The inaugural HomeCamp

As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I went along to HomeCamp 08 in London, organised by Chris Dalby and Dale Lane, and sponsored by Current Cost and Redmonk.

I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.

The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.

Some very general comments on the day:

• Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
• A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
• A lot of fun… I only wish my hacking skills were greater – but I’m looking forward to contributing and generating ideas in this community.

That’s it from me. Really looking forward to HomeCamp 09!