My aim for the session was to encourage people to celebrate their failures and share with the group the lessons they learned.

It went a bit like this:

“Hi, my name’s Luke, and I failed” (cue cheers + applause from the crowd)

“I did ___, it failed because of ___ and the lesson I learned was ___”

I kicked off the celebration of failure by talking about a start-up I worked on many years ago that lost its way and failed.

After a slow start, where people needed encouragement at first, the session really got going and more and more people opened up and shared business, personal and technical failures. Some were valuable life lessons, some… well… simply hilarious!

I wrote any lessons learned onto the white board (both sensible + silly):

• Stay on target (Stay focussed)
• Don’t lie about your abilities (but if you already have, learn the thing you said you could do asap!)
• Don’t trust:
  • Grown ups
  • Other people’s code
  • Your own code
  • Lotus Notes
  • Consultants
  • Programmers
  • Acronyms
• Back ups = Good
• Don’t get distracted by shiny things
• Don’t think you know it all
• Check for typos
• Always check the box contents
• Try a restart
• Don’t try to be funny (the story behind this one was BRILLIANT, I won’t recount it here)
• Don’t expose your dev server to the world
• Ask for help
• Failure can become a win

If you’d like to share your failure, please do add a comment below and tell us what happened and most importantly what you learned from your glorious failure.

A great variety of talks, from the technical to the… less serious:

Day 1 grid:

(Day 1 photo from Tom Morris)

Day 2 grid:

If you missed it this year, go forth and follow @bcbournemouth for details of next years event… or look out for a Bar Camp near you!

See the site above for more info (few tickets available at time of publication) or search for #bcbomo3 on twitter for the dicussion around the event.

Also coming up for all creative / web / techy folks is the fabulous Meetdraw (Mar 24th) – more social than bar camp but still very much worth attending for those around Bournemouth who are creative / web based businesses.

It’s just such… an OLD and dated format, its interruptive, its all about sales and not content.

He who pays, talks – if I go to see someone talk, I want them to be an expert in their field, not just a guy with a chequebook.

Money generating not knowledge generating – it’s about selling stuff, not adding value… ok I cringed writing that, a bit of a cliche but it’s so true! If I look back at all the events I liked and hated this is the key difference

Why do we need it? – a conference, about the “internet world”? Stop and think for a minute, erm… isn’t there a better way?

Ok, I do get that it’s handy if you’re a huge product or a big buyer. Personally, looking for ideas, innovation, inspiration… it’s all about the smaller niche ones like:

ContentStrategyLondon10 – superb, an intimate gathering on a specific topic. Lots of good networking, 3 excellent speakers (and beer).

TEDxCDF – outstanding, inspiring speakers by invitation. It expanded the mind and gave me something back for my time. (Great Guardian write up)

BarCampBournemouth2 – with the almost anarchistic approach that anyone can speak, you build your own conference program and interact with almost all the other delegates.

Plus by not going, I’ve probably saved about a tree in brochures I’ll never read…

I asked on twitter if it was just me who thought it wasn’t worth my time:

“I’m bothering, but I’m not optimistic based on last year!”

“Yeah it seemed a bit s#!% to me too.”

“Not Definitely no need.”

“I’m not doing IW, did it last year. Too corporate, so many cheaper ways of doing the same things, not as handy as the A4Uexpo.”

So go forth, find the small get-togethers and un-conferences… expand your mind. Don’t give up your time to be sold at.

What do you think? Did you go to IW10? Was it any good?

Big thank you to C4L and Fibreband our main sponsors of BarCamp Bournemouth 2.

If you haven’t signed up to come along… why not?

** Sign up for BarCampBournemouth2 here **

If you’ve never been to one, you should go. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, I new the history of how they’d started and I had a rough idea what went on… I’m pleased to report it exceeded my expectations.

For those of you who too lazy to click on the wikipedia entry above, in essence its an event where anyone (and everyone is encouraged to do so) can give a talk about pretty much anything. There’s a white board with slots on it for people to write in what talk they’d like to give/discussion they’d like to host.

from Flickr stream (Andy Trickett)

Some of the highlights for me:

Two Guys a smart car and a bagel – which can only be described by “the hodge” himself, go read it.

The crowdsourced haircut – donate £5 to The Dyslexia Research Trust and take a snip at his hair. Erm… ok.

DigitalDeath – this one was a real though provoker, what happens to accounts after people die, does their content get deleted, should it be kept? Do you have a digital will? We also touched on whats happens when people go “off-grid”.

Other talks I attended (some lightning talks) were on Geocaching, how to make a pulse jet engine, “developer vs designers, why can’t we all get along” (by @adrianh) – from the downright geeky (life defined in two lines of APL  code) to the philosophical (A proof that there is only one true fact).

I really loved the talk about the ridiculous diagrams people have developed for Social Media (@socialmediatwat) – it’s so true.

It was really good to hear a developer rip into “social media practitioners” using their own worst examples – I’m always concious that what I do doesn’t get drowned in marketing drivel and buzzwords – so it was really good to get some reinforcement that what’s important is true engagement, it IS sad that some marketeers and agencies need telling that its just conversations online – I think what he missed though is that some people NEED to be shown this stuff, they’re not native to the internet and what they’ve seen before is push push push perhaps.

Where possible, I check content avoids the LGA banned word list – I’d suggest you read this list.

Next time you see a BarCamp near you, go.