Camp Smalltalk 2014 is over and I think the general conclusion was that it was Jolly Good. I’ll leave it to other 20 plus attendees to pass opinions and just describe a little of what went on.
The event was held at the Makerspace Nanaimo facility and we had plenty of room, comfy chairs, plenty of food and drinks, a nice projector, and 24/7 access. I think everybody considered it a really good place to hold the camp. We got fabulous support from the Makerspace and they’re (I should say ‘we’ since I’m a member too!) looking forward to doing it again.
People arrived as early as the Thursday and several stayed until late Monday. Most of the action was on Friday/Saturday/Sunday - including the excitement on Saturday of the Makerspace open house mixed with our stuff. That might seem like a recipe for disaster but it had the big benefit for Makerspace of showing off how a very young organisation could host an international conference in a small town that is very keen to make a name. The mayor and several councillors were visibly surprised and impressed. Having the open house also had the side benefit of a pretty damn good bbq being fired up and free burgers and dogs provided.
We kept the formal schedule light, with a few opportunities for talks but mostly just groups self-organising to discuss projects, problems and other news. During the Makerspace event a bunch of people decamped to a lecture hall at the local university to take advantage of higher bandwidth so that a Terf conference could be used. We kept a laptop logged into that displaying on the projector at Makerspace and it was a source of quite a bit of interest. People were quite amazed that we could have attendees from all over the west coast and Canada plus bring in people from Europe and the Moon via the network. Oh, wait, we don’t have that Moon base yet… Damn.
In the evenings we sampled the delights of Nanaimo’s nightlife, which turned out to be fairly nice. Gina’s Mexican restaurant did us very well on very short notice, people enjoyed Fibber Magee’s pub fare (some enjoyed an awful lot of the liquid sustenance too) and on Sunday we got very well fed for brunch at the Coast Bastion and later at Beefeater’s.
Right now we’re seriously considering trying to do this again in 6 months or so. It was *that much* fun.
tim PS - I know not every attendee reads this list, so feel free to forward this to any other list of relevance -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.