Tania.co.za

BarCamp, StarCamp, PodCamp, Geek Dinners and 27 Dinners: A brief political history for Capetonians

BarCamp

In 2006 on a very cold weekend, a bunch of geeks (plus a couple of people who felt that by hanging around geeks, they could make money) met in a dark and uninspiring school hall in Kuils River, where they were very inspired. Based on similar events held elsewhere in the world (if you're really interested, you could probably get someone to explain how FooCamp spawned the BarCamp revolution), the Cape Town event was largely driven by Conrad Strydom, but nobody seems to know what has become of him since.

Many of the guys who were at the Cape Town event have now become quite famous as a result of the BarCamp catalysis.

Dave Duarte, Rafiq Philips, Adrian Rossouw and
Miguel dos Santos at BarCamp in June 2006.

Geek Dinners and 27 Dinners

One of them, Dave Duarte (a then colleague of Conrad Strydom) co-presented case study on blog marketing featuring Stormhoek, a small wine company which managed to make a name for itself on a shoestring budget by effectively harnessing the power of the Internet and social media. Graham Knox, Stormhoek's owner, spoke of how they sponsored so called "geek dinners" — parties held by computer guys who had blogs — in America and other countries, in exchange for having these guys say something about their wine on the Internet. These could be costume parties or formal dinner parties — any kind of party where wine is consumed.

As part of Stormhoek's South African launch, Dave and Graham started organising dinners in Cape Town. Here, a "geek dinner" took the specific form of a sit-down dinner in a restaurant with talks by volunteer speakers, and sometimes also with live entertainment.

The Mike-Stopforth-comes-to-town get-together at Yindees that led to
more formalised 27 Dinners and Geek Dinners in Cape Town.
In the foreground are Conrad Strydom and Miguel dos Santos.

Soon, however, some of the people who attended the parties began to feel that they had been cheated: they had expected a get-together of computer enthusiasts, but instead, they had to listen to yuppie marketing pitches and to pay a lot of money for very little food (a hallmark of nouvelle cuisine). As a result, a breakaway movement called the Original Geek Dinner was formed with the wine sponsor varying from event to event, while Dave (teaming up with Mike Stopforth, with whom he later went into business) continued with a series of events which became known as the 27 Dinners, being held on the 27th of every second month. (The latter movement soon spread to Johannesburg, Durban and elsewhere). In spite of the split, many people such Ian Gilfillan and I continued to attend both events on alternating months.

Jonthan Endersby, Joe aka Swimgeek (and other names, including his real name) and
Jaco Engelbrecht at one of the early events organised by Dave and sponsored by Stormhoek.
After this one in February 2007, Geek Dinners and 27 Dinners became two separate events.

Rather than being opposing "camps", the two groups may be considered branches (or perhaps clusters) which focus on different aspects of Information Technology. Both have a leaning towards Open Source, but the 27 Dinner movement focuses on the outward, glitzy side of new media, with a lot of emphasis on marketing, while the Geek Dinner also includes the guts and the engine room.

Through a curious set of coincidences involving Jaco Engelbrecht and Die Mystic Boer, I got to know Jonathan Hitchcock. In spite of having missed both BarCamp and all the 27 Dinners, Jonathan soon became one of the most diligent organisers of the Geek Dinners.

Rudi van Niekerk, Graham Poulter and Wessel Venter at the September 2007 Geek Dinner.

Related events, such as visits to South Africa by Wikipedia's founder, and the Open Coffee Club (run by Eric Edelstein and focusing on business networking amongst entrepreneurs) attracted members of the same crowd, and so the movement grew. (Ian Gilfillan is leading Cape Town's bid to hold the next Wikimania conference. Results are due any day now.)

Glen Verran interviews Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia at the Creative Commons event in Observatory.
In the background is Zalta, Stefano Sessa's girlfriend.

PodCamp

Being into "broadcasting IT", one of the original guys from BarCamp, Glen Verran (host of the ZA Show podcast), stuck with the 27 Dinner branch and began organising an event focused on new media. The first Cape Town PodCamp will be held on 20 October. (ProjectManagement.co.za is sponsoring a prize draw for a copy of James P. Lewis' Fundamentals of Project Management.)

*Camp (StarCamp)

With Conrad Strydom being AWOL and thus no plan for another BarCamp for 2007, another original BarCamper, Neil Blakey-Milner (a Geek Dinner affiliate who also frequents 27 Dinners) began organising *Camp — a kind of "bigger, better BarCamp".

I was a (very nervous) speaker at the original BarCamp 2006. I chose to do a short presentation on Lotus Notes/Domino as an development platform, showing some of the applications which I have developed for the Web and for the Notes client, including the templates which run content-managed Web sites such as ProjectManagement.co.za and Pavatile.co.za. (Thank goodness Adrian Rossouw told me he found it interesting, because without that reassurance I would probably would have gone and hidden myself in a cupboard afterwards.) As a keen social chessplayer, I put my name down to speak about the social aspects of chess at a Geek Dinner in mid-2007, but later chickened out. However, Bryn Divey came and sat down next to me at the Creative Commons event at the Armchair Theatre in Observatory, and talked me into doing a short presentation for the following Geek Dinner after all. I switched my subject to Project Management in Five Minutes Flat, but actually delivered it in ten minutes. Since this was quite well received, I thought it might be a good idea to do a longer presentation at *Camp, focusing specifically on Project Management software, with plenty of demos, particularly of scheduling software. I had initially wanted to present a workshop for newbies on the technical steps involved in setting up a formal personal Web presence (from domain registration through DNS setup and mail forwarding to building and uploading a Web site), but I can't feasibly do both. I have also been promising a talk on graphic design for non-designers, which I intend to deliver in abridged form at the next Geek Dinner.

*Camp is scheduled for 8–9 December 2007.