BarCampLondon2 :after
If you read my Thurday's post, I was terribly undecided about what to talk about (doesn't sound too good, heh!), but after forcing myself to revisit all the special and interesting issues or topics I have been involved in lately, I finally decided that I really needed to talk about communicating and more specially, making yourself understood. So here they are... the slides for Being Understood by Soledad Penadés. (I presume they are not self explanative so I'll probably extend them in an article soon).
The presentation itself wasn't nothing spectacular but I think it went terribly well, given that it was the first time I spoke to strangers and in english. We were a reduced number of people so we could have some interesting chat instead of being a traditional speech, which was pretty cool.
I tried to use a Flash based tool for making the slides, but as I couldn't to find certain files and also I was beginning to feel the panic attack at 3AM I decided to go for some HTML+Javascript+CSS. I used Script.aculo.us and Prototype for the little Javascript involved, which could be thought of as absolutely overkill but anyway, it was a quick hack ;-)
The good thing of this is that as the slides are HTML with a css style sheet only for screen, if you try to print them they will appear as raw HTML with all the content still looking meaningful. In fact, if you use Firefox and have the Web Developer Toolbar installed, try deactivating all the linked styles - it should do :-)
BarCamp itself was great. It was very very motivating to see so many active people, so many presentations lined up, on so many different topics. I really liked that willing-to-share atmosphere. And in a way, it also confirmed that dream idea that we have discussed some times of organising an event like that, where people could organise themselves and their timetable, wander around the spaces and join whatever they liked more. And the next half an hour, maybe present something.
So, congratulations and thanks to all the organisers and attendees for the insane amount of work required for bringing it all up and running :-)