Opentech 2008

It’s been a long, long day, but at least I got to watch the final episode of Dr Who when I got home.

I wasn’t as inspired by the talks as other people seem to have been – the ones I attended seemed reasonably prosaic, although I did make a couple of notes to follow up on later. I think this means I need to change the criteria I use for choosing which talks I go to.

The social aspect was great though; the attendees, both speakers and audience alike, were awesome – a real cream of the crop. It might always be like that at London gatherings, I don’t know but it seemed great to me! Of couse, my view is probably tainted by the fact that I got to shake hands with Ben Goldacre (as I simpered like a girl).

Things I learned:

At the moment there are only two of the dozens of presentations on slideshare, but I hope they will be gathered together somewhere at some point soon.

Incidentally, Sir Bonar has written an excellent summary of the day.

OpenTech 2008 announced

OpenTech 2008 has been announced!

an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living (Saturday 5th July 2008 in Central London).

The last OpenTech was in 2005 just a few days after the attempted bomb attacks in London and was totally awesome. It saw Ewan’s iPod Shuffle Shuffle the forming of the ORG (I’d totally forgotten that this was where it happened until Suw reminded me at XTech last year), and loads of other stuff.

It was totally excellent, and I’d definitely recommend it to all UK-based geeks, especially since it only costs a fiver on the door. Frankly, I can’t imagine how they won’t have to be turning people away.

If you want to get a feel for what it was like last time, take a gander at my Flickr photos from OpenTech 2005 and all photos tagged opentech