Barcamp 2008 - Granville Island, Vancouver

07 Oct 2008

barcamp.org/BarCampVancouver2008

My first Barcamp started the way most mornings do. Alarm goes off, roll out of bed and rub the eyes. Brew a pot of coffee and… you get the idea. This day saw me at the Granville Island market bright and early, 9.30am, okay so not so early, but it was a Saturday… Anyway, in I went to fill out a name tag and meet some other technology loving peeps. Being my introduction to this event I figured I’d join some conversations and find out what brought others to the place. From what I could tell, the majority of the people were quite sociable and outgoing, which in my opinion is typically not the norm for techies. I was impressed by this, and thought the chances of enjoying this camp were actually possible.

My fellow 2pathers, Omar, and Geoff, found their way to the venue shortly after, and along with some of the new faces I’d met, filled my in on what I was to expect. The lot of us, some wearing the light blue Ts of the Barcamp, and some just slurping back the coffee, made our way into the Granville Island Arts Club Revue Theatre. The orientation ensued, mostly a rough outline of what the day was to provide, and to invite everyone who wanted to run a discussion group to give a 30 second spiel to inform the crowd. A bunch of interesting topics were covered, categorized into Wordpress, techonology, and other things geeky. I’m not particularly sure how Wordpress received so much attention, but I suppose people like to blog.

The discussions that interested me were all held at the Emily Carr Intersections Digital Studio (IDS). Of the ‘un-conference’ conferences I sat in on, the ones that I found most interesting were:  Data Aware Legislation, Elections and the Internet, Laptop Bedouin, and Markets for a Cause. Starting with the first one of the day, Data Aware Legislation, I found myself curious to see what Vancouver’s health authorities were providing in terms of public data. Soon I believed that the health authorities weren’t providing much at all. The presenter (I didn’t catch his name), let’s call him Chuck, described how Vancouver originally had 54 health authorities that were elected in some manner to govern over the health care system in Vancouver. That number has been folded down to 5 ’super’ authorities, and are no longer accountable to anyone but the health minister. The thought of this was scary, so I started to listen more intently. Chuck talked on about how 700 bodies of children were found in a Victoria warehouse, and how many of these children were abused. He mentioned that post operative cognitive disorder is not recognized by nurses or physicians, and mental health complications are a major cause of deaths among the elderly. At first I couldn’t figure out why he was talking about these seemingly unrelated facts, until I realized it was all about privacy. His take was that the privacy act blocks investigation of the 700, where the private care facilities are not required to divulge their practices and events taken place. Similarly the act prevents other public disclosure of health related facts. Eventually Chuck got to his point, he has built a Legislation Reader which combines areas of law and makes cross references searchable. His problem, is that he can’t publish due to government copyright. He wants more people to demand a public API to the government data and legislation. Good luck to you, Chuck.

The next discussion was a little less sobering. The goal originally was to create a website, produced at extreme speed, by all those that were in the room in 30 minutes. The actual result was 3 groups of roughly 20 people broke off to give their opinions on how to better a charity. I was hoping to see this product creation en-mass, so was disappointed to have to choose between 3 different smaller less focused circles. I pulled a chair over to the HandsUpForAfrica.org pod and sat in on what sounded like a standard business planning meeting. One where people throw ideas ‘out there’ on what the charity needs to do to be more accessible for donations. Ideas like online payments, using a newsgroup, and placing pictures on a social site like Facebook so those that donate can put faces to their goodwill. I did see one team go a little further, as they lent money to, Kiva.org, a charity used to provide impoverished people in other countries business loans.

Up next, the Laptop Bedouin talk, were Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. The two had lived in various parts of the world, and were able to operate their business while away from Canada. This was a less technical forum, but was still informative for understanding what barebones planning needs to be done to be able to work elsewhere in the world, yet have an IT business. Stressed was the notion that redundancy is your friend. The pair had used tools such as Skype, various instant messangers, and mobile to voicemail phonetag for their communications alone. One trick they used to lessen the feeling of distance was to time shift the day, so that their days had some overlap to what their client’s hours were back home. The last big item that I took away from this presentation was that closing the Canadian bank account before leaving the country was a must, otherwise taxes would have to be paid upon return, basically double taxing your income. The counter to this would be to leave the account open, and have all accounts receivable paid to the Canadian account and have bookkeepers in Canada take care of the company expenses so that taxes are only paid in Canada.

The final time slot that I care to write about was for Elections and the Internet. Earlier in the morning I had met Luke, who was keen to host a discussion about having a central location to learn from a nonpartisan standpoint all about the different parties, their platforms, and even what the members of the government had voted on. Someone felt that ideally as a citizen one should be able to know what the campaign contributions were for each member of the government, and how that company has influenced the voting. Others in the group wanted to know about promises vs deliveries. Another participant even suggested having online budget tracking that could be drilled down to minute details of pens purchased for the office, so we as citizens would know where the money is being spent. After some chatting about what people were interested in discussing, it sounded to me like a number of individuals had attempted to create websites in the past, and a number of really interesting urls were gathered up. The most impressive link for me was on tracking candidate voting, howtheyvote.ca. With the election coming up shortly, it’s still up to each individual to do the leg work on research themselves. There just isn’t a one stop shop to all the data-mash-upy goodness of Canadian politics yet. A newly formed  newsgroup was formed in the discussion, so if you’re interested in this topic, check it out here.

My overall take on the day, was that people feel the need to be heard, and to share what they know. I’m not sure that I found Barcamp the most educational of conferences, but I did find the whole thing very enjoyable. The people were friendly, the ideas shared were interesting, and the organization and running of the event were top notch. I walked away happy to have been a part of it. I’ll leave you with a link from the Election and the Internet talk that was not purely political in nature, but more economic and environmental: www.storyofstuff.com/

- Garrett

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