So today quite a few people got pissed of at the BarcampLondon4 organizers for royally screwing hem over. What happened? A few weeks ago during the registration for first batch of tickets the ticket registration “accidentally” opened an hour before it was supposed to, greatly disappointing me and a few others who set their timers for the supposed time. 

The Premise

Now what happened was that EventWax (the system used for signup) is a stupid-ass system that’s unable to “open” at a certain time. It can only open on a certain date. So by going to the right URL a few people managed to get their tickets before the official opening and spread the word to a few others. 

To solve the issue, the organizers released the 2nd batch of tickets at the official time, giving all the others including me the chance to fairly signup. So, when the 4th and final batch was released yesterday at 11am, I had set my timer to register a ticket for a good friend of me who I finally convinced to also come to his first Barcamp. I typed the URL I remembered in my browser and Safari autocompleted it for me as it remembered it from the history.

Safari didn’t send me to the official site though, but to the not-so-secret URL that allowed anyone to sign up before 11am. As the first batch of tickets quickly sold out to people who figured this out I quickly did the same and signed my friend up on his email address. 

Now comes the bad thing: I later found out that the Barcamp organizers had send an email to my friend’s email address stating:

Heya there,

I see that you’ve already booked a ticket to londonBarCamp4.

While (as you have seen) eventWax is allowing you to book we are only honouring registrations from 11am onwards when we post a link from the barCamp homepage to the registration page - it’s only fair.

I’m afraid I am going to have to cancel you ticket but please try to register again at 11am.

Follow the link from
http://barcampgcap.eventwax.com/barcamplondon4

Obviously I never got that email as it was send to my friend’s email address and I send a disgruntled email to the organizers afterwords. They send me an email back that they wanted to do things fair this time and that it wasn’t really their fault but the fact that EventWax had quite a whole in their signup.

Conclusion

The conclusions that I could take from this are numerous. First off EventWax is a shitty system that I will NEVER use as it is flawed. Secondly I learned that next time I sign up for someone else I should do it on a *@cristianobetta.com email address so that I get the confirmation and cancellation emails.

The GCap crew that is organizing the Barcamp though could have done their stuff better too. First of there was the problem which lead to me having to sign up for a friend: all the signups were at 11am. Not just he but quite a few others too had this issue. Take a look at the upcoming page and twitter (yes we are alowed to complain on twitter) for more details.

Secondly the organizers should have realized after the first fiasco that EventWax sucked and moved signup times to 12am as that would have solved all their issues and automated the process for them.

Let’s hope the rest of the organisation of the Barcamp will be much better and we’ll have a magnificent two days in central London. I haven’t given up yet.

A special “Over The Air” production of Torchwood, by the OTA-sweding crew.

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 ?

So last weekend I went to SemanticCamp, a semantic BarCamp organized by Tom Morris here in London at Imperial College. The event was kind of “OK”. I said OK because honestly the event was not the best thing for me. I personally went because I was wondering what all this “semantic” stuff was all about. I guess more people had the same idea, and as a result, at most of the times, only 1 talk was going on. Combine this with a lot of no-shows and you get bored soon. I didn’t feel like listening to too many talks on RDF so I hung around with some people in the other rooms instead.

There were some great things about SemanticCamp though, most important of which was the organization, the location, and the drinks afterwords. One of the other great things about SemanticCamp was the Semantopoly game, custom made by Jon Linklater-Johnson. The game is a kind of Monopoly where you can play a web “celebrity” and buy technologies and social networks to make mashups and get venture capital. One of the board characters was Jeremy Keith so image the joy we had when Jeremy decided to play himself in the game.

Here are the photos:

A while back I posted a video of my BarcampLondon3 presentation created by Tom Morris. Lucky for me Improbulus took a bit of a better video (which also shows the screen we are all looking at). If anybody is interested in seeing this again, enjoy!