp!
• The session streams were setup badly (by me). Instead of long talks outside and short talks inside, it should have been non-tech talks outside and tech talks inside. We had several instances where both rooms had tech talks on at the same time which was less than ideal for many attendees
• The mix of talks was fantastic. Still quite tech-heavy but lots of other too. The biz ones seemed to be particularly popular. Time for a BizCamp?
• The mix of people was a real pleasure to see. From secondary school students to grandparents, I think we had it all.
• A constant supply of tea/coffee/water is necessary. Why can’t pay-for conferences get this right? We were very lucky that Webworks could facilitate this. Thanks again to Kay.
• How did people feel about the mics? The reason we got them was that at BarCamp Cork 1, we couldn’t hear speakers in the open area properly due to the amount of chatter. Were all the sessions ok from an audio perspective?
• To make BarCamp more accessible for more people, a talk like Emma Persky’s “A Geek’s Guide to BarCamping” should be the opening one at every BarCamp. It just tells newbies what it is all about and sets the tone for the day. 
• Pre and Post events make it an even more social occasion
• The webapp was a very worthwhile experiment and there’ll be a separate follow-up post about how that went
• There were no complaints about wifi. A conference first?
• The lack of a large amount of video and pics from the day is a reflection of how busy everyone was doing face2face social networking.