Yesterday I attended my first unconference: Barcamp Auckland 4. I learned a lot from the talks and presentations, but I also got a lot from the breaks in between and from the event as a whole. Here are some of my highlights.
Twitter is awesome for conferences. I tweeted interesting points from the sessions I attended, but I also regularly checked the #bcak4 hashtag to see what was going on in the other sessions. In some cases I missed bits of what the presenters said, but caught them a minute later as the person sitting next to me tweeted them. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed the rain on Twitter before I saw it outside the window.
The tweets really added a lot to the sessions. There were a handful of Twittering heroes there. A few times I heard a presenter mention some project or document, and within 60 seconds @vickytnz would tweet the reference along with the URL. Awesome.
There is a great web-design-media-etc. community in Auckland. I mean, of course there is — Auckland is big and hip enough — but I haven’t been exposed much to it before. I’m starting to recognise a few names and faces too. Now I want to get more involved.
The sessions I saw were a good mix of tech, design and social issues. This reflected the mix of geek, design, and strategy people I’ve encountered at Auckland Web Meetup, Auckland UX meetup and other groups. I’ll write more about the individual sessions in separate posts under the Barcamp tag. I was hoping to do them all today but given my usual blogging speed I will be lucky to write them all up within the week. 🙂