BarCamp Canberra #1 wrap

I think I speak for all of the Unor­gan­is­ers when I say that Bar­Camp Can­berra #1 was an unqual­i­fied suc­cess! We couldn’t be hap­pier with the turnout, the qual­ity of the talks, the feed­back we’ve received and the enthu­si­asm to hold another Bar­Camp here in 2009.

Here are a few stats from the day:

• in excess of 60 atten­dees (that’s an amaz­ing turnout for some­where as small as Canberra)
• over 30 pre­sen­ta­tions on top­ics includ­ing web typog­ra­phy, GTD, open source, design and language
• 156 pho­tos and counting
• sev­eral enthu­si­as­tic blog posts already — Stephen Dann, Gavin Jack­son, Ruth Elli­son and Steven Han­ley
• 30+ t-​​shirts handed out (if you were in the first 40 reg­is­tra­tions, you were enti­tled to a t-​​shirt on the day, and if you were in the 41 – 55 bracket, there’s a t-​​shirt com­ing for you — make sure you let me know if you missed out)
• a bunch of peo­ple intro­duced to the power of Twit­ter
• 16 piz­zas eaten
• many Chupa-​​Chups and Arnotts Shapes consumed
• 72 600ml bot­tles of water drunk
• 32 peo­ple for the din­ner afterwards
• just two pieces of lost prop­erty — an Asus Eee PC power brick and a Nokia N95 belt pouch (if you own either of these, email me)

Per­son­ally, it was an incred­i­bly ful­fill­ing expe­ri­ence and I’m look­ing for­ward to being involved next time. As Canberra’s a small town, we’re prob­a­bly a one Bar­Camp a year place. In the mean­time, I’ll def­i­nitely be at any Aus­tralian Bar­Camp I can get to and might even try for the odd nearby inter­na­tional one…