Live from Barcamp Leeds

Today and tomorrow there is the Barcamp Leeds here at the Old Broadcasting House. This year I had not prepared any talk, but I just decided to stop by and meet a few people there. Right now, Tom Scott gives a very interesting presentation about creating videos for YouTube or other video sites. He pointed out that this is right now the "big thing" to do, as the technology is here, and video provides a very good way to access audiences and present ideas. He gave a few tips on how to make a good video, using frequent cutaways to keep the video alive and to cover cuts and camera position changes. He also pointed to the parody site he made a few years ago about the UK government emergency web site (brilliant parody!).

Leeds BarCamp

On Saturday, 17.November, a quite unique event took place in the Leeds Met Old Broadcasting House, which was formerly the BBC Broadcasting House (but is now renovated and occupied by the NTI): the BarCamp Leeds. This event was an "un-conference", having a freely self-organising schedule in which everybody could sign into sessions and offer a presentation.

I had proposed to give a talk about my work and interests at Leeds Metropolitan University, around various topics in the realm of Creative Technology.

The self-organising principle worked to a certain degree: but as the presentation schedule was assembled with yellow post-it notes, which were placed onto a schedule wall into a matrix ot time and room arrangements, some of the notes fell down, and the schedule was to be rearranged a few times.

Most talks were about various Web 2.0 technologies and concepts from different perspectives - quite interesting!

Here are the pictures of the participants:




And here is a shot of the "back board" onto which everybody could draw something:



A search on Google for "barcampleeds" reveals many results where blogs and reports about this event are shown.