Sonntag, 22. Juni 2008

barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 1/3

the scope of the june 2008 barcamp salzburg was wide. from media culture and internet history, right through modern programming approaches. game programming and the laws of self organization where there as well as a slot from me about start.up financing. around 20 people - i will call them barcampers - gathered at the arge kultur „studio“.

read in part 1 about or why presentations including actual programming code should not make one afraid. the upcoming part 2 explains what self organization has to do with barcamps and 3 part finishes off with thougts about the start.up presentation and concluding remarks about the barcamp salzbug 2008.

starting around two o‘ clock in the afternoon and personally having to leave for vienna already at six p.m. it was an intense experience. the „studio“, a regular site for concerts and theater plays is located in the cellar and is all painted in black . that definitely pushed everyone in the topics. the „bunker“ feeling made it easy to not get distracted and a missing wlan connection for the first half of the sessions kept everyone focused on the topics presented.

the wide array of topics made this barcamp interesting and (positively) difficult for non programmers like me. this forces one to think outside of the normal paths which is a worthwhile and fruitful exercise already by itself.

presentation lines like „“ do not make my attention wandering away, neither do details from michael raidel about the open id authentication protocol (presentation found here). on the contrary. besides the sheer beauty of well written code this would have made me missing organizational developments around programming like „scrum“.
scrum forgets about the old heavily specification focused programming towards a result driven approach. thomas r. koll, recently back from working as a developer in london, where they "lived" scrum obviously enjoyed the experience. not only were they more productive as a team but also had more fun on the way. see his presentation here.

the talk of brigtitte jellinek about internet history in salzburg even gained the interest of the ORF. brigitte digged back casual style into the roots widely undocumented past of austrian internet history. it was only around 1991 when the first IP connection was established in salzburg. in these days the then european backbone was powered by a 256kb connections.

start.ups where somewhat missing at this barcamp. martin herfurt was the exception. he planned to present the challenges of his start.up toothr after i headed back to vienna.

read why the barcamp is the consequence of self organization in the upcoming 2nd part of the round up.