B. Mann Consulting

I just got back today from a long week in Amsterdam, having attended a grand total of 3 conferences: Euro OSCON, DrupalCon, and BarCamp. I met a huge group of people

I would like to thank Chris Pirillo (check out his new gada.be multi-search service) for supporting BarCamp. Chris: wish you could have been there, buddy...we could have worked on our plans for World Domination, and probably gotten pretty close.

It didn't quite turn out to be the "hackfest" that my preconceptions led me to believe. Or perhaps the hacking was more of the "hack your brain" kind. More on BarCamp and these other conferences later: one big thing I learned is that I am not very good at creating artifacts while attending conferences. I'm very much in the moment, having intense sessions with people and trying to integrate it all internally. Inserting a computer into the mix means I miss what's happening. Paper seems to work OK for notes (maybe a tablet would, too?)...now I just have to transcribe all the bits and pieces, especially what essentially turned into an interview with Ralph and Edwinn of the Jabber Software Foundation.

Well, I'm still in Amsterdam nearing the end of the week but it feels like things are just getting started. I'm actually sitting in de Brakke Grond, site of the DrupalCon, as Moshe Weitzman walks us through the simpletest framework for unit testing in Drupal.

The first OSCON in Europe is just ending. I was disappointed that we couldn't integrate more fully, but Chris Messina and I had a really long and fruitful discussion with Gina Blaber and Margi Levin of O'Reilly's conference team. The team is already looking at planning the next OSCON event in Europe, and I'm looking forward to have a really interesting set of satellite events in partnership with O'Reilly in the future.

And yeah, BarCampAmsterdam. It starts...well, it started about an hour ago, I'm just still finishing my last conference! Yes, things are busy, so busy that I didn't get a chance to bang the drum about some cool hacking stuff that I hope to see accomplished during BarCamp (there's a long story about the lack of Internet connectivity in Amsterdam as well). So, on to the hand waving, or Cool Things I'd Love to See Hackers Build at BarCamp:

The Drupal community was in the process of organizing a meet up around O'Reilly's EuroOSCON event when we heard the bad news: since this is O'Reilly's first OSCON event in Europe, they had limited space and wouldn't have an exhibit hall, and hence wouldn't have room for booths from open source projects. Károly Négyesi is giving a talk, but we would have no booth to man, making it hard to meet a lot of the interesting people that are going to be there.

We were somewhat dejected, but then we had An Idea: why not do our own event, and invite other open source projects to come along. Hmmm...what did this sound like? It sounds like BarCamp. So, please join us in helping to organize/attend/promote BarCamp Amsterdam*.

Messina, patron saint of BarCamps everywhere, has posted about this as well -- so we're off to the races!

* I wanted to call it HamsterCamp...after all, we've got a Moose Camp