Barcamp Hong Kong 2008

This past Saturday was Barcamp Hong Kong (photos). If you’ve never heard of Barcamp you should check out the Wikipedia article. The event was organized by technologists from the area and was hosted by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. at their location in Quarry Bay.

There were five rooms available during each of six time slots for a total of 30 possible sessions. I attended six:

• Online Marketing for Consumer Acquisition
• Technology Yesterday, Relevance
• Making iPhone Apps
• Open Culture
• Just What the ____ is SPAM?
• Theming Drupal

I organized the session on Open Culture, and was very happy at the amount of discussion and participation we had. Most of the other sessions were more like lectures but still quite good. The interactivity was mostly thanks to Conrad Benham’s idea to make the session an “open space” discussion, it seemed to fit perfectly with the topic. We placed five “hot seats” at the front of the room. To control conversation, only people seated in the designated seats were allowed to talk. Anyone could join the conversation by bumping another person off the floor. The discussion mostly focused on open education and it’s practical application, but we hit a few other topics as well.

There were more than 25 Drupalistas at Barcamp HK. It was quite funny to bump into Dave Hansen-Lange from Advomatic again, I met him earlier this year on the other side of the planet at Drupalcon Boston. I took the first few minutes of the “Theming Drupal” session to talk about the Knight Drupal Initiative and answer questions related to the grant process before the other talk begain. There was quite a bit of interest in KDI; let’s see those proposals!

After the conference ThoughtWorks and others sponsored a gathering at the East End Brewery.

Many thanks to everyone for such an enlightening day.