Wow I can’t believe it’s almost here again! For the 2nd year in a row I’ve helped in a small way to organise OggCamp! Glutten for punishment or the fact I love working working with the UUPC and LO folks. This year I’m over here which also helped so no flights and cross country travelling for me!
It’s just one short week until OggCamp 11! This year the event is bigger than last year, hard to believe good thing the venue is large to cope with it. Folks are travelling from all over the UK and from outside of the UK to make the weekend event, folks have even sorted out camping to help others and starting from Friday night Oggcamp is in full swing.
The Farnham Maltings venue has a really nice feel to it and is ideally located for the park and pubs. Venue aside it’s the people who come to the event, take part, giving a talk, demonstrating and getting together offline and face to face that make the event. Without people coming and taking a weekend out to join us there would be no point in having it, we could just tune into the podcasts 
There are three stages, two of which are being run as an unconference. That means that the wonderful OggCampers volunteer talks and others vote for the ones they’d like to see most! Today I’ve been kind of mulling about giving a talk, contemplating life outside of IRC in a FLOSS community, it’s just a thought at present may need to do some scribblings using old fashioned pen and paper and see how it goes from there.
We’ll be using CampFire Manager by Jon Spriggs to schedule these talks for the first time this year and it looks like it’ll be great.
Our main stage schedule is basically complete. The Ubuntu Podcast team will be joining forces with the Linux Outlaws for the traditional live podcast recording. There will be a panel discussion and a raffle too! We’re also grateful for our main stage speakers, including
- Simon Phipps
- LornaJane Mitchell (careers in Open Source)
- Chris Gutteridge (Southampton OpenData project)
- Steve Lee (Accessibility)
- Wayne Myers (professional music production on Linux)
We’ve got some exhibitors, including
- O’Reilly (who are offering 40% off their books on the Saturday)
- Free Software Foundation Europe
- Hacker Public Radio
- Ubuntu UK
- Reprap 3D printer
- FSF
We’ve also got some surprises planned for the weekend which you’ll only find out about by being there. If you want to come along and join in some or all of the weekend’s activities, you can. It’s free. That’s right, it doesn’t cost a penny. There are a few tickets left and you can get your hands on them here: http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com
It’s free thanks to our lovely sponsors:
- Bytemark (our headline sponsor!)
- Chris Procter on behalf of lug.org.uk
- Bitfolk (sponsoring the Saturday night party!)
On Saturday at lunch time we’re going to have a GEEKNIC! So come prepared with some nibbles or there are places close by to buy some food!
With a week to go the last bits of pieces are coming into play which hopefully means my inbox will stop filling up. Before we know it we’ll be standing in the William Cobbett pub sharing a drink or two with the lovely OggCampers on Friday night and won’t touch the ground until after the Sunday night drinks! The plan for the weekend is available on the OggCamp website.
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