Barcamp Southampton 2016

By admin on 06/12/2016

Another successful Barcamp Southampton.

On November 12th, myself and the good folks at EtchUK hosted Barcamp Southampton at Central Hall in Southampton. A Barcamp is a "user generated conference", this means the attendees give the talks. We provide a venue, four rooms and divide the day into sessions and people turn up, scribble an outline of their talk on a post-it and pick their slot.

I'm glad to say the event was a resounding success and I personally had a very enjoyable day. Despite the numerous events I'm involved in, there's still trepidation before we open the doors with usual worries about turn out, quality of talks, will people enjoy themselves and many other demonic thoughts about things I have no control over. Fortunately, these were a non-issue. We had a great variety of talks from some amazingly talented people and it's a real pleasure to see the Southampton digital community coming together and sharing their enthusiasm.

Here's some notes from others about the event:

As organisers, one thing we're aware of is that we must do a better job of getting the word out about these events. We tend to rely on our collective, existing reach on Twitter, a fairly unplanned stream of as-we-think-of-it Tweets and word of mouth. Whilst this does the job I would definitely like to see us improve our range and diversity of attendee which is something I'll be focusing on for next year.

If this sounds like your bag then we'll be back next year so follow @barcampsouth. You might also like our local hackday @HackSoton which will be happening in the new year (seriously, it's amazing, come along!) and if you're interested in helping spread the word then please give me a shout.

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