Well, had a nice barcamp again. The site, mVillage in Schaerbeek, was slightly less glamorous than the Halles des Tanneurs of Barcamp#3, but still good. Organization (by Peter) was impeccable.

It started at a crazy hour for a saturday: 9 o’clock ! On a saturday ! No mercy, i tell you.

Like last time, the hardest thing was to choose your presentation. I really hope it will be possible to retrieve the ones i have not seen: in fact, if i was to suggest one thing to Peter, it would be to encourage everyone to put their presentation on Slideshare.

The ones i saw:

• A presentation of bootcamp by Yves Hanoulle of Paircoaching. A series of protocols to make your meetings productive.
• FOSS for non-profit organizations by Wim Mostrey. His speech was interesting in itself, and i would say his situation was recognizable: he wanted to do something meaningful other than just web development. He was contacted by CivicActions to participate in the development of the Amnesty.org site.
• Commentag is a (startup ?) project by Xavier Dammans, and is about tagging blog comments. This would allow you to organize and analyze discussions at a glance.
• Shoes: a fun presentation by Koen Van Der Auwera, about a (looked like) equally fun toolkit for making Ruby GUI
• Thought-provoking presentation by the MakeOrFund.com team. Their idea is to allow you, me, everyone to select, and then micro-fund entrepreneurs. While there are still some gaps in the plan (what’s in it for the investor ? will the general public really select the best ideas ?) it sounded like a real innovation.
• Tim Romberg is participating to a research project to take the wiki a step further. This would involve integration with other enterprise components, semantic search, a rich client to allow a more usable and productive way to contribute to wiki’s (for the non-IT user), and content ‘gardening’ by the software itself. Looking forward to their release in january.
• Peter Vandenabeele is (amongst other things) or national expert on ODF. A presentation about the roll-out of this format within the belgian government.
• emich messed around with Google Android and made a presentation to tell us the tail. His verdict: an alpha at best, not ready for serious development.
• errr … my presentation.

I missed a good few other ones, which sounded equally interesting. However, the best thing about BarCamp is the fact that you meet people, exchange ideas, discuss ideas and plans. You leave the place with a headfull of new ideas, tools, advice. Cross-pollinating in the belgian IT world.

Somehow i feel really tired, now. Full day.

• Previous Entry: Links on a more serene thursday
• Next Entry: Ontology virus