Thanks to everybody who came on Monday night (22nd March 2010). We had close to a dozen people if I recall, which is about as much as we could handle the first time I think. Its was really great to meet everybody who came – a diverse bunch of interesting people, which is exactly what we want. We even had embarrassing name labels.
Richard Spence, in addition to organising the room at The Exchange, gave us an engaging talk about the mobile phone development business. We managed to avoid bloodshed on the iPhone vs Android issue. This was followed by drinks at The Fleece just up the hill in Stroud. People were talking about the open source Cassandra MapReduce database, the perils or benefits of working at home, and quirky user interfaces for people with difficulties using keyboards and many other topics. I also found out that I wasn’t the only drummer there!
We decided at the meeting to plan for the next meeting to be a little later, at 8pm on Monday April 19th – please put it in your diaries!
I think that there was talk of formalising this so that it is on the same Monday of each month, eg the first or last monday of each month or something like that. We should sort this out at the next meeting, as it would probably be helpful (also we can soon publish an iCal feed of the dates past and future).
Its also becoming apparent that we need to change a few things to scale this up to larger numbers.
The small meeting room at The Exchange was OK for the first one, but we are looking at using the new bigger meeting room for the talk part, when its ready (which it may not be for the next meeting). We’ll also need to look at finding a pub/bar with more space in it / a large area with smaller table clusters as the number of attendees grows. The Retreat and Bar Nine might work out for nights where we have larger numbers.
We’re also looking for ideas as to how to take the talks forward. Richard is in touch with people from BathCamp about how they do it, and others had suggestions on the night such as using the 20 x 20 second slides Pecha Kucha approach, and the inverse of a presentation e.g. “I’ve got problem X – what do you think I should do to solve it?”.
More suggestions and talk proposals are most welcome.
We’re going to play with using a WordPress site for SBC to publicise the group and the events, possibly photo gallery (of handsome geeks in harsh lighting? Really?), and maybe voting on the talk (and other issues) for each event. We would appreciate if one or two people could come forward to do brief write-ups/event info posting on there etc once its set up (we’re going to use free wordpress.com hosting for now – zero hassle). Ning.com is another possibility there, BathCamp use it, but I will say I’m not a fan of such “portal” style sites. Do we really need forums, logins etc?
Also, if we continue to do the talk parts at a place such as The Exchange, I can talk to Stroud Brewery… they may sell us a small keg at reduced price in exchange for event sponsorship. I can see a vote for which brew around the corner…
So any ideas at all, please throw them out here on the list. Moderation has been turned off on the mailing list by agreement of all those who came to SBC #1. The point is simply for us to have fun and maybe learn something.
Finally – thank you again and please spread the word – the more the merrier!
BarCamp Stroud 