hpr_transcripts/hpr0746.txt

Episode: 746
Title: HPR0746: Interview with Tony Whitmore about OggCamp11
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0746/hpr0746.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:50:56

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Hello everybody. Today on HPR, we're going to interview Tony Whitmore from the Ubuntu
UK podcast about AgCamp 11, which is taking place on the weekend of August the 13th and
14th at Farnham in Surrey in the UK.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. Today I'm really excited
to talk to one of the guys I listen to every week from the Ubuntu UK podcast and also
representative of the Ob AgCamp 11, Mr. Tony Whitmore. How do you...
Ken, how are you doing? Not too bad, not too bad. It's nice to speak to you.
It's very funny to have somebody on the phone talking back to you when you're
only screaming, Tony, you're wrong. Ah yeah, I get that a lot in the street sometimes.
You do all you're so famous. So, Tony is it wrong?
Is it, um, August 11 or is it Uncle AgCamp 11 or AgCamp 1-1?
It's both. Fortunately, this year and last year we were happy, happy coincidence that the
the number in binary and the number of the year match up. What we'll do next year if we do an
event next year? Who knows? But yeah, I'll camp 10, I'll camp 11. This is our third
AgCamp, which we've done and this year we've taken it down south in the UK.
The first one was in the Midlands. The last second one, sorry, was up in the north,
happy Liverpool and this time we brought it back down south. Yeah, and it's in say. As you said
in the intro, it's in Farnham. The event is taking place at a venue called Farnham
Malttings, which used to be a brewery. So, we are literally organising an event in a brewery,
make your own jokes there and that's in Surrey in the UK. Okay, very good. So, how did this
all AgCamp things start? Well, most of the people who involved in the organisation of AgCamp,
so that's the Ubuntu UK podcast crew and the Linux Outlaws guys and a few other kind of helpers
were big fans of LogRadio, which you are, I know you used to listen to as well, but the one of
the earlier Linux podcasts and they used to do an annual event called LogRadio Live and in 2009
they did the last one, which was a one day event, whereas previously it had been two day event.
So, what we said was, why don't we do our own little event on the Sunday,
there have been an answer today, in a nearby hotel and sort of tack it onto the end,
and the guys came along and we started on Camp that way. And then next year there was no LogRadio
Live at all and everybody said, we've got to do our camp on two days. So, no pressure there,
but we did our best and that was the Liverpool event. Oh, fantastic. So, you've got a done so sick
of doors and Lordeners or? No, no. Well, there was no real reason to go to Wolverhampton once
a LogRadio had stopped and sorry if you live in Wolverhampton, but you know, it's not the nicest
place in the world. Liverpool was great, that was where Dan, who's one of the Linux Outlaws,
guys, is based and he was able to do a lot of the donkey work around Liverpool. And this year
we decided we wanted to take some of the load off Dan and we made sense to do it somewhere which is
local to those of us who live in the south and then next year who knows, we'll be either back up in
Liverpool or somewhere else. Okay, cool. And this is a mashup between the Ubuntu UK
podcast and the Linux Outlaws. That's right. We obviously got both quite different audiences
and Dan and Fab with the Linux Outlaws and us and Ubuntu UK podcast and we just thought,
well, let's pool our resources and see what we can make of it. Absolutely fantastic. I just want
you both to know that you all to know that I have been saving up Brony points all year for this.
Every time I'll take care of the kids dear, but there has to be no debates about that weekend.
Whenever it is, I'm going. Wow. Okay, there's no pressure on us then. It's not a really good weekend.
Not at all. Now believe me, I've been to the first two
lug radio lives whilst we able to make it over to the other two and if I can guarantee,
you know, it's going to be, it's just such a good event when everybody comes together.
So yeah, I booked my flight. When do I, when do I need to arrive Friday, Saturday morning,
Tommy? You can arrive when, whenever you like. Of course, we will probably have some sort of event
on the Friday evening. The actual official event is Saturday and Sunday, but I should imagine
we'll be getting together in a pub or some sort of, you know, watering hole near the venue on the
Friday evening for a bit to do informal get together, but we'll have to work that out a little
bit closer to the time. And the event itself will kick off on Saturday morning. I think we're
going to be opening the doors about half past 10 at final maltings and the first sort of talk,
I guess, will be at 11 o'clock, I think. And then it will go all the way through till five o'clock.
And then the, I think I'm writing saying it's 11 o'clock on the Sunday morning again and
through about four o'clock on Sunday for people who've got to head off home.
Okay, and will there be anything on the Sunday evening for people?
Again, Sunday evening, I'm sure we'll have some sort of informal meet-up in a hotel or a pub or
something like that. Finally, there's a very nice little village in Surrey and it has got a number
of nice little pubs. So I'm sure they will be, they have, we're heavily used by the Okkan Patendys,
Saturday evening. Again, we're hoping to do something a little bit more organized on Saturday evening,
but we're not sure where and we're still kind of looking into that. So these are the kind of
periphery events. The main main art camp event itself, we know pretty much what's going on
on the Saturday and the Sunday in terms of the the format of the day. But what we don't know is
the schedule because it's an unconference type event. Well, okay, well, unconference event is
an unscheduled conference. Sometimes called bar camps where we don't know in advance exactly what
the weekend is going to entail. Now, this year we are having a schedule track of speakers and then
two unscheduled tracks. So it means that people are coming along to the event,
can bring, I don't know, either a talk or a workshop or just something that they wanted to do
and wanted to kind of lead the way on. So it effectively had that incorporated into the event
timetable. So it means that it's really what you make it. The event is what you make it and what
you want to bring to it. We've had some great things, just great talks come out of the woodwork
at the last couple of years that nobody really anticipated ahead of time. But people sort of
volunteered them on the weekend and they turned out to be some of the highlights of the weekend
for people. So exactly how does this work? I guess the door is open at 11, people move in.
What do you do? You write on the board somewhere? What do you want to talk? For example,
I want to give a talk on how to do a podcast. Okay. What we know we have is the first talk of the
weekend is pre-arranged and pre-sheduled. And that gives everybody about an hour to feverously
behind the scenes, sort out the schedule for the rest of the day, which will then make available.
Now we're looking to various options of how we can do that electronically as well as,
you know, on displays or posters or whatever it might be around the venue. So there are a number
of different ways to find out what the schedule is. But yes, as you come through the door,
you can volunteer a talk and people can express their interest in going to that talk and
we try to prioritise the ones that have the most interest. Okay. So will there be, you know,
somebody's supposed to bring a laptop, USB stick? Is there going to be a beamer? How long do you have?
A mixture of slots, I think some of the shorter ones were about half an hour. But again, if there's
two or three people who've only got 10 minutes, they want to do each, then no reason why they can't
combine their efforts and take a half hour slots. Some of the longer slots are an hour long,
but we try to kind of balance a mixture of the two. There will be digital projectors provided
and if necessary, because some of the rooms are a little larger than others, there'll be a PA
provided as well. Generally, speakers bring along their own laptop or tablet or whatever they want
to use if they happen to want to be running slides. Some speakers, of course, just talk.
Okay. And are the, for the people who can come over, the
presentation is going to be recorded and released? That's the plan. We've got Alan Bell, who's
leading up the AV crew. It's going to be planning to record all of the talks and make them available
as soon as possible after the event. I'm sure Alan will do a great job, but generally it's a very
difficult thing to get all this content sort of uploaded and encoded or whatever. So there's always
a bit of a delay after the event and sometimes in recordings get lost or whatever. So the only way
to be sure to see all the best stuff that's going on up campus to turn up on the day. Very good
idea. Very good idea. So they'll be released, obviously, under a creative commons license of
some sort, I guess. Yeah, I should imagine so, yeah. And how are you doing for attendees?
Very well. We've been a little bit taken aback about the number of people who've expressed
an interest. One of the things we've done this year is to use Eventbrite so people can just
sign up for a ticket entry is free, we should say. We didn't mention that, but we do ask people
just to sign up on Eventbrite so we know how many people are coming. We haven't done that
the last couple of years and we've all been really shocked and surprised pleasantly about how many
people have expressed an interest in coming to Oddcamp this year. So we've had to make another
couple of batches of tickets available and that's meant sort of swapping rooms around and trying to
make the most of the space that we would available to us. So if you're interested in signing up for
a ticket, you can go to Oddcamp11.eventbrite.com and that's Bright B-R-I-T-E. It's also linked
from our homepage at Oddcamp.org and there will be a link in the show notes for this episode.
Oh, brilliant, excellent. So if you're interested in coming along, you can sign up for a ticket there.
If for some reason you find out later that you're unable to make it, if you let us know, we can release
that ticket to somebody else. At the moment, there are still tickets available, but they've been going
down quite quickly. So yeah, if you let us know if you're not able to make it, we can make that
ticket available. And yeah, that's absolutely fantastic. And so once this has filled up, that's it.
There's no more tough turning people away. We've got a file in on the venue, so we'll let people
in up to that file limit. Obviously, we're going to make sure the people who have signed up for tickets
are going to be able to get in first. If there is somebody who turns up on the day and there's space
and then we're not going to turn them away because it's a community event and it's not
a Rolling Stones concert or something like that. We're trying to make as many people
included as possible. But yeah, if you let us know you're playing on coming, it's the best way to
be guaranteed that you can get in. So I'd love to read your live one on two that was sort of
a bit of a zippeter area in the halls that are on the first. Do you do something like that?
We're hoping to. We have done in previous years, but rather than commercial exhibitors, as in
I'm from a company X and here's my stand with a vertical banner and some leaflets,
they're more kind of community oriented. So there are people who have invented cool things using
Arduino's or there was a text message controlled bubble machine last year, for example.
There were guys who were helping people install a bunch who on their laptops and some, I think,
open-susers had a desk and things there. So we don't know again. We don't know exactly who's
going to be there because it's still a couple of months out, three months out from the event.
And if people are interested in having a stand, they can get in touch with us.
Best is to email ocacamp at Ubuntu-uk.org. And we can try and sort you out with a table.
That's fantastic. I think you are aware already that HPR are interested in having a table at that
event. Indeed, I think you're on our list. So that's good. And it is pretty much just a table.
All the exhibitors get the same. It's not like a big corporate event. You get a wallpaper table
essentially and you can do with that pretty much what you like. Is there power us, the table?
Will there be network kibbles or network available? There should be power. We're not sure about
the network yet. We're still talking to the venue about whether there's internet connectivity
that we can use or whether we've got to try and provide some of our own. Same goes for Wi-Fi.
It's obviously useful if we're doing electronic scheduling and things. But it's also, you know,
difficult to do and difficult to do well. Yeah. Okay, that is fantastic. Just some information
for people who are traveling. How do you get from Heathrow or their main airports over to Farnham?
Well, there are good rail links from London that are out out to Farnham. It's pretty near
Gatwick Airport and it's not so far from Heathrow and it's even reasonably close from Southampton
Airport. So if you're flying from Europe, there are a number of different options that you can
fly in on. The train links are pretty good for the safe from London. It's pretty well connected
by road as well. So if you were going to hire a car or something, the other options are
bus and I think there's some pretty good bus routes as well down from London by using the local
bus routes and that sort of thing. And I'm sure you could cycle or walk as well. And all this,
of course, would be on the website, I guess. Yeah, there's some information up there at the moment
and we're hoping to get more information up there as we get it confirmed ourselves.
Okay, fantastic. And what about accommodation? Do you have any routes or special
routes or hotels or is it just come as you find a spot? We have a what we're calling a suggested
hotel. We haven't got a formal arrangement with a hotel. The one we are suggesting is the
Premierian in Aldershot, which is about three miles up the road. So it's not directly on the door
step, but it's a reasonable quality hotel for a reasonable rate. They were last in my check
they were doing rooms for a double rooms for about 44 pounds for Saturday night, for example. So
that's pretty good. There are other hotels in Farnham itself, which have got the advantage that
you can just stagger there at the end of the night if you want to, but they tend to be a lot
poshier and therefore a lot more expensive. So if you are well healed, then you know, make
you make your own selection of hotel. And there are some good folks who are actually camping,
they're taking the camp in Og Camp literally and camping out in various places nearby. I'm very
good. And what's the transport arrangements between that hotel and Aldershot and whatever,
how much would a taxi run you? A taxi would probably be just a handful of pounds. So I'm guessing
probably four or five pounds. The obviously if you share that between a number of people, then it
you know, obviously goes down quite dramatically. It's about three pounds on the train. There's a good
train link from Aldershot train station down to Farnham train station. I think that's three pound
return even. So you know, it's not very much too holistic. But then again, there's only a three mile
walk. So if you fancy a nice brisk morning walk, it'll take you about 45 minutes to an hour to
walk down the road. Okay, absolutely cool. I am really, really looking forward to it. And I'm
looking for volunteers to come and help us with that boot. As you know, cold cruncher has a conference
pack that she prepares for HPR going to these events. So hopefully we'll have that with stickers.
We have HPR stickers. We have HPR tickets for people or t-shirts for people who want to come.
And there might be some other goodies as well. So I'll definitely be there. People want to come
and help out on the day. That would be great. And speaking of helping out, is there any way that
do you need helpers or people who come and help out on the day? Yeah, absolutely.
We're looking for people to help out on the crew. And to be honest, volunteering to be part of
the crew is a really great way to get to know people. I've been there myself before. In fact,
I think the first lug radio live I went along to I didn't really know anybody else there.
And it and being on the crew is a great way to actually get to know some of these people,
start to form friendships. And then as you go back year after year, you've got, you know,
you've got people that you can say hello to and have a good chat with. So yes, so if you're
interested in helping out email log camp at Ubuntu-UK.org, same address as before. And yeah,
and say you're interested in being on the crew. And then Dan, from the next Outlaws,
who's in charge of the crew, will add you to his list and get in touch a little bit near at the time.
But we laugh to people who can, you know, carry boxes, maybe help set up some AV equipment or video
cameras or just generally supervise a room as well. Make sure nobody's, you know, running off with
a projector or something like that. Do you need people to bring some kids, stands,
cameras, laptops, screens? We may do. Most of it's been provided by the venue. And I think we've
probably got most of all the other bits and bobs that we need. But if you're on the crew and you say
that, you know, this is an area of your interest, you're interested in running the PA. And maybe you've
got some kit that you could bring along, then let us know and then we'll incorporate that into our
plans. Fantastic. I don't have any more questions. Is there anything else you want to say before
we wrap it up? The only thing I can think of is that one of the things we haven't talked about is
that we do a live podcast recording. The Linux Outlaws and the Ubuntu UK guys, we all get on the stage
and we do a joint podcast recording, which is then released as part of our regular podcast schedule.
The Linux Outlaws guys release the root version with all the swearing in it. And we,
not that there's a huge amount of swearing, but occasionally something slips out. And then we have
to do the family that friendly cleaned up version on the Ubuntu UK. So a lot of people enjoy listening
to both versions to see if they can work out what the differences are. Fantastic. Yes, so we do
that. So that's the best way to get that particular aspect of the content after the show. And it's
good fun. And I hope that I will see as many of you there including you can, but as many of your
HPR listeners as possible. And people can follow you on Twitter and Identica, I guess.
Yeah, we are OgCamp on Twitter and Identica. And you can from there you can see the accounts
of all the individual presenters and the podcasts. Fantastic. Okay, thank you very much.
And you've heard it here folks. And I hope to see you all in person at OgCamp 11.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Republic Radio. For more information on the show and how
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