What is OggCamp 10?

OggCamp is a free software / free culture unconference organised by the presenters of the Ubuntu UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws. This year’s OggCamp will take place at The Black-E in Liverpool, UK on the 1st and 2nd of May 2010, 10am – 5pm both days. It’ll be 2 full days of Free Software, Free Culture and Free Thinking. We have a large venue booked and expect 200-300 people. If you want a chance to meet others who are passionate about technology and share ideas this is a great chance. We have many top FOSS developers from around the world joining us.

ENTRY TO OGGCAMP IS COMPLETELY FREE!

If you want to get a feel for the event, have a look at our recap of OggCamp 2009.

What is an Barcamp/unconference?

More formal conferences have the usual people speaking every time; an unconference is an opportunity to interact with new and interesting people. There won’t be a published list of speakers before the event, everyone generates content on the day. That can include you! The schedule is decided by the attendees and we’ll have a voting system for that.

See what others are already proposing – http://ideas.oggcamp.org/talks

What Is An Ogg?

Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source. OggCamp is about technology, Open Source and Freedom, but also about music, art, politics, community, creativity and much more. We chose to use the term Ogg because for us it reflects all these things pretty neatly.

Get Involved

Please add your own ideas for talks and activities to our public wiki help make the event what you want it to be! It doesn’t even have to be about technology strictly, it could be anything. We have about 60 slots available and all are welcome – ideas.oggcamp.org

You can also meet other attendees on IRC in #oggcamp on the Freenode network.

If you have a project you’d like to promote or exhibit about you can email the organising team – oggcamp@ubuntu-uk.org

Come and join us, it’s going to be a great weekend. There’s travel information and much more at http://oggcamp.org

Also See The Rathole Roadshow

OggCamp 10 is preceded by a special free culture gig on Friday April 30th 8pm (the night before). It’ll be at the Bad Format Social Club in Liverpool. Kick off the weekend in style with live music from David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and Rathole Radio host (and Linux Outlaw) Dan Lynch, among other guests. Tickets are £5 in advance and can be bought from the website right now.

                          

So far they’ve cranked out 3 episodes and in my opinion they’re all great. They’re all quite short but nicely packed with useful geeky information. Many Supreme Overlord geeks will probably say the content isn’t geeky enough, but it’s pitched at the right level for me. I learned plenty from all three episodes which covered quite different subject matters.

The first went into a little detail about the GSM vulnerability that’s been talked about recently, and how one might exploit it in practice with some amusing and alarming suggestions. The second episode gave an introduction to NoSQL which I’d heard about and roughly knew the basics, but didn’t appreciate why they existed or how widely they were used. In the third Nat and Alex talked about Web Sockets which again I had a slim passing knowledge of, but nothing I’d put on my CV.

I listened to all three episodes on the way to work this morning, and was left ‘wanting more’ which is always a good position for a podcaster to be in. The short duration (10-15 mins) and conversational style make for easy listening. The sound quality is great and the content is nicely paced. The presenters clearly know their stuff so can speak authoritatively on the subjects they discuss, which makes for a refreshing change from some podcasts.

I hope they can find time to crank out more episodes and sustain the quality. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of these and prioritise them accordingly in my player queue.

                          

I thought now would be a good time to publish the list of what I subscribe to. I’ve attached an OPML file that was exported from gPodder (subscriptions -> export to OPML file). You can just import that OPML into your podcast client, or just open in a text editor and pluck out the interesting URLs and use those instead.

I don’t listen to every episode of every podcast, but usually I get around to most of them at some point. A couple of them might be unsuitable for minors, specifically the ones involving Richard Herring, and Answer Me This! The rest are pretty mainstream. They’re in all sorts of formats – mostly MP3 or M4V because the feeds came originally from when I was using iTunes.

Update: Thanks to Ellwyn I now have synchronised my podcast subscriptions to my.gpodder.org. Clicking the image below will take you to my subscriptions.

I’m interested to know if you have podcasts that you like and you think I might enjoy, let me know in the comments, or if you’re brave, post your OPML file. Make sure to remove any podcasts that you might have paid for, and that have username/passwords in the URL.

                          

I was able to listen to a preview of the show a few days ago, and I’m impressed. They have the kinds of elements that I like to listen to in a show including news & opinion, techy segments and a bit of fun. The team have managed to put together a tight, interesting and fun show which is no mean feat for episode one. It’s clear that they’re finding their feet in the first epsiode, but that doesn’t mean it’s low quality. There’s some harsh editing, which we also suffered from in the early days, and the audio levels are sometimes a little wobbly, but these are things that usually improve with practice, and aren’t showstoppers in my opinion.

In their favour they have some strong personalities who have their own areas of expertise, and can feed off (and back to) the Full Circle Magazine which can help them to build an audience and gather contributions. I understand they’re all spread around the UK, but are keen on getting contributions from around the world – given the magazine as a global project team and readership, this makes sense.

I hope they can find time and resources to crank out some more episodes, and can get contributions from the community to help them build up their content. Give it a listen and let them have your constructive feedback.