Basing monetization on the fact we...
The Future of FOWA
Last week was a quite busy week in London. Many events were planned around the hype that is FOWA (Future of Web Apps conference). I met quite alot of people at BarCampLondon2 that was 2 days before FOWA and stayed in contact with some of the people that went to FOWA afterwords. What I managed to understand about the FOWA experience is that I am happy that I didn’t pay 200 pounds to go there.
The problems where numerous. First of all the organisation was rubish for a payed event. According to Jeremy Keith there was no free WiFi and no free beverages. The atmosphere was therefore kindof below standard which led to many of the FOWA people to be found at other events in the evenings. This is how I met Andre Ribeirinho from Portugal who escaped to the Girl Geel Dinner at Wednesday.
I stayed tuned to all the interesting talks at FOWA with the help of Colin Schlueter and the use of Twitter. I was amazed that most of the interesting speeches where also given at BarCampLondon2 (for example Simon Willison’s OpenID speech), and all the others were regarded as salesmen-talk. I wonder what Dan thought of the event as he was actually not paying but working.
Your OpenID login appears to be broken - I got an error when my provider attempted to redirect me back to your site.
Just for the record, I actually gave different talks at the two events. The BarCamp talk was mostly unprepared and consisted mainly of live demos. The FOWA talk was longer, slicker and spent a lot more time discussing the interesting things that can be built with OpenID.
As to the two events, I think they were different events aimed at relatively different audiences. FOWA had the budget to fly in some big name speakers from the States, and was probably a better fit for people who weren’t so keen on the sleeping over / everyone-must-talk ethos of BarCamp. I enjoyed both events, although it’s certainly true that the raw energy at BarCamp was so intense you could almost taste it (probably due to a lot of people staying there for 36 hours straight with almost no sleep).
Thank you, I fixed the OpenID issue. Somehow integrating OpenID into WordPress into RapidWeaver was a bit too much.
I want to make clear that I don’t say that FOWA was NOT interesting. I just want to note all the people who have been complaining about the fact that, though payed for, FOWA did not offer that much extra to some people. The lack of organization and the re-use of certain talks by some people (not just yours, and I don’t want to make any comment on your talks on OpenID) really annoyed some people. I wonder if FOWA organizers can give the next FOWA a small twist to appeal to the people that go to all those other events?
I must say I really enjoyed FOWA. Looks like you’ve only heard about the bad bits. Yes the wifi completely failed, there were sponsors speaking and the food wasnt amazing.
However there were lots of very interesting people and many great talks. As far as I’m aware none of the talks were the same as barcamp but touched on the same topics in palces. Simons presentation was brilliant and different from his barcamp one. I know because I was getting worried before his slot because I was still waiting for him to finish it and hand it over! I guess he was having a rest in bed after staying up till 3am preparing. Other outstanding talks included “Everything you need to know about funding” and the Moo one. There was also the Soocial demo, a sponsor who was actually entertaining! There were probably other highlights that I missed because I was running around.
HE, I asked dan to give his opinion and he did. It is nice to see this discussion. I think I missed out some interesting and positive talks in the online “twitter” (both on the actual twitter and in the blogosphere). Always good to have a nice discussion.
Theres some videos available thanks to Ian at http://blip.tv/posts/?topic_name=fowalondon2007. There will also be slides&audio soon on the FOWA website so that you can see what you missed :p
I probably still would have paid to go to FOWA. There were insightful presentations and lots of chatting in the breaks in between. It probably would have been a very different experience if I was just a normal visitor, not sure if I would have been able to meet so many of the speakers.
Ahh, so in the end you think that not being a normal attendee was a good thing? You were hoping to have some time of here and there to watch some presentations, did you?
Hey Cristiano,
It seems pretty unfair to judge an event you didn’t even go to!
Kind regards,
Ryan
I agree, but I was not really directly judging. I mean, there are some people online less happy than you guys.