Posts about wherecampeu

Gary's Law Of Conference Failure

Mark Iliffe and Giuseppe Sollazzo I was certainly there in spirit. You see, at WhereCamp EU in Berlin last year I was doing what I usually do at conferences; watching a talk, laptop on lap, live Tweeting furiously. This particular talk contained a live demo and a backing track of Arthur Conley's Sweet Soul Music. What could possibly go wrong?

I wasn't at WhereCamp EU in Amsterdam recently. At least, I wasn't there in person, but according to Mark Iliffe and Giuseppe Sollazzo I was certainly there in spirit. You see, at WhereCamp EU in Berlin last year I was doing what I usually do at conferences; watching a talk, laptop on lap, live Tweeting furiously. This particular talk contained a live demo and a backing track of Arthur Conley's Sweet Soul Music. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, a live demo can go wrong and did go wrong, which prompted me to say

Never work with children, animals, sweet soul music or live code demos. You have been warned

Although I'm sure someone might have said something similar before. That was last year's WhereCamp EU. This year's WhereCamp EU, thanks to Messrs Iliffe and Sollazzo, seemed to have elevated that random Tweet to a law. A law which happened again at WhereCamp EU in Berlin. More than once. And then again at Mark's PhD presentation.

So it's official. Gary's law of conference failures is now codified as never work with children, animals, sweet soul music or live demos. And before you ask, I've learnt the hard way, never, ever, to do a live demo, because what can go wrong, will go wrong. Photo Credits: Uncle Zirky on FailBlog.

"Ich Bin Geograph" - WhereCamp EU Is Coming To Berlin

Chris Osborne and myself transplanted the post-Where 2.0 WhereCamp from Silicon Valley and brought it to London. Judging by the feedback and comments we got during and after the event, it was a geotastic success and showed that Europe had an appetite for a 2 day, free, unconference on all matters geo. After a brief northbound sojourn as WhereCamp UK in November 2010, we're happy to announce that WhereCamp EU is back for 2011 and with a distinctly European flavour.

Ovi Maps. Made here. In Berlin

Whilst the venue is yet to be confirmed, WhereCamp EU will be taking place on the 27th and 28th of May in Berlin.

We'll keep you posted with more details on the WhereCamp EU blog , on Lanyrd and on our Twitter feed.

"Ich Bin Geograph" (as Google translate tells me).

In March 2010, Chris Osborne and myself transplanted the post-Where 2.0 WhereCamp from Silicon Valley and brought it to London. Judging by the feedback and comments we got during and after the event, it was a geotastic success and showed that Europe had an appetite for a 2 day, free, unconference on all matters geo. After a brief northbound sojourn as WhereCamp UK in November 2010, we're happy to announce that WhereCamp EU is back for 2011 and with a distinctly European flavour.

Ovi Maps. Made here. In Berlin

Whilst the venue is yet to be confirmed, WhereCamp EU will be taking place on the 27th and 28th of May in Berlin.

We'll keep you posted with more details on the WhereCamp EU blog , on Lanyrd and on our Twitter feed.

"Ich Bin Geograph" (as Google translate tells me).

Geomob In A Coma

Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:

After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I'm afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.

That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started - free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.

Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.

Its been a blast

To paraphrase both Douglas Copland and The Smiths, Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:

After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I'm afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.

That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started - free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.

Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.

Its been a blast

As both Chris and I found out, organising the WhereCamp EU event that took place in London earlier this year was an exhausting, if ultimately rewarding, task. Imagine doing that every other month?

Chris Osborne at Geomob

I hope this isn't the last we hear of Geomob; it's been a major contributor to the Geo community in London and has, indeed, been a blast. It also gave me my very first Geo themed public speaking engagement and for that I'll always be both profoundly grateful and profoundly embarrased at my first stumbling efforts.

If you're thinking of taking up the role of Geomob organiser, I encourage you to do so; it's a battering, weary, exhausting and sometimes thankless task in the run up to a meetup. Then you see the audience waiting expectantly , watch the speakers, listen to the Q&A session and before you know it the evening's over in a rush; you won't regret it. Photo Credits: Roman Kirillov on Flickr.

WhereCamp EU - The Geo Unconference Experience for 180 People

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will  show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London's Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

51° 31' 36.8364" N, 0° 7' 44.0466" W

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will  show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London's Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

WhereCamp is traditionally held in California's Silicon Valley after the Where 2.0 conference and is based on the BarCamp unconference ethic to be a counterpoint to the expensive and corporate outlook of Where 2.0. Last year, both myself and Chris Osborne were at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp and both came up with the idea of "wouldn't it be great to bring WhereCamp to Europe?"

Tyler Bell, myself and Aaron Cope

Just under a year of planning, organising and wheedling cash out of sponsors, Chris and myself, with the support of the rest of the organising team, welcomed 180 people to Europe's first WhereCamp.

I was both proud and privileged to kick start things off with an introduction to how WhereCamp EU came to be, explaining to the slightly bemused but thoroughly enthusiastic audience just what an unconference is and how it all worked.

I'd decided that a good way to introduce the event would be to define where, unconference and WhereCamp EU: * where - the question asked by people when they try and work out how much it will cost to get to Where 2.0 and WhereCamp in Silicon Valley. * unconference - a conference without all the things you hate about conferences, such as massive corporate involvement, sales pitches and formality * WhereCamp EU - a two day, free unconference about all things geo, place and location

I then handed over to Chris who totally upstaged me with a gorgeous visualisation of how OpenStreetMap mapped Central London, courtesy of his day job with ITO.

The key to WhereCamp EU, just like any other unconference is "the wall", which is where the days of the conference are marked off in half an hour slots. An unconference is a user or participant driven conference; if you want to see what's going on, you check out the wall, if you want to participate, you grab a PostIt note, write your name and the talk title down, find a free slot on the wall and make sure you turn up on time. Participation is usually a brief talk followed by a, sometimes passionate, Q&A session, but it can also be an open forum discussion, a demonstration or some good old fashioned hacking.

The Wall

Unconferences are common in the US, where the concept originated, but less so in Europe, so the organising team made sure that we seeded the wall with initial talks to get things started and to show people how it worked. Our initial fears that the wall would remain empty were quickly quashed as a sea of yellow PostIts took over the wall, fuelled by a melee of talk proposers, anxious to get their talk into a free slot, and participants who wanted to see what the next session was all about.

My initial talk in the main room was on Location, LB(M)S, Hype, Stealth and Stuff and provided a series initial thinking points around the LBMS hype, around gathering stealth data and on how my Theory of Stuff validates the success and failure of location based ventures.

Yet again I was upstaged by the (err) creative and passionate talk titles which appeared on the wall.

The Problems With Metadata

After a totally exhausting day we retired to a local bar for geo-beers, courtesy of one of our sponsors, and to review the day. I wasn't able to make the second day of the unconference due to family commitments but my sources tell me it was an equal success.

High points for me were standing in front of a room full of people at the kick off session, a lot of whom had travelled a significant distance to be there; watching the ladies toilets being used furtively by the men; seeing the youngest participant in a conference I've even seen (3 months) and watching Hal Bertram from ITO produce jaw droppingly gorgeous data visualisations.

Out of all the things I've done in the geo industry, being involved with putting WhereCamp EU together has got to be a personal and professional high. It would be good to do it all over again next year wouldn't it ... ?