www.gisprofessional.co.uk

Spontaneity,improvisation and participation seemed to characterise the day.

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ON THE 12TH OF MARCH,I was fortunate to havea ticket for wherecamp eu. I say fortunate becausethis was a free “unconference” and tickets, whichwere released in blocks over a few weeks, weregrabbed within a couple of hours of release. Hardlysurprising really, if you knew what to expect, but Ididn’t. This was my first unconference and I was abit puzzled as to how this loosely structured eventwould work.After three years of chairing GeoCommunity, Ithought I knew a bit about organising ageoconference. But at an unconference there is noprogramme, you just turn up and stick your nameand topic on the wall to show that you havesomething to say or to talk about and people turnup and join in. Some slides, but way less than in the“death by PowerPoint” or drowning in keynotedays that we have all suffered silently. Spontaneity,improvisation and participation seemed tocharacterise the day.There were about 180 people there from acrossEurope (although to be honest it was largely Brits)enjoying two days of discussions about geo.

GaryGale

of Yahoo opened the event talking about his‘theory of stuff’, which was a quick run throughubiquity, location based social networks and somefuture possibilities for mobile location. In manyrespects, Gary’s intro gave an insight into the wholeday’s agenda.

Walking with Dinosaurs

There was a big choiceof sessions (with up to 5 or 6 streams) attractingaudiences from a few to 50+. I sat in on sessionsabout Open Street Map, location based gamesstrategies, some pretty philosophical stuff aboutsense of place and capital, map visualisation as artand inevitably a heated discussion about the value inMaking Public Data Public led by

Eddie Curtis

ofSnowflake entitled “Walking with Dinosaurs”.Perhaps the best title of the day was for apresentation called “why metadata is shit” from

Charles Kennelly

of ESRI (the room was packed andthe discussion was serious and thought provoking).

Do we need business models?

I talked aboutbusiness models (no slides because screen wouldn’tconnect to my Mac): “Without a business model weare all FCUK’d” The basic premise was that to turnyour idea into a successful business you need toknow who your customers are; what they arebuying from you; how much they will pay (and howmuch it costs you); and why they will buy from yourather than someone else. It was a lively sessionwith people standing up and giving elevator pitchesto feedback from the audience. One guy fromGoogle did not see the need for giving thought toa business model; he said ‘Why do you needmoney?’ – turned out that he had a successfulbedroom business that he was running outside ofhis day job (a mobile browser for iPhones andAndroids that didn’t store your browsing history soyour girlfriend wouldn’t know you had beenwatching porn) so maybe I had it all wrong. To behonest I didn’t know there was that much demandfor mobile porn.

Starting to understand

wherecampEU was runby a group of volunteers who persuaded sponsors

An unconference

The Californian Where2.0 style conference came toLondon last month.

Steve Feldman

sampled what was on offer at the eclecticwherecampEU event to which speakers just turn up and set their stall out in the hopesomeone will listen to them!

G i S P r o

f e s s i o n a l

joining the geography jigsaw

No risk of “death by powerpoint” – an unconference is all about spontaneity! Speakers just turn up, put their name and topic on a Post-it note and stick it on the wall to show they have something to say.