The never ending drums. Can’t you hear it? The noise. The drumbeat! Louder than ever before!!

Okay so it is now just over a week since the end of the drumbeat festival, and it is about time that I complete this write-up of the event.

I will be writing this post from a somewhat different perspective to the majority of the posts on the event you will see elsewhere. This post is about the never ending drums, the noise, the drumbeat, louder than ever before, the call to war!

Okay so “call to war!” is a little strong, call for change is probably better… So as I said this post is coming from a different angle, and in seriousness that angle is from that of a festival volunteer. So I was one of the people who were ensuring that the rest had as great at time as possible, and at the same time, this meant I had a mega time!

I wont be able to provide you with too much in the way of detail on talks, however I can tell you, from the talks that I heard, and from the aftershock on twitter, a lot is happening/about to happen/is coming! I can’t wait to see the fruits of our labours in Barcelona to come into the light of everyday reality, and they will.

So, lets take this from the end of the last post, and go from there.

In my last post I finished up at the end of the first night, so time for the first day! It starts as any day shouldn’t at an event like this, with my alarm failing to go off, I arrived at the event at around 9am (an hour after schedule) and jump feet first into the mornings work, helping with the general running, and looking after those attending the festival as well as the press. It runs straight through to lunch where all hell breaks loose as, even after being told to get to the information desk early for lunch, people all swarm the desk for the €15 lunch tokens. This was in the end the worst part of the day, so not much in the way of hell. This was then followed by another half a day running, then a nice dinner at the press event held for, you guessed it, the press.

Now I said that this post would come from a unique angle, and that is one which I am about to show you. So far I have just told you that I did a lot of running… sounds boring? Well no, it really wasn’t! I had the unique opportunity being a runner to bits and bobs from all the talks, gaining a greater picture of the scope of things to come. Sure, I spent my day solving problems, and ensuring that supplies were in the right places at the right times, but that was only the start. I had some amazing conversations in the hallways about why the education system in broken, and how we as geeks can fix this. I learned a lot about a potential new way to award achievements for your skills and work, that should be easily recognizable, as well as respected by not only education but employers as well!

The best thing about all of the events of the first day, was not the meeting old friends, but the making of new ones. I spent hours talking to people, and this has gained me a large number of contacts that I will have to stay in contact with!

So day two… this was filled with much the same of day one, however there was a difference in the latter half, we had to pack up. This was not fun, nor wanted really. However it had to be done. This was the hard job, we had to ensure that all chairs, and tables made their way back to the designated areas for collection by the firm who we hired them from. We needed to clear all the tents and work spaces, we needed to do a lot in short. This meant that for a few of us, we missed the closing talk, and that is a shame. The good thing though, is that we did get to go to a major league party at the end of it all! Where we were introduced to the concept game of “Massive Multiplayer Thumb Wrestling”, where, I am proud to say I got to the semi-finals of the tournament!

All in all I thank Mozilla for getting me out there, to help, participate and share in the awesome that is, drumbeat.

Now my explanation of the event was not great I know, I probably left this post too long in the making, and I have never been great and documentation, let alone documenting my own experiences, so I have photos for you (from the mozillaeu flickr stream), as well as a link to a site that is keeping track of all the event write ups. Which I have to say, are a lot better than mine.

The link as promised is here -> http://bit.ly/a1PBzu