BarCamp Canterbury 2

BarCamp Canterbury is an unconference that is a completely free to attend and based loosely around the theme of:innovative, unusual, and amusing examples of information and technology.

A technology conference with a difference: more like a gathering of enthusiastic people that are into tech, gadgets, science, crafts, or just about anything else that’s geeky and fun. There will be plenty of entertaining sessions and workshops on the day, and when sessions aren’t running, there’s usually other fun stuff happening: food and drink, games, conversation, silliness, and people hacking on projects. You can go to any session you like, and if you don’t find a session interesting, you can leave and go to another.

Last weekend was more than just fun, it was brilliant. BarCamp Canterbury had everything you could want from a gathering of geeks. It had robots, clocks, and lego! I feel privileged to have been able to represent Mozilla at such a great event, and even more so for having been able to attend!

I did several talks while I was there, and got a lot of good feedback from it. So what talks did I do?! Well, I used my short form “Who? What? Why? (Mozilla)” talk each morning, and both times got a good-sized audience, as well as a lot of interesting, in-depth, and sometimes difficult to answer questions (where I just didn’t know the answer but really wanted to know myself (did a little looking up in those cases). I got so many questions in fact that I had to do an entire extra session (AMA style) to get through them all. Questions ranged from getting people into web making, to how Mozilla got so big, to how to fix problems some people had encountered with Firefox.

I also did a talk on some of the new tools build into Firefox that make development easier, as well as the tools/resources created by Hackasuarus. Again, there were a good number of questions.

Something that I did off my own back was my presentation on being a good public speaker, which I made as interactive as possible by getting people to come up and use the first three picture slides from my deck to do a presentation on anything, using the tips and tricks I had just spoken about. This session was so popular that I ran it 4 times! I even took it a step further and ran a session at the end of the event on making slide decks using my favourite tools. HTML, CSS, JavaScript and DZSlides.

Was it worth Mozilla sponsoring this event. In a word… YES! There was a lot of interest in Mozilla, what we have done, and where we are going. I attended a talk on Teaching programming in 5 languages at once by Allan Callaghan. This talk was so inspiring and energetic, and on a topic that I think is still very relevant to Mozilla… Learning, Freedom, and the Web!