So one week later I thought I would talk about what a great experience BarCamp Ottawa was, I hope to do more events with the people from Ottawa [BarCamp Montreal : The Invasion] ;-)
I think the most valuable thing I took away from Ottawa (besides all the new friends) was a greater understanding of development beyond my software service industry world. I’ve got a taste of that in Toronto through TorCamp but the fact is that servicing government, financial institutions and other major corporations is still the driving force of the software industry in Toronto, IMHO. I was talking to my friend Jason who is an Ottawa ex-pat and he told me that he read that tech industry jobs are back to the levels they were at during the boom, but instead of these jobs being with large corporations (Nortel, Corel, etc.) these jobs are now dispersed over many small firms and start-ups. Getting to interact with the people who work in these companies and people who work for the federal government was tremendously insightful.
Bryce and I got to run a BoF (birds of a feather) session titled “Beyond Software - User/Domain Research as a Strategic Asset for a Organization”. We are going to run Part II at BarCampTdot2.0.
It was also really nice to see Derek Featherstone again. He is a cool guy who does amazing work that I have always admired. He said it was nice to go to an “un-conference” in his own town where he didn’t have to present. :-)
For more info on the event you should check out all the postings by Alec, Craig, David and James. I’m sure there are others so you should search for entries marked BarCampOttawa or check out the photos on Flickr.
So we got back from Ottawa and we moved right into DemoCamp5 (superCool) but I’m not going to talk about that ;-) …
Vanity thy name is Rooster
Peter Hum and Bruno Schlumberger spent the day observing and participating and that turned into a piece for the Ottawa Citizen Techweekly section. Bruno took a lot of pictures of me and the big guy but the caption for the photo in the paper was, “Bryce Johnson and his Chicken”! I was wearing a huge nametag, people! W.R. It’s pretty easy. Since when is Bryce the draw? Seriously, everyone know that I’m the star. :-)
[tags]BarCamp, BarCampOttawa[/tags]
