Canberra BarCamp
What's a BarCamp?
According to Wikipedia it is, "an international network of user generated conferences - open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants - often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats".
The inaugural Canberra BarCamp was held in the Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT) building at ANU on Saturday 19 April.
"Almost 60 people attended, including several of our students in DCS as well as people from Sydney fresh from their own BarCamp held about 3 weeks ago at UNSW," said Bob Edwards, Chief IT Officer in the Department of Computer Science.
"There were plenty of 20 minute talks that mostly dealt with Web-enabled technologies, with a fairly strong emphasis on social-networking sites, including some recent ones such as Twitter. Word of this BarCamp was mainly spread through such sites," he said.
Bob, who also teaches the Computer Networks and Security course in the Department, has some concerns when it comes to these large monolithic social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. He would prefer to see people using a more distributed (or federated) approach to avoid single sites being able to gather lots of personal information, including relationships between people.
However, most of the BarCamp participants appeared to be more interested in usability and aesthetic issues, than in issues of privacy and security, and managed to squeeze in a good deal of face-to-face social networking too while in Canberra.
