Barcamp Bournemouth: The ‘un-conference’ conference
We were proud to sponsor and support our recent local Barcamp at Bournemouth University. As well as a free lunch in the bar, a team of us went along to chat and present on design, web development, search and content strategy. For those of you that aren’t sure what a barcamp is, it defines itself as a ‘free self-organising un-conference for anyone interested in the digital and online world’.
There was a sense of nervous excitement from the speakers as things kicked off at 10am on Saturday morning (yes, pass the caffeine). Most of us were not sure to expect – who would attend, how many people would we be presenting to, what topics would prove to most popular? There was a ‘bun fight’ to the scheduling board of presentations as those taking part claimed the sought-after times and spots they wanted.
The Redweb team put in a strong showing, with most departments getting involved:
- Design and development double act Luke Guppy and Phil Heywood – ‘Usability vs Accessibility’ discussion
- Angela Barnard’s ‘Without a content strategy, you could still be throwing your content into the wind’
- David Burton’s entertaining overview of creativity and top tips for brainstorming
- The Redweb Search team of Martin McAndrew, Stefan Boettcher and Sandy Lee held a debate on the ethics of using black hat vs white hat SEO techniques
- And finally Damian Proctor’s rather intriguing ‘How to roll a turd in glitter’ and tips for ‘design awesomeness’ – proving that a provocative title wins you the biggest audience!
Our student intern, Rob Hawkes, also told us why he believes that HTML5 canvas is the future of graphics on the Web and gives a good round-up of the event here.
The informal environment allowed plenty of opportunity to talk to fellow designers and developers about what they were interested in and each presentation generated lots of chat and sharing of ideas and opinions.
Overall, this was a great – and different – event to be involved in and we will certainly be attending again next year, as well as others around the UK. We hope to see it build on this and grow and would encourage anyone interested in this digital field to go along to their next Barcamp!
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