Articles
10 of the Best Conferences, Meet-ups, UnConferences and Summits
Rebecca Kahn, iCommons reporter (South Africa) · 16/2/2008 00:06 · 25 votes
With preparations for the iSummit cranking up a gear or two, we thought it would be interesting to look at some of the other community get-togethers that are out there. From high-profile events like TED and Pop!Tech to those which are more niche, and just starting out, these ten events are relevant and important to fostering the principle that ideas, knowledge and skills should be shared as often and with as many people as possible.
TED
The big-daddy of the big-ideas conferences, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual, multi-disciplinary conference, for about 1,000 attendees, held in Monterey, California. Founded in 1984, TED has featured speakers and thinkers from diverse fields and many different countries. Presidents, Nobel laureates, geeks, musicians, activists, doctors, designers, artists and wordsmiths have all graced the stage, and spoken about ideas as diverse as spaghetti sauce, nanotechnology and dictionaries. Attendance costs a hefty US$ 6,000 – which covers an annual “subscription” and various extra goodies, as well as access to TED Global, which is a sister conference held annually in different locations around the world. In 2005, the TED Prize was established – the prize is given to three people every year, and consists of US$ 100,000, with which to work on their wish to change the world. Lucky for the rest of the world, all the TED presentations are available as videos on the TED website, under Creative Commons licences.
BIL
BIL stands for Boisterous Impromptu Latitude, or maybe Building Inspiration Liquidity, or perhaps Beneficent Instability Lounge – nobody’s sure yet. What we are sure about is that BIL may just be something brilliant. This year, for the first time ever, in Monterey, California, a group of inspired individuals are holding a conference that they say is going to be: “an open, self-organising, and emergent science and technology conference,” held just after TED, on the 1st and 2nd of March 2008. According to the conference site, BIL wants to be “to TED, what BarCamp is to FooCamp.” Running with an unconference structure, the schedule hasn’t been decided yet, but so far, they’ve got a list of interesting speakers and attendees on the wiki, which is where anyone can sign up to present and listen. While BIL is in no way affiliated with TED, it will be interesting to see if any TEDsters cross the road to BIL, and what comes of it. Attendance at BIL is free, and you can find out more on their site and wiki.
Wikimania
Wikimania is the umbrella term for the annual conference held for the contributors to the various wiki projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Since the first Wikimania in Frankfurt in 2005, the conference has grown to include about 500 attendees, and has been held in Boston and Taipei. Wikimania 2008 will be hosted by the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. Discussions at Wikimania cover topics that are relevant to the development of the free encyclopaedia; issues such as how to collaborate peacefully, the different experiences of various indigenous language wikis, and how much emphasis to place on expertise in a project that allows anyone to contribute. Every Wikimania conference has a comprehensive event website, with an archive of the presentations given.
Design Indaba
Few people would have expected a conference about design to be sustainable in Africa, but the Design Indaba, founded 11 years ago (as the country basked in the glow of our first-ever democratic elections) isn’t just about chairs and lamps. Access to water, sanitation and housing – the three biggies of the developing world, have also been treated as design issues at the Indaba, and the results have been spectacular. This isn’t just a showcase of straw-bale houses – the Design Indaba explores how and why design is vital in creating balanced lives for people – whether it’s a solar-powered donkey cart or cardboard handbag. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Indaba is held in Cape Town, the beautiful city at the tip of the continent, where design is practically a religion.
Chaos Communication Congress
The annual congress of the international hacker scene, organised by the Chaos Computer Club, CCC is Europe’s biggest hacker meet-up. Every year thousands of hackers descend on Berlin between Christmas and New Year to discuss technical, societal and political issues pertinent to their community. Every four years, the Club runs the Chaos Computer Camp, in the summer, which is a similar event, but held specifically for the international hacker community, where delegates camp in a networked campsite, divided into “villages” where work on different projects take place, including lockpicking (real locks, that is), art and beauty and robotics. Both CCC events are less structured than standard congresses, and while presentations do happen, they’re not the sole focus of the event. Every year, CCC set up a hack centre, which is an integral part of the Congress, allowing about 600 people to hack in one place.
Pop!Tech
An annual mass media and technology conference, Pop!Tech as been running for over a decade. Held in a restored 19th century opera house in the small seaside town of Camden, Maine in the US, this conference brings together 600 students, CEOs, venture philanthropists, bloggers, activists, scientists, planners and thinkers for three days of presentations, discussions and visions of the future. Pop!Tech isn’t cheap – registration costs about US$3,500, but you’re guaranteed to be rubbing shoulders with some pretty great minds. For those who might not be able to make it to Maine, you can follow what’s happening on the Pop!Tech blog, complete with streaming video and audio.
FooCamp
Foo Camp may have started out as a joke, but it’s quickly become the unconference that anyone who is anyone in the tech-culture world wants to go to. Described variously as a “wiki of conferences”, “meta-birds of a feather” and the prototype of the unconference, FooCamp is an invitation-only get together where innovators and people doing interesting work in the fields of technology, web services, data visualisation and search, open source programming, computer security, hardware hacking, GPS, alternative energy and more spend a few days camping on the O’Reilly Media campus grounds in Sebastopol, California, drinking beer and talking to each other. The format is loose, and the programme is only decided on the evening before the camp begins. Previous attendees nominate people they think would be worth adding to the guest list, so as to keep cross-pollinating the attendance lists, and the organisers keep the groups deliberately small. FooCamp gave birth to the BarCamp, which has been replicated all over the world.
FOSS.IN
FOSS.IN is the successor to the FOSS conferences that were once known as Linux Bangalore. Originally designed to be a national FOSS conference for the FOSS community in India, FOSS.IN has grown in the last five years into an international conference, and is one of the largest annual FOSS events in Asia. Held annually in Bangalore, the event is endorsed by the Indian government, and has become one of the major events on the FOSS development calendar, where developers and innovators can meet up and discuss projects. The event is divided into two distinct sections – project days (which focus on specific projects like Ubuntu/Debian, Gnome and OpenOffice) and the main conference.
DebConf
DebConf is the annual meet-up for Debian developers, contributors and other interested folks. It’s an international conference, held in a different country every year since 2000. It’s preceded by DebCamp, a week-long, smaller, less formal event giving an opportunity for group work on Debian projects - and Debian Day, a self-contained conference aimed at Debian users and others interested in learning more about free software. About 400 people attended last year’s DebConf, in Edinburgh, and they proved that they have a sense of fun: for this event, attendees created their own tartan, the colours of which reflected the Debian swirl logo, Tux the Linux penguin and other relevant logos and mascots. The white in the tartan spells out DEBIAN in Morse Code.
Sakai Project
Sakai is a community of academic institutions, commercial organisations and individuals from around the world who have developed a common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). The Sakai CLE is a free, community source, educational software platform distributed under the Educational Community Licence. Every year, the community meets up twice, in June and December, in different countries to discuss progress, plan and share experiences.
TED
The big-daddy of the big-ideas conferences, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual, multi-disciplinary conference, for about 1,000 attendees, held in Monterey, California. Founded in 1984, TED has featured speakers and thinkers from diverse fields and many different countries. Presidents, Nobel laureates, geeks, musicians, activists, doctors, designers, artists and wordsmiths have all graced the stage, and spoken about ideas as diverse as spaghetti sauce, nanotechnology and dictionaries. Attendance costs a hefty US$ 6,000 – which covers an annual “subscription” and various extra goodies, as well as access to TED Global, which is a sister conference held annually in different locations around the world. In 2005, the TED Prize was established – the prize is given to three people every year, and consists of US$ 100,000, with which to work on their wish to change the world. Lucky for the rest of the world, all the TED presentations are available as videos on the TED website, under Creative Commons licences.
BIL
BIL stands for Boisterous Impromptu Latitude, or maybe Building Inspiration Liquidity, or perhaps Beneficent Instability Lounge – nobody’s sure yet. What we are sure about is that BIL may just be something brilliant. This year, for the first time ever, in Monterey, California, a group of inspired individuals are holding a conference that they say is going to be: “an open, self-organising, and emergent science and technology conference,” held just after TED, on the 1st and 2nd of March 2008. According to the conference site, BIL wants to be “to TED, what BarCamp is to FooCamp.” Running with an unconference structure, the schedule hasn’t been decided yet, but so far, they’ve got a list of interesting speakers and attendees on the wiki, which is where anyone can sign up to present and listen. While BIL is in no way affiliated with TED, it will be interesting to see if any TEDsters cross the road to BIL, and what comes of it. Attendance at BIL is free, and you can find out more on their site and wiki.
Wikimania
Wikimania is the umbrella term for the annual conference held for the contributors to the various wiki projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Since the first Wikimania in Frankfurt in 2005, the conference has grown to include about 500 attendees, and has been held in Boston and Taipei. Wikimania 2008 will be hosted by the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. Discussions at Wikimania cover topics that are relevant to the development of the free encyclopaedia; issues such as how to collaborate peacefully, the different experiences of various indigenous language wikis, and how much emphasis to place on expertise in a project that allows anyone to contribute. Every Wikimania conference has a comprehensive event website, with an archive of the presentations given.
Design Indaba
Few people would have expected a conference about design to be sustainable in Africa, but the Design Indaba, founded 11 years ago (as the country basked in the glow of our first-ever democratic elections) isn’t just about chairs and lamps. Access to water, sanitation and housing – the three biggies of the developing world, have also been treated as design issues at the Indaba, and the results have been spectacular. This isn’t just a showcase of straw-bale houses – the Design Indaba explores how and why design is vital in creating balanced lives for people – whether it’s a solar-powered donkey cart or cardboard handbag. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Indaba is held in Cape Town, the beautiful city at the tip of the continent, where design is practically a religion.
Chaos Communication Congress
The annual congress of the international hacker scene, organised by the Chaos Computer Club, CCC is Europe’s biggest hacker meet-up. Every year thousands of hackers descend on Berlin between Christmas and New Year to discuss technical, societal and political issues pertinent to their community. Every four years, the Club runs the Chaos Computer Camp, in the summer, which is a similar event, but held specifically for the international hacker community, where delegates camp in a networked campsite, divided into “villages” where work on different projects take place, including lockpicking (real locks, that is), art and beauty and robotics. Both CCC events are less structured than standard congresses, and while presentations do happen, they’re not the sole focus of the event. Every year, CCC set up a hack centre, which is an integral part of the Congress, allowing about 600 people to hack in one place.
Pop!Tech
An annual mass media and technology conference, Pop!Tech as been running for over a decade. Held in a restored 19th century opera house in the small seaside town of Camden, Maine in the US, this conference brings together 600 students, CEOs, venture philanthropists, bloggers, activists, scientists, planners and thinkers for three days of presentations, discussions and visions of the future. Pop!Tech isn’t cheap – registration costs about US$3,500, but you’re guaranteed to be rubbing shoulders with some pretty great minds. For those who might not be able to make it to Maine, you can follow what’s happening on the Pop!Tech blog, complete with streaming video and audio.
FooCamp
Foo Camp may have started out as a joke, but it’s quickly become the unconference that anyone who is anyone in the tech-culture world wants to go to. Described variously as a “wiki of conferences”, “meta-birds of a feather” and the prototype of the unconference, FooCamp is an invitation-only get together where innovators and people doing interesting work in the fields of technology, web services, data visualisation and search, open source programming, computer security, hardware hacking, GPS, alternative energy and more spend a few days camping on the O’Reilly Media campus grounds in Sebastopol, California, drinking beer and talking to each other. The format is loose, and the programme is only decided on the evening before the camp begins. Previous attendees nominate people they think would be worth adding to the guest list, so as to keep cross-pollinating the attendance lists, and the organisers keep the groups deliberately small. FooCamp gave birth to the BarCamp, which has been replicated all over the world.
FOSS.IN
FOSS.IN is the successor to the FOSS conferences that were once known as Linux Bangalore. Originally designed to be a national FOSS conference for the FOSS community in India, FOSS.IN has grown in the last five years into an international conference, and is one of the largest annual FOSS events in Asia. Held annually in Bangalore, the event is endorsed by the Indian government, and has become one of the major events on the FOSS development calendar, where developers and innovators can meet up and discuss projects. The event is divided into two distinct sections – project days (which focus on specific projects like Ubuntu/Debian, Gnome and OpenOffice) and the main conference.
DebConf
DebConf is the annual meet-up for Debian developers, contributors and other interested folks. It’s an international conference, held in a different country every year since 2000. It’s preceded by DebCamp, a week-long, smaller, less formal event giving an opportunity for group work on Debian projects - and Debian Day, a self-contained conference aimed at Debian users and others interested in learning more about free software. About 400 people attended last year’s DebConf, in Edinburgh, and they proved that they have a sense of fun: for this event, attendees created their own tartan, the colours of which reflected the Debian swirl logo, Tux the Linux penguin and other relevant logos and mascots. The white in the tartan spells out DEBIAN in Morse Code.
Sakai Project
Sakai is a community of academic institutions, commercial organisations and individuals from around the world who have developed a common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). The Sakai CLE is a free, community source, educational software platform distributed under the Educational Community Licence. Every year, the community meets up twice, in June and December, in different countries to discuss progress, plan and share experiences.
tags: Johannesburg South Africa media-events conferences meet-ups 10-of-the-best summits congress culture
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