LUG Radio Live and OggCamp

I spent the weekend in the company of fellow geeks in Wolverhampton at LugRadio Live and OggCamp. As can be expected the ratio of connected devices to attendees was over 1 and we successfully saturated several WiFi routers to death.

While LugRadio was a more typical conference type event with scheduled speakers OggCamp was a more informal BarCamp style affair. Both had a number of interesting speakers and discussions including presentations made by the Open Street Map people discussing their ambitions to map the world in an open and re-usable way. An interesting suggestion made for the Free the Postcode campaign was to skip adding postcodes to Christmas mail replacing them with FREE THE POSTCODE on the last line. It was suggested it would get the Royal Mails attention very quickly as it would increase their cost of routing mail by more than the money they make selling the database. Other people pointed out making lives harder for the workers on the ground was not the right way to campaign. I'm in two minds about the idea but I suspect the Royal Mail have other concerns higher up their agenda at the moment.

I finally signed up with cold hard cash to the Open Rights Group who I've had plenty of warm words for recently. I even volunteered some time for one of their projects which I shall talk about more when I have something to show. However it was pleasing to find out that the plans to widen electronic voting and counting have been effectively abolished although slightly worrying to hear some of the stories from our brief flirtation with the technology. Their report on voting can be found on their website. For now their current campaigns include petitioning against the 3 strikes proposals and the mass surveillance of peoples electronic communication.

Some people who were following my Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook status feeds may have been confused by the preponderance of #lrl2009 and #oggcamp hash tags in my updates over the last few days. These were the conference tags which were being followed by attendees as well as several live projectors which were displaying messages posted with the tag. This was the source of much hilarity to people at the conference although probably made less sense to people following the stream from the outside world. It seems that micro-blogging is quickly overtaking communal IRC channels as the way to keep in touch with conferences.

I came home on Sunday evening tired but having enjoyed a lovely weekend of geeking out and looking forward to a 2 day OggCamp sometime next year!