Simon Whitehouse's view
The Saturday before last Digital Birmingham were involved in putting on Local Gov Camp on its return to Birmingham. Actually, my Gov Camp started on the Friday night when 20 or so ne'er do wells turned up early to have a drink in The Anchor followed by a curry at Manzils in Digbeth. Already, it was invigorating to be part of conversations between such committed people.
Local Gov Camp is is run using the unconference format. Here we don't have any key note speakers, the attendees run their own sessions if they want to and the agenda is decided on the morning, based on people pitching the sessions they want to run.
If all that sounds a little unfocused and unstructured then well, that's because it is a bit. But what this allows is a flexibility and cooperative spirit that makes for a lot more creative and enjoyable experience. In my opinion that is.
I'd expected that helping to organize the event would be a lot more stressful than it turned out. There are a number of reasons for this:-
1. At an unconference you are responsible for a lot less than at a normal one. The attendees are responsible for making the event a success (or not)
2. I knew a lot of the attendees and so was confident that we were going to get plenty of interesting sessions
3. Sammy Williams, our events organiser, was fantastic. She sourced the venue, knocked them down in price more than I ever would have dared try and kept us all in line
4. Dave Briggs, with his Zen-like calm and the efficient Mrs Briggs
There have been a whole heap of people posting about their experiences of the day. A lot of them are being collated on the LocalGovCamp Posterous account, which I heartily recommend taking a look at. It gives a feel for both the breadth of the discussions and the level of enthusiasm that was there on the day.
There are a number of events and activities that I know are coming out of the day. Some friends and colleagues who work in libraries were already planning a LibraryCamp by lunchtime. Digital Birmingham have already done some work with libraries recently, after KindleCamp, and we will be happy to help advise and support the organisers of LibraryCamp.
The next Brewcamp will be in Coventry towards the end of July. This time the organising has been passed over to Kate Sahota, Karen Ramsay-Smith and Sasha Taylor. The sign up for the event will be coming to an Eventbrite page very soon now.
And the same people are joining us for the second HyperWM unconference which we hope to hold in Warwick this autumn. With our established team of Andy Mabbett, Stuart Harrison, Mike Rawlins, Dan Slee and myself, we've got quite a collective going now.
And, having started to see a certain momentum behind these events, it has been good to see that some people, such as Simon Gray, are questioning how useful they are and whether we are maybe just a little bit self-congratulatory about what we are doing.
I'm hoping that some of the activities such as Kate Sahota's idea of an extended Transport hack provide us with a project to come out of these events. At the moment I think that most of what we achieve is influence and networking. These are important things to do, and it could be argued that's what traditional conferences exist for, but it would be satisfying to see something tangible to come out of our discussions.
