Backnetwork sees another outing this weekend. We have setup a full copy of the system for the delegates of BarCamp Ireland barcampireland1.backnetwork.com. If you have not heard of BarCamp it’s a great idea a non-conference conference. In their own words…

“A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.”

What this really means is that a whole group of people gather for a weekend. There are no formal speakers or lineups, every attendee has to speak for 30mins on what ever subject matter they want.

I went to BarCamp London a couple of weeks ago; it was a really energetic event. I was taken aback about how well people can organise themselves given the space to do so. I gave a talk about my experiences of using Microformats while building the backnetwork site. We ended up with a mini Microformats track with Frances Berriman starting with an introduction to Microformats my talk in the middle and then Drew Mclellan giving an interesting perspective on the subject by talking about microformat parsing.

As with d.construct it is great to be able to support any event like BarCamp by providing a resource that hopefully be will be useful to the delegates.

I have now become interested in the virtual aspects of an event I am not attending. It is a bit like going to the pub to watch a game of football, a second virtual community built around a physical event. I hope they starting blogging soon as I really want to know the score.