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. 

This post should have been written last weekend so apologies for the slowness.

There are a bunch of people to thank for the success of BarCamp. It genuinely couldn’t have happened without them.

• YOU! BarCamp is about everyone contributing in some way. The speakers did an awesome job and everyone else asked, discussed, argued and queried brilliantly. Thank you all (110+ of you) for coming and making it the best BarCamp yet.
• Damien Mulley, Dan Barry, Kay Wright. This trio made the venue and much more happen. Kay went far far beyond the call of duty all day. Every BarCamp needs a Kay.
• Damien. Again. He makes things happen. Nuff said. 
• All of the sponsors. In these tough times, it is impressive to see local companies supporting events like BarCamp. Behind companies/organisations are people. Those people include Pat Phelan, Michele Neylon, Donncha O’Caoimh, Matt Mullenweg, Dan Barry, Kay Wright, John Henry Donovan and Jack Donaghy
• Pat Phelan. Again. With good reason. Pat not only sponsored lunch, he also gave over his offices for two talks, gave a talk, provided equipment and most of all, provided enormous moral support all day.
• John Henry Donovan. Again. Still the best BarCamp logo ever. And for doing the sign-up system too
• Every person who got the word out and there are lots of you. At least 50% of the faces at BarCamp were new and that was down to you
• Phoebe Bright and Bartosz Ptaszynski for doing all the heavy lifting on the webapp. There are still more lessons to be learned there and hopefully one of them will do a follow-up post here.
• Donogh and Odette did a super job interviewing people. We’ll see the videos in the coming days.

Bart has made the code-drop from Saturday available. He’ll do another drop later this week with a better landing page etc.

 
It requires:

• Python 2.5
• Django 1.0
• sqlite3
• pysqlite3

Right now you can either access the http://localhost:8000/events/ or the http://localhost:8000/admin/ pages to play around.
login: admin
pass: barcamp

Code archive file: green.zip

You’ll find photos of the day in two main locations:

Pix.ie
Flickr

Some of the snappers include:

Phil O’Kane
Alexia Golez
Donncha O’Caoimh
Jessica Mannering
Me

In general if you are uploading pics, please tag them with “barcampcork” so we can find them on the various sites.

Leave a comment below with a direct link to your pics.

Several members of an obscure Californian cult with a svengali known only as Black Turtleneck left some of their magic charms behind at BarCamp yesterday. If they are yours, just email me directly on conor AT loudervoice DOT com.

This is just brilliant. Well done Ian. Belly laugh on a Sunday morning post-BarCamp

Faces of Barcamp from Ian O'Donnell on Vimeo.

Clodagh Kelly is going surfing on Sunday morning. Chat to her at BarCamp if you are interested in taking part. It looks like it’ll be at Garrettstown.

There is no parking in the Webworks building. However the City Hall Cark Park is facing the front door right across Eglinton Street. It’s a bit pricey but no worse than any of the others from what I can see. Cheapest option is to park in the Railway Station carpark for €6 per day. It’s maybe a 10-15 min walk.

Push-pin B below is at entrance to both Webworks and the City Hall Car Park. Push-pin A is where the big railway carpark is located.

Cork based TV and Video production company StormVids will be scooting and shooting throughout the day.
Look out for their vids a few days later, all set to embed in your blogs and put on Facebook. I had a great chat with them last week and it’ll be fantastic to see some high-quality footage of BarCamp.

At the more grainy end of things, I’m sure the usual suspects (like me) will also be QIkking, Ustreaming and Flixwagoning on their phones. If you record anything or take any pics, let us know about them so we can link over afterwards.

After a bit of tooing and froing, we’ve decided to have no official place for food after BarCamp, it’s just too awkward to arrange for that many people. There are tons of good places to eat in the city centre and I’m sure groups of you can organise yourselves.

However, the final destination of the evening will be The Bierhaus on Pope’s Quay. The route is as follows: