I went to BarcampBrighton2 last weekend, held at the University of Sussex student union (USSU). I normally don’t get excited about Barcamps on universities but I have to admit that this Barcamp was brilliant. The food was good, the rooms were great, the crowd was inspiring and the talks were exciting. I was actually amazed about the amount of new people (about 50%) which made the event yet again refreshing.

I attended a few talks including giving one myself on “Voluntary Economies” (more in a moment). During the day I visited quite a few talks, including:

• Barcamp Ephemera (by Ryan Alexander) - A quick and funny introduction to Barcamp
  
• Arduino Introduction - I got to play with an Arduino board to get a led light to pulse on and off with increasing/decreasing speeds. And all of that within 45 minutes. I need to buy an Arduino board and do something cool now.
  
• Open Rights Group (by Glyn Wintle) - A nice talk by Glyn on how the ORG prevents the UK government from making even more mistakes than they already do. His talks are always good for some interesting anecdotes.
  
• How to : Uncricket (by Melinda, Emma, and Patricia) - What i thought would be a lame talk by the girls on how to play something without rules that they had come up with in Berlin last year, turned out to be a lot of fun. It did lead to some bruises and swollen tongs though.
  
• The Origins of Design Patterns - What town planning, poetry and design patterns have in common
• Summer 2008 movie trailers (by Melinda Seckington) - Mel did a nice talk by simply showing all the coolest trailers of the summer movies on the big screen, with nice surround sound.
• Wine and Cheese (no really, eating and drinking) by Emma Persky - I think the title says it all. Good wine though and I could use some cheese by then.
  
• High-performance scalable web apps with memcached (by Marco) - Interesting talk on what memcached is exactly and how it can make your site so much faster.
• Ask the BBC ANYTHING! (by Ian Forrester, Sheila Thomson, Dan Morris) - Interesting discussion on the BBC, the fun they and we are having with the iPlayer, and the future of the BBC in general
• Delicious Pecha Kucha (by Tom Morris) - Pecha Kucha style session where people got to explain a random 5 of their last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks as they showed up on screen. I didn’t present as I was afraid it would be way to boring.

As i said I also did a talk myself on “Voluntary Economies” and the talk went pretty well. For most part I stole the slides from Alper and Reinier who gave a similar talk before during BarcampLondon3 and BarcampAmsterdam3, and I probably should have prepared a bit better. Still, people seemed to love it and we filled the 45 minutes with ease. Here are the slides:

Finally I made a few photos. I had a play with Mark Ng’s Sigma 30mm F1.4 HSM which resulted in some very nice photos during the uncricket session. I really need to get this lens, so can someone donate me £200 ?