Chaos'n'Coffee

The first day of this first barcamplondon of the post-BBC era is over, and here I am to write down a few considerations on the experience.
The overall impression is awesome, and I think the general mood is that this event is definitely up to the standard we were used, although in the morning I saw a quite a big stack of “undelivered” badges that gave me an early feeling of emptiness.
Another thing that hit me as soon as I got to the leicester square venue was the fact that the rooms are actually spread over three different non-contiguous floors of an eight floors building and, on average, quite tiny (10-12 people). I immediately thought this was going to be a logistic nightmare.
I was (happy to be) wrong: having many (8) small rooms (well, two are actually biggish boardrooms that can easily host 40-60 people) turned out to be a very good context to spark conversations, as each and every session I’ve been to turned out in a lively, often inspiring, discussion.
And about logistics, I must say that thanks to the wonderful endurance of the first floor staff that kept giving direction and routinely FOB-ing the door (I felt sorry for them), and a really awesome 6th floor terrace overlooking soho and acting as decompression space (and no, it wasn’t even raining!) the experience has been more than enjoyable.

Among the topics I’ve learned about today:
* Arduino rfid hacks (by Nigel Crawley with whom I attended the RFID workshop at the Dana Centre a couple of weeks ago – it’s been interesting, although a bit frustrating, to see where he went from there)
* Making a better system for government consults. With Harry Metcalfe from tellthemwhatyouthink, and also Rob McKinnon from theyworkforyou.co.nz.
* How to make a proper Italian espresso (no, really!) – with Carmen Boscolo and Julius Solaris, who then went on presenting his ideas on building a “proper”, all-in-one solution for event management. Thanks to a really interested audience, the follow-up conversation lead to the potential basis to start outlining and/or building something! Fingers crossed (and yes, good espresso is obviously essential to properly manage a conference, so everything fits).
* Usable Conference, a project by Jure Chalev on creating guidelines for a successful conference, something along the line of what we did in Italian on the Bzaar Wiki – note: I think a set of tangible deliverables would really help in this case, like a checklist that you can actually print and carry with you when you’re considering venues, or at the event itself.
* Usability testing for console games, with Andy Budd. A lot of interesting facts and ideas, first of all that, quite unexpectedly, most of the console games that hit the shelves don’t actually go through a proper usability testing process. Key idea: games, unlike for example office suites, cannot afford to be unusable.
* Comet web application architecture, with a cool demo chaos game session.

A great part of the day has been also, as usual, the presence of old friends with which to hang on,
and force you to talk through your thoughts.