Mike Stopforth

BarCamp Jozi 2006 has come and gone, and besides it being in the middle of a particularly hectic couple of weeks for me, I really enjoyed the experience.

The venue, Sci-Bono, was a brilliant find (credit to Armand) and really set the tone for a relaxed vibe, high-level thinking and great networking. From Sci-Bono’s website:

The Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, Gauteng’s exiting new Science Centre and the largest in Africa, is a uniquely crafted edutainment destination for learners, educators, families, companies, and tourists to interactively participate in exciting and fun-filled activities in mathematics, science and technology.

Initiated by the Gauteng Department of Education and private sector representatives, Sci-Bono aims to support education in mathematics, science and technology to improve public engagement with science, engineering and technology and to promote career education in these critical areas of the economy.

Our two days of tech, media and culture discussion began (a little late) yesterday with Peter Le Roux introducing us to the open-source animated short film Elephant’s Dream. The rather confusing, albeit impressive film and the subsequent discussion broke the ice and we were A for away.

I can’t remember exactly the order of events from there, so I’ll just highlight what I can remember and trust that other bloggers will pick up on what I missed.

Denis, Jared and A.J. Venter of OpenLab International (I still can’t get over the fact that he’s not a loose forward :)) followed up with a report on some of the incredibly cool work they’re doing with SchoolNet in Namibia. They handed out some OpenLab .0 Live CD’s and so on. Nice bunch of guys, and they live in the Far East too, which just makes them nicer.

I did a bit of stuff on my favourite Web 2.0 applications, and apparently even the geekiest of geeks enjoyed it so must’ve got something right!

Anton de Wet from Obsidian delivered an informative, entertaining preso on some of the struggles geeks face as they make the transition to the entrepreneurial space. He spoke mostly about the challenges of marketing and people management - things that really talented geeks should never have to do. Interestingly enough , as a sales slash marketing dude, I’ve seen similar problems in selling environments when great salespeople are promoted to managerial positions simply because they sell alot - biiiig mistake. Great coders, great mechanics, great salespeople, great musicians are all artists - and therefore not particularly passionate about marketing or management. Anton is a rare breed of authentic geek who has had to learn these lessons the hard way and has clearly come through a successful, fulfilled, intelligent and all-round nice person (sat next to him at lunch and thoroughly enjoyed his company). I look forward to future chats with him.

Probably the highlight of my BarCamp Jozi experience was meeting Danie Roux. He’s a passionate, abnormally smart coder who wears his heart on his sleeve and could well have been a stand-up comedian had he not opted for a career in information science. Danie is a thinker and a hard worker who is clearly passionate about constant streamlining and efficiency of productivity. He presented on all sorts of things, but the highlights were introductions to Extreme Programming (XP), and a dummies guide to Ruby on Rails (specially for yours truly, seeing as I thought it was the name of a Broadway musical). Danie was later made to pay for his blatant enthusiasm when he was the subject of an introduction to Bondage 101, courtesy of that very-nice-female-person-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten (*sorry*). Incidentally, the same very nice femal person later gave us a great intro to the Nikon D70s (I think) and inspired me to get a real camera. She also supplied really yummy biscuits and killer coffee. She also promoted some great conversation. Crap, I really wish I could remember her name. It starts with a D. Darn.

Moving along, other highlights were Jaco Meiring’s intro to all sorts of cool things. Scott Gray told us why he thinks Picasa is better than flickr, and Dave (I think his name was Dave) from Ministry of Illusion introduced us to a 3D animation tool, the name of which eludes me now. Clearly I’m not so good with names.

One name I will remember is Carl Spies, who did a quick intro to Systems Thinking. Carl is another abnormally smart human being who I am really looking forward to chatting to in future - he has some great ideas, serious intellectual capacity and some nifty life experience to boot.

I had to leave early (2pm, Danie!) but that is pretty much what stood out for me. Bearing in mind, if I did not mention you and your preso here it’s not because I didn’t like it, it’s because I have a mind like a sieve.

Thanks once again to all who participated. We learnt muchly and had a few good laughs, and I personally will be very keen to attend the next one.