Success at DemoCampVictoria01–My thoughts from last night

by Tris Hussey on April 4th, 2008

When you launch, launch with a bang: DemoCampVictoria01 Rocked

Last night I live-blogged Victoria’s first DemoCamp and it was a huge success. The place was packed. We were in the presentation centre for the new Juliet condos that are going up on Blanchard Street. The presentation centre is a lovely, lovely venue for event and thanks to Dave Chard, Wendy Pryde, and Jessica Pryde for being amazing hosts.

Mark Lise told me that he expected more than the 48 people there were chairs for and yep, that was true. It was a packed house. When this DemoCamp was being planned, Mark had arranged with buddies from Flock and Songbird (I’ve downloaded Songbird, btw) to give presentations, then in the couple days just before last night Mark said people came out of the woodwork to want to present. This was a great problem to have, more people who wanted to present than there was probably time for. As it turned out there was time for everyone.

Reflections on DemoCampVictoria01

One of the perils/problems with live blogging is that often you don’t get to synthesize what is going on until much later. When you’re at a conference and still covering other sessions often this means not getting back to reflect on what you wrote about (and having only vague memories of). Now a day later I’ve had some time to reflect a bit.

Sure Flock and Songbird get a lot of attention here, but what about SkyscraperPage? Oh didn’t know about them? Have you seen the scale drawings of skyscrapers? Chances are the drawings came from them. That was one of my wow moments. You’ve probably seen a lot of their skyscraper posters around. I’m told a Vancouver one will be out this spring (it’s at the printers right now).

Joshua McKenty talked about the irony of pushing BountyUp for a long time, then in a few hours made BuyLater and is already making money. It also helped that Lifehacker and others did some posts about him too.

Gels talked about her new project at UVic the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) where she is working on making a collaboration platform for academics to read and annotate scanned versions of texts. We’re talking about texts hundreds of years old. You know how hard it is to even to get to look as those kinds of documents much less discuss the contents in situ with people also interested in that time period? Pretty darn hard is the quick answer. There are a lot of cool things that can be done with a platform like that … once it is off the paper-alpha stage. No matter what Gels thinks, it was great to see such an important project presented at its very earliest stages.

We were even graced with Boris Mann’s presence (here is his chat with Wendy via Utterz) and the Victoria premiere of Darren and Julie in Victoria! Welcome back to Canada Darren and Julie.

So far Mark and Yule have posted their thoughts about DemoCampVictoria01. I think since I managed to live blog and get pictures up last night, I’m allowed to have slacked off a bit on this post.

I can’t wait for the next DemoCamp, I have a feeling we’re going to need a bigger place and there are going to be a lot of people wanting to present once they hear how well last night went.

More pictures from the event:

www.flickr.com