BlogCampSwitzerland – over and finished

Well, better late than never I blog 24 hours after the event started. I drove down to Zurich and (just for fun) used the cars navigation system. Either I am to stupid or those “navis” should be more intelligent. Why can’t it say “go to Enge” instead of “go straight”, and that on a road with four lanes, each going to another direction.

After finally arriving at the ETH, I parked and run into Dominik and William. While grabbing my stuff, I discovered that I forgot my beamer. Sorry again for that :o). We walked to the venue – which was the same as last October, the same rooms and all. But this time, there was a guy with a professional looking camera set, some nice and comfy chairs and music. I grabbed my number, pinned it on my shirt and was instructed that I am at the welcome and “get-your-number” desk. Shortly before 10 AM, Ronnie asked where everybody is. I told him, they all show up at the same time and the others will be late. Well guess what: I was right. Even the locals were late. Peter Hogenkamp started the intro session at 10 AM and we still welcomed a lot of people at the desk. Has anybody recorded it or knows what he said?

At 10:30 the crowd came out of the intro session and walked towards the (almost) empty schedule. And again, it started to fill pretty fast and all session were set. And here is my complaint: Due to the late start and the early finish it was only possible to schedule 4 sessions per room (4 sessions times 5 rooms equals 20 sessions). That was actually pretty bad. But we are discussing to change location for the next BarCamp or BlogCamp event. At the ETH we had to leave both times at 17:00 (5:00 PM) and clean up everything very quickly. Any ideas or suggestions?

The first session I went to was called “Wissensmanagement mit internem Multi-Blog” (en: Knowledge management with internal Multi Blog) by Jürg Stuker (CEO of namics ag) in German.
They always had the problem, that if people needed information, they sent emails to the whole company what generated a high volume of emails nobody really wanted and cared about and that the actual information and solution died in somebody’s inbox and others had to ask again.
A half year ago they rethought this and came up with a “multi-blog-platform” where every user could start a posting on a topic (his example was: a designer was searching for “red websites”) and the co-workers can comment to this post and add value. Pretty cool concept. But I had my doubts if really everybody was using this. He answered that the biggest “bloggers” are the consultants, they like to talk anyway he added. But the stats he showed that the real top-posters are the engineers, the CEO, a marketing guy and some consultants. He also added, that the designers needed the most time to “get it” and use it. But now the whole system gets between 10 and 30 new posts/comments a day. I really see a future in this. But we really need an open source system together with some nice AJAX features like Stephanie Booth wants.

After the short break I went to the talk by Mr. Minute. He was in jail over Christmas and New Year and blogged from inside his cell. Pretty freaky, right? Mr. Minute quickly explained why he was in jail, why he decided to go to jail instead of paying a fine and what he did there. You have to know, in Switzerland you might be only “half-prisoned”. That means, you can leave the prison during the day and go to work. But at 20:00 you have to be back. You are not allowed to have laptops, mobile phones or other stuff in your cell. But there are ways to sneak in stuff. He said everybody has two or three mobile phones and leave one of them at the counter. And somehow he managed to keep a laptop over night and started to blog. His first problem was: “How do I get connected?” One of the prisons neighbors had an open access point. But on evenings, the connection was so slow, it was no fun at all. Later he sneaked in an external antenna for his WLAN-card. That worked better, until it broke. The next thing he uses was a beam device. Shortly after powering it on, Net Stumbler beeped like crazy. He now had connections to APs from far, far away. Maybe I need one of those as well? Pretty cool session and one of the geekiest I have seen until now.

After the lunch break with some other Bloggers (like Jens from BlogWiese, Bruno Giussani, Gabor, Jul and others – drop me a note and I’ll add you, I really forgot your names *shame*) I went to see a “real” (white hat) hacker: benbit – with glasses and a cap. His session title was: “Wie man sich in einem Blog unbeliebt macht – Live hacking”. The English title is something like: “How to make enemies with your blog”. He discovers XSS vulnerabilities. And because he is a white hat hacker – a lot of the participants didn’t knew the difference between black and white hat hackers, bleh – he informs the companies and does not use his discoveries. But he complained about the unwillingness from such companies to fix the holes. He talked about the Swiss national TV and found a XSS in their contact form. He asked the participants about sites he should check. bö said “ringier”. Benbit first tipped www.ringer.ch instead of www.ringier.ch, yes the keyboard was bad :-). In the first input form he found, he tipped in ‘>huhu and already found a XSS. The Ringier employees weren’t that happy 🙂

The last session of the day was Gabor’s “talk” … em discussion about “The Future of Blogging Technology”. It was the only session I went to the language was English. His point is, that blogging hasn’t changed over the year. There are of course new ideas like twitter (btw. twitter isn’t that big in Switzerland) and his explanation “who writes/blogs for who”. I really hope he shares his slides. For a better transcript surf to Stephanie and her blog post.
One sidenote: Stephanie is right, posting should be more AJAX like. I love the Flickr way to rename and add description to an image. That can’t be to hard for Matt and the WordPress guys (I don’t talk about plugins, we want it native!).

After cleaning up and packing, we decided to meet at the NewsBar in Zurich Downtown. But only 5 other people showed up. Did the others meet somewhere else or was that to “un-organized” for the rest :-)?

That was it, BlogCampSwitzerland. At the outro session, Peter asked who would come again in half a year and 80% raised their hands. Maybe we have another BlogCamp or BarCamp event this year. For that, I made a little list what we should change for the next time:

• Maybe another location. ETH is cool, but we want to stay longer. I remember in Berlin, we sat around in the yard for a long time and talked, blogged, surfed and discussed.
• We should have some dress stands (Kleiderständer).
• Make a two day event. The evenings are often so cool.
• Please, bring your cameras, dv-cams, microphones and shot, record, and podcast about the event.
• More sessions. At BarCamp we had around 5-7 sessions per room. A had around 25 sessions in 4 rooms. It is more intense, but you also have to talk about more.
• An AfterCamp event – organized and communicated to others. Reserve some tables somewhere. Tell everybody where we meet! This is so great. You can talk and discuss on other stuff or on things that happened at the *Camp. And you network a lot.
• Maybe we can finally find a sponsor for t-shirts.
• … please add your ideas, needs and comments below!

Again, somebody showed up with a tie 🙂

You can find my Flickr images on my set and hundreds of other photos under the “blogcampswitzerland” tag. My videos will be linked from the BarCamp site and blog.