Episode: 1074
Title: HPR1074: OGG Camp 11. Post-event Commentary with Alan Pope
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1074/hpr1074.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:31:13

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The full circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio in this episode are camp 11 post-event
commentary with Alan Poe.
The world and welcome to the full circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
This is the last of our highlights of last summer's Unconference Olk Camp 11 held at
final maltings in the south of England.
The full circle podcast is the companion to full circle magazine, the independent magazine
for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
This show is a post-conference debrief with Alan Poe, one of the event organizers and friend
of the show.
Well, we hope he's a friend since he sometimes guest presents with us.
So it's now midweek and I've finally managed to have a catch up with Mr. Alan Poe.
Good evening.
Hello, how are you doing, Robin?
Very good.
Very good.
Have you caught up your weekend's exertions?
Yeah, I've had a couple of early nights.
I think that's fixed everything.
I think I'm all right now.
Good.
I'm taking a little bit rapid in the headlights down at the pub on Sunday.
Yeah, a couple of late nights and I'm getting on a bit and I can't do three successive late
nights in a row with lots of drinking and then getting up relatively early.
So I guess the 64,000 kilobyte question is how do you think Og Camp 11 went?
Well.
Yes.
I guess it depends how you measure it.
If you measure how well it went by number of people, then we had about twice as many people
this year than last year.
So we had about 320 or so people this year, which is pretty good.
I guess because we're further south, it's easier for people to get to and we've promoted
it a lot more and you know, we're getting an established name or some or all of those
reasons.
I'm sure people don't come to see me and Tony and Laura and Mark.
They come to see all the fantastic speakers as I think because we announced lots of stuff
was happening.
More people came and it was in a really good venue.
I quite like the venue.
It seemed to go quite well and we've had positive feedback.
We've had some negative feedback but not a lot.
So that sounds good.
So yeah, I think it was pretty much a success.
Yeah.
I do as well.
It's the first Og Camp that I've been to having missed the previous two.
Well, they were a bit out of the way, weren't they?
First one was in Ballvant and the second one was in Liverpool.
So yes.
Yes.
But I could hardly not turn up to this one given that it was practically on my doorstep.
Yes, I would have sent someone round to get you if you didn't turn up.
Yeah, it was a very good venue worked out much better than I was expecting anyway.
Yeah, we had a bit of trouble getting the place, not trouble, but yeah, when we first
approached them, I think they're a bit perplexed as to what an unconference was and how can
you not know how many people are coming and what is going to happen, what are these people
coming here for?
You know, these are questions we couldn't actually answer very directly, which kind of threw
them a bit.
And how many rooms will you need?
We think three, but maybe more, maybe less, but yeah, it all kind of worked out.
And they even put Wi-Fi in the week before all of the camp ran because they didn't actually
have any public Wi-Fi in there.
They had a little access point in the reception, but nothing really majorly public.
And they put that in there and 325 people managed to, or however many people had wireless
devices, managed to use it and didn't fail at all.
Yes, we didn't kill it.
If you measure your conferences by that, then that worked, yes.
We did have quite a few decent speakers turned up.
I mean, everybody on the schedule track in the great hall turned up and did a sterling
job.
And I thought quite a few of our unscheduled speakers all pitched in and we hadn't quite
entertaining sessions out of it, who stood out for you, anybody in particular?
One of the ones that actually ended up with me giving someone some money at the end of
the talk, which is a good measure of whether it was a good talk.
I think was the Nanode Ken Boat, who along with London Hack Space has created this Arduino
like device called a Nanode.
And it's basically a small computer with a USB port on one end and an Ethernet port on
the other.
He had some kits there and he was showing people how to do soldering.
And selling the kits and the kits were like 20 pounds or something like that.
So I bought one and I know a few people bought them.
I think I got the last one, although I think a few people got the last one.
So I think that was a marketing trick.
But yeah, it was a good talk to hear about how, you know, how they develop this thing
and what you can do with it and what other people do with it.
And yeah, it's good fun.
So what are you planning to do with yours?
No idea.
My daughter's expressed a bit of an interest.
She's seven and she asked me what was in the bag and I pointed out all the little components
and she was helping me sort them out and she can read the resistor color codes really
well.
So I think that's a job for her.
As my eyesight seems to be going.
Right.
Might get her with a soulline and then see if she can see doing a bit of electronics.
Oh, the things that were interesting then also we have some exhibition space, there's
a couple of exhibitors that really took my eye.
One was the guys who made a rep wrap, the self-replicating printer things that could
get 3D items.
What's in fact the folks from a company called empirical limited who bought a 3D printer
down empirical.
So there was the 3D printer from empirical, empirical, which was cool.
There was a stand for the FSFE free software foundation Europe.
They were only able to come on the Sunday but it was really handy because I had a friend
who was looking for a job in the open source community.
She's applied for a job for a company and she doesn't really know much about open source
and she said to me, can you tell me all about it?
And I just turned a look at this guy from the FSFE and I said, ask him, he knows all
about it.
And I think she's spent about 20 minutes bending his ear about how open source works
and stuff.
And she came away brilliant, it answered all her questions.
So it's not just about sitting in a room and being talked about it, it's about having
conversations with people and that kind of stuff.
And it's those little things that we don't often hear about, or can the conversations
people have in corridors?
Yes.
There was quite a lot of that going on down in the reception area with the little coffee
bar and things.
Yeah.
Those chairs are very comfy.
When you sit down, you don't want to get up, do you?
No.
I think I didn't at one point.
I had a chat with Alistair Kergan, who's, I think he works for Red Hat on, works on LVM.
He's also been looking after most of UK lugs for a very long time.
He's been looking at the old Boomsday discs, you know, the old laser discs, like 1980
or whatever, and been decoding the data on them.
And he was going into some detail about the structure of the data on these old school
laser discs.
And that was right, super interesting.
And he was going to give a schedule, he was going to give a talk, but unfortunately,
the schedule was just full up.
So I got the benefit of him chatting about this, so maybe, maybe we'll get him back
next year to talk about it.
That would be really cool.
Yeah.
Because it's a data disc, but not as we know it, Jim.
Yes.
An analog data disc with everything kind of jammed in and compressed and interleaved.
And you look at the technical spec, because that project has actually been revived as
a new website, and they've had to decode and translate all of the old data.
And you look at the technology now and you go, how, how did you ever make that work
in the first place?
I know.
It's amazing, isn't it?
And one of the biggest problems that they had, that they didn't really consider back
then, but is an issue now, is that there's a massive copyright problem with the content
that's on the disc, because there's so much on there that may have been had the copyright
signed over to the BBC, but it might have been signed over by a little Jillian who's
six years old, who drew a picture, and that's been scanned in and put on the disc.
And, you know, legally, a six year old can't sign over copyright to, you know, stuff.
Yeah, whether they'll actually be able to publish the whole thing, I don't know, but it
was very interesting to hear about it.
And, and coming back to the, the scheduled track, very entertaining opening session from
Simon Thips, who is with his hats, I was telling people about Tommy Cooper, the sketches
that he used to do where he would flip hats every couple of lines, as he was doing various
jokes, and Simon was doing the same sort of thing.
But what I thought of was quite an entertaining opening speech turned out to be a little bit
controversial.
Not everybody quite saw eye to eye with Simon on some of the things he was saying about
what freedom means.
Yeah.
And I think that's, that's a good thing, because if you, if you come to our camp, it's
not, not the kind of conference where you expect absolutely everyone to have the same
opinion, a bit of debate, a bit of disagreement, some arguments here and there.
That's great.
That's a nice fluid community getting together and having a chat.
Yeah.
If, if we all, I think it would be a bit tedious if everyone turned up and sat there and
just gave them a big round of applause and said, yes, we all fully agree with everything
you say.
You are right.
I think it would be a bit boring.
So yeah, it's nice to mix it up a little bit sometimes.
And yet the, the much anticipated round of arguments that we expected out of the panel
discussion didn't quite happen.
The problem with that was I think they just run out of time to prep for that.
So unfortunately, it just suffered from being kind of thrown together a little bit too
quickly.
I think if they had a bit of chance to prep it, maybe that would have got a bit better.
But I think that's something we'll definitely learn for next time.
Yeah.
It wasn't a bad session.
It just wasn't quite the sparky thing that we thought we were going to get with the
simple panel up there.
Yeah, there were a few sparks and there was a bit of a bit of disagreement around the
area of cloud computing and who owned your data and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think maybe next time we'll do a bit more planning in that area.
It's funny because we've planned so many other parts of the conference and things like,
you know, all the crew were fantastic and they did all of their work and, you know, we
had these screens up showing you what talks were going on in what room and the wireless
was working great and everything else was working.
So there's something I had to give.
It couldn't, it couldn't all have worked on day one.
So yeah.
The logistical side of it was very impressive.
I don't think we had any breakdowns during the two days, did we?
No, you might not have seen them, but they were there.
We had little things like not being able to get video off of an SD card.
So I think possibly Simon's talk might not be available to watch later on video because
some mess up with the video cameras.
Oh, there was a good one with the talk scheduling system campfire manager that's written by
John sprigs, there were some bugs in that that we were ironing out through the weekend
and Mark kept scrolling away to SSH into the box and fix it.
Yeah, so I did notice there was a couple of, a couple of those went on and everybody had
the information and we all knew which rooms we were going in even when they got changed
like the Dicturpin Roadshow that shifted room almost the last minute.
Yeah, yeah, that happens sometimes, but you know, it keeps everyone on the toes, but
we all found where we where we needed to be.
The rooms weren't exactly far apart from each other, were they?
That's true.
Two of them were right next to each other and the other room was just down a set of stairs
and around a corner, you know.
If we did it again, I've had a number of people who said to me, if you do it again, do
it there again.
Yeah, I guess the question is what next for Ogk camp 12?
Yeah.
Well, the general consensus is we don't even think about it for a good few weeks or months
after the last one and luckily that, even if we did choose to go back to that venue, August
is a really quiet time for them, as long as we can get the sponsors and people want to
come, then we'll do again.
Good.
Well, I think I've passed on my congratulations and thanks to as many of the organisers as
possible, but yeah, I've been looking at the various comments that have been collected
on Lanyard of various write-ups that we've done and I think they've nearly all been
glowing and false some in their praise.
Yeah, that's good.
I think we'll consider that a job well done and look forward to the next one.
Thank you for that.
We look forward to the next event.
Yes.
I've got the gun published the latest episode of UUPC.
Go to your podcast.
I've got a one-two-day update or four, or details.
Very good.
Thank you very much.
Shall I let you get off?
Lovely to speak to you.
And you?
That was did you answer?
Yes.
Well, we'll have to have you on for a guest appearance because we keep thinking about
how to live and up the show.
Marvelous.
All right.
We'll line something up.
Hey.
You know, thanks very much.
Thank you.
See you later.
Bye.
Yeah.
That was a post-event chat with Alan Pope following Og Camp 11.
Alan has since joined canonical as engineering manager in product strategy, which means he's
engineering Ubuntu for hardware on a variety of devices and platforms.
He includes the shuttle with plan for Ubuntu on everything.
You can find Alan at Popey.com slash blog with the tagline, don't you know who I am?
And in his regular appearances as co-host of the Ubuntu UK podcast, that's at podcast.buntu-uk.org.
His wiki page is at wiki.buntu.com slash Alan Pope.
Og Camp is a joint venture organized by those lovely podcasters, the Linux Outlaws,
and the Ubuntu UK podcast.
That about wraps up our highlights of Og Camp 11 on the full circle podcast.
We'll be on two subjects new in following shows.
For now, I'm Robin Cattling.
Thank you for listening and goodbye.
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