On Monday morning, my arms, legs and brain felt like jelly. There was a sleeping bag and some schwag strewn across the living room. And I couldn’t stop smiling. Must’ve been the morning after a BarCamp!

For those who don’t know, the past few months have been spent organising BarCamb with a few other volunteers. The aim of BarCamp events is to bring people from a variety of fields of interests together to do short talks, exchange experiences and generally geek about. For more on this, I’ve written a BarCamp Virgin’s guide last year.

Since this weekend, I’ve recovered so I thought I’d gather my thoughts and write a wrap-up post before my goldfish brain forgets all the best bits.

This weekend included:

• 54 presentations
• 10 sponsors
• 26 trays of sandwiches
• 45 litres of fizzy drinks
• 30 pizzas
• 100 BarCamb mugs & tshirts
• 1 episode of Doctor Who on the big screen
• 2 knackered organisers & some sleepy volunteers
• half a dozen games of Werewolf
• a few months of preparation
• 80 or so people who hopefully had a great time!

As an organiser, I attended more sessions this time than with the previous two BarCamps I organised. Probably mainly due to having a fantastic co-organiser, Lee, and a brilliant venue provided by Red Gate in the Cambridge Business Park.

When we kicked off the event, I asked for a show of hands to see how many newbies we had – I was both thrilled and worried that we had nearly 50% newbies. Why worried? Because usually newbies are a bit nervous of presenting and leave the board looking a bit bare for the first day. I couldn’t have been any more wrong because as soon as I invited people to put their topics up on the board, it was like the IKEA stampede and I had to flee the area!

Saturday went by like a blur, attending a few good sessions, feeding over 70 ravenous BarCampers at lunch, more sessions in the afternoon including my own on baked-in virality. As we stretched into the evening, it was comedy to see a group huddle into one of the rooms to religiously watch Doctor Who over pizza and beer.

As all good BarCamps must do, the evening turned into a night of Werewolves, Settlers and the occasional snorer in the corner…

On Sunday, the turnout was smaller but the sessions were still great. We finished mid-afternoon, cleared up the Red Gate office and many of the survivors headed to the pub. (I was pooped, I went straight home!)

You can find a few of the presentations of the weekend on Slideshare, with more coming soon, I’m sure. Some of the presentations topics are listed here, and we’ll aim to add the full list in the near future. There are also some great (and some not so great) photos in the BarCamb Flickr group.

A few attendees asked whether Cambridge Geek Nights were being revived and, in the light of how much interest there is, I suppose we might just have to do that! Beers, geekery and chatting coming soon to a Cambridge pub near you.

[Photo credit: Networking through the day, photo by Martin88, All rights reserved]

Proactive operates in a paperless environment! That makes your relationship with your accountant easier, quicker and cheaper. Now is that something you’d be interested in?

According to their website,

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup

The Cambridge event is happening courtesy of IdeaSpace (one of BarCamb’s lovely sponsors) at the new Hauser Forum in West Cambridge, 4pm until late. Jeremy Parsons, who runs the IdeaLab, is going to be at BarCamb too and has promised to help co-ordinate transport for anyone attending both events.

Tickets are available at http://startuplessonslearnedcam.eventbrite.com/ – there’s a £25 ticket available first come first served and a limited number of student tickets at £10.

For more details, go to the ticket site or email jeremy@ideaspace.cam.ac.uk.

http://barcamp.org/BarCambPresentations

If you have a good idea on what you are going to do or have some ideas on what you want to hear about, why not sign up and add it to the wiki? This will hopefully inspire a few people to come up with their presentation idea.

http://eventbrite.com/s/Nbu

If there are any last minute cancellations, we’ll start allocating tickets to people on this list.

Happy Easter to everyone!

http://www.eventbrite.com/s/Nbu

Good luck!

Opportunity Links

Squizzle

Studio 24

CoDE Research Institute

Once this batch of tickets is gone, I’m afraid that’s it unless people drop out from coming. We’ll set up a waiting list after this which you can join to keep you in touch with what’s going on with any tickets. More details on this nearer the time though.

So the ticket sales will be rescheduled to 9am tomorrow morning (Sat 27th March)