Getting To Know You - BarCamp Bingo Generator


Cards with a long list of silly questions like "Can speak fluent dolphon".

At last month's BarCamp London 13 I ran a little experiment that I'd been meaning to do for a while. "Getting To Know You" bingo is a well-established team-building exercise. Usually, you gather a bunch of interesting personal facts from a team, stick them on a bingo card, then have people wandering around trying to find out who once dated a Spice Girl and which mid-level executive has a cat called Mr Tiddles. At this unconference there wasn't a good way to poll attendees in advance. And,…

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Collaborative discussions at an unconference


OGGCAMP BOOKCAMP
recommends the following:
 Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
. Podkin One-Ear - Kieran Larwood. 
Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien. 
The People - Sleina Todd
. Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson. 
Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas. 
We are Legion (We are Bob) - Dennis Taylor. 
The Entire Discworld - Terry Pratchett
. The Empire of Normality - Robert Chapman. 
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
. The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin. 
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
. Fall or Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson
. Git Commit Murder - Michael Warren Lucas. 
Snowcrash - Neal Stephenson
. Tomorrow + Tommorow + Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
. There is no Anti-memetics Division
. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
. The Brentford Trilogy - Robert Rankin
. Fight Club - Chuck Palahnuik
. Digital Korea - Tom Ahunen.

Unconferences are brilliant. Rather than a set agenda, people come up with their own sessions. A dozen Post-It® Notes are slapped on a wall, everyone writes down what they want to talk about, they're slotted into a grid, and - BAM! - you've got yourself an unconference. At the recent OggCamp there were a number of brilliant spontaneous talks. But nearly all of them involved one person standing at the front, delivering a message to an audience. That's fine. But there are other forms of …

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How to cope with a broken HDMI port during a presentation


Laptop rotated 90 degrees so the screen is on the visualiser and the keyboard is pointing in the air. I'm giving the thumbs up.

Last week, I was part of the BarCamp London Hackathon. It had all the usual ups and downs of a Hackathon - laptops crashing, APIs failing, and HDMI ports breaking. We had a massive projector for participants to show off their work. The HDMI connection was… shit. Sorry, there's no better way to put it. It worked for about 30 seconds and then displayed a green screen. We replaced the HDMI cable. We swapped between a dozen dongles. We tried Linux, Mac, and Windows. In a last ditch attempt at g…

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GovCamp Rules - In Memoriam


UK GovCamp logo.

The last year has seen an overabundance of death. Some of us got chatting about the various people from the GovCamp community who have died recently, and how we could memorialise them. It used to be the case that we started every 'Camp with a reading of the rules. A gentle intro to let everyone be on the same page. The "rules" started out as: Whoever comes are the right people. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it is over, it is…

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What Happens at #GovCamp Stays at GovCamp?


A dictaphone.

How do you archive a conference? A decade ago, I blogged about how to archive a BarCamp - I don't think anyone took up my suggestions. I tried to put it into practice, but in this post about 2009's BarCampBrighton4, half the links have rotted away, cool media-hosting startups have gone bust and eaten the video. Websites die, tweets get deleted, media codecs become obsolete. BarCamps, GovCamps, and other unconferences are part of our digital heritage. We should be proud of what we create and…

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How to run a tech swap shop at a conference


A bearded geek holding a mysterious cube. A sign in the background says "Swap Shop".

At the recent BarCampLondon Ⅺ I decided to run a little experiment. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentAnyone coming to @barcamplondon fancy doing a Tech Swap Table with me?Bring bits of (working) kit and old gadgets that you don't want in the hope they find a loving home.Let me know if you want to take part 😁#bclxi❤️ 7💬 3🔁 016:20 - Sat 04 May 2019 The idea is similar to Swishing - a popular way to recycle old clothes. In a Swishing party, you turn up with a jacket, swap it for a ticket, then s…

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The Policy Hack


Clip from the film "The Matrix" - a young bald boy is saying "There is no spoon."

I've found a delightfully exploitable social hack which I presented at UK GovCamp. It applies to any uncooperative bureaucracy. Here's how it works. You ask someone to do something and they reply with "I'm sorry sir, that's against our policy." You should say "I'm sorry to hear that. Please can you send me a copy of the policy?" Turns out, most times, there is no policy! Shocking, I know. So much of modern life rests on the whim of whichever call-centre worker you happen to get. If they …

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Over The Air 2012


Another brilliant event from Over The Air. The perfect mix of lectures, hacking, and relaxing in a country manor / museum. And, to top it off, my hack won a brace of prizes! The Wifi just about held up. Although I think it's fundamentally impossible to provide decent connectivity to 200+ people. Especially when they're geeks. Dan Benton@dogsbodyorgIt's people like @edent that break conference Wi-Fi ;-) #ota12 pic.x.com/dl2fibfi❤️ 0💬 0♻️ 015:43 - Fri 01 June 2012 Which, in turn, lead to …

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HOWTO: Preserving BarCamps


Oh! Woe is me! I can't make BarCampLondon 8. This will be the first BarCamp I've not been able to get to in ages. Following hashtags is fun, if a little disjointed. What I really need is some way I could attend virtually..... .social-embed {all: unset;display: block;}.social-embed * {all: unset;display: revert;}.social-embed::after {all: unset;}.social-embed::before {all: unset;}blockquote:not(*) {all: unset;}.social-embed a {cursor: pointer;}blockquote.social-embed {box-sizing:…

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Hack Your Kindle


I gave a quick talk at BarCamp Brigton about how to hack the Amazon Kindle 3G.  These hacks come in two flavours - easy and very easy. Very Easy - Pictures Wouldn't it be great to view pictures on your Kindle?  Well?  OK - pictures, perhaps not so much - but comics?  Yes please! For best results, image files should be the same resolution as the Kindle. 600px * 800px - and grey-scale. Let's use the XKCD comics - mostly because they're already the right size and mostly in black and white. And …

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BarCamp Africa UK


I met Ethel Delali Cofie at BarCampBrighton. She was telling me that she wanted to run a BarCamp called #bcAfricaUK09. I pointed her towards the BarCampLondon 09 organisers and told her that I'd see if she could use the Vodafone Group HQ. I woke up on Saturday morning after a long and difficult week at work. The last thing I felt like doing was making the trek into the office. I just couldn't face spending half of my precious weekend trapped within the same walls I look at every day. I…

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BarCampBrighton4 and High Def Video


Photo by tristan_roddis on Flickr of a wall covered in post-it notes with speaking suggestions.

Another weekend, another BarCamp.  This time the Fourth Annual BarCampBrighton. The BarCamp was excellent.  A great bunch of people.  The venue was beautiful, but the lack of walls (and floorboards!) meant that sound bleed was a problem. The problem I have with BarCamps is there are invariably two or three talks which I really want to see which have clashing timeslots. So, I decided to record the sessions I went to so that others could see them later. I really hope that future BarCamps ma…

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