I ran two sessions at #bcbomo3, one on ableton live and the other… The Failure Swapshop

My aim for the session was to encourage people to celebrate their failures and share with the group the lessons they learned.

It went a bit like this:

“Hi, my name’s Luke, and I failed” (cue cheers + applause from the crowd)

“I did ___, it failed because of ___ and the lesson I learned was ___”

I kicked off the celebration of failure by talking about a start-up I worked on many years ago that lost its way and failed.

After a slow start, where people needed encouragement at first, the session really got going and more and more people opened up and shared business, personal and technical failures. Some were valuable life lessons, some… well… simply hilarious!

I wrote any lessons learned onto the white board (both sensible + silly):

• Stay on target (Stay focussed)
• Don’t lie about your abilities (but if you already have, learn the thing you said you could do asap!)
• Don’t trust:
  • Grown ups
  • Other people’s code
  • Your own code
  • Lotus Notes
  • Consultants
  • Programmers
  • Acronyms
• Back ups = Good
• Don’t get distracted by shiny things
• Don’t think you know it all
• Check for typos
• Always check the box contents
• Try a restart
• Don’t try to be funny (the story behind this one was BRILLIANT, I won’t recount it here)
• Don’t expose your dev server to the world
• Ask for help
• Failure can become a win

If you’d like to share your failure, please do add a comment below and tell us what happened and most importantly what you learned from your glorious failure.

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Bar Camp Bournemouth is done and dusted for another year, big thanks to all our attendees who made the event so good and our kind sponsors:
Proactive, Nokia OVI, Bournemouth Uni, the BCS (Dorset + YPG) and G3 Radio

A great variety of talks, from the technical to the… less serious:

Day 1 grid:

(Day 1 photo from Tom Morris)

Day 2 grid:

If you missed it this year, go forth and follow @bcbournemouth for details of next years event… or look out for a Bar Camp near you!

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We’re less than 2 weeks away (Feb 26+267h) from Bar Camp Bournemouth 3, last years event saw over 100 tech/web folk converge on Bournemouth uni for 2 days of talks, discussion and stuff.

See the site above for more info (few tickets available at time of publication) or search for #bcbomo3 on twitter for the dicussion around the event.

Also coming up for all creative / web / techy folks is the fabulous Meetdraw (Mar 24th) – more social than bar camp but still very much worth attending for those around Bournemouth who are creative / web based businesses.

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I went to Internet World 09 and I was really disappointed, I found it hard to say why I didn’t really like it.. apart from the poor quality of the talks I attended… now I think I know what it is.

It’s just such… an OLD and dated format, its interruptive, its all about sales and not content.

He who pays, talks – if I go to see someone talk, I want them to be an expert in their field, not just a guy with a chequebook.

Money generating not knowledge generating – it’s about selling stuff, not adding value… ok I cringed writing that, a bit of a cliche but it’s so true! If I look back at all the events I liked and hated this is the key difference

Why do we need it? – a conference, about the “internet world”? Stop and think for a minute, erm… isn’t there a better way?

Ok, I do get that it’s handy if you’re a huge product or a big buyer. Personally, looking for ideas, innovation, inspiration… it’s all about the smaller niche ones like:

ContentStrategyLondon10 – superb, an intimate gathering on a specific topic. Lots of good networking, 3 excellent speakers (and beer).

TEDxCDF – outstanding, inspiring speakers by invitation. It expanded the mind and gave me something back for my time. (Great Guardian write up)

BarCampBournemouth2 – with the almost anarchistic approach that anyone can speak, you build your own conference program and interact with almost all the other delegates.

Plus by not going, I’ve probably saved about a tree in brochures I’ll never read…

I asked on twitter if it was just me who thought it wasn’t worth my time:

“I’m bothering, but I’m not optimistic based on last year!”

“Yeah it seemed a bit s#!% to me too.”

“Not Definitely no need.”

“I’m not doing IW, did it last year. Too corporate, so many cheaper ways of doing the same things, not as handy as the A4Uexpo.”

So go forth, find the small get-togethers and un-conferences… expand your mind. Don’t give up your time to be sold at.

What do you think? Did you go to IW10? Was it any good?

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Big thank you to C4L and Fibreband our main sponsors of BarCamp Bournemouth 2.

If you haven’t signed up to come along… why not?

** Sign up for BarCampBournemouth2 here **

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