WherecampUK 2010 Recap

Last week I journeyed down on the train to Nottingham to go to WhereCampUK – an unconference for all things “geo” – but it was only a few months since the similarly named WhereCampEU of (which I never actually wrote something about) down in London. Before I share some of the best bits, here’s some of the similarities and differences.

* Less international folks

* Less big geo personalities and keynotes

* More OSM

* No T-Shirts

* More beer – we drank a large pub dry, literally. The next day, the landlord swore at me for pissing off their regulars.

* More cake

* Cheaper and quicker to run, setup and organise.

For more pointers in how to run an unconference, check out Steve Coast‘s latest post, where he writes about what he did for Wherecamp in Denver.  How I ran a successful unconference in 6 hours and you can too.

Overall, the event was great.

I ran two sessions. The main one was “What is Psychogeography“. The best part of this was sending all participants out with directions in twos and threes, for 10 mins before lunch. They had directions such as “left left right”, “follow someone”, “ask where the centre is, follow that direction, ask again”, “find hidden portals”, “find fairies”, “hear something, take a photo”.

I also quickly slotted in the NYPL Warper presentation, and included this slide. You get 20 points if you know what this refers to!

I also mentioned the words “neogeography” for the first time in the conference, and that was at 3:30pm, which says quite a bit about the use of the term.

Talks I liked were:

* Vernacular Geography & Informal Placenames

* Geo Games

* Education and mobile maps

* Augmented Reality roundup

* How streets get names

* Peoples Collection Wales

* Haptic Navigation

* OSM Talks including – Potlatch 2

* Gregory Mahler’s – I’m a Psycho Mapper!

* OSGEO



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