Image by coffeemick, some rights reserved.

Last week I had the privilege of attending Barcamp London 6. For those not in the know, a Barcamp is conference/workshop where participants contribute to sessions within a fluid agenda that is formulated as the event proceeds. The Guardian hosted the event at the paper’s new offices near King’s Cross. Saturday morning’s first activity was an ice-breaker where seven groups of 10-15 people each assembled a letter from “BARCAMP” producing the result pictured above.

'The Grid' on Saturday morning.

Shortly afterwards the blank ‘grid’ for Saturday had been filled with presentations sourced by participants, ranging from “Advanced CSS Tricks” and “Geotagging – just a fad?” to “Sourdough bread baking hacks”. On Sunday I gave my own talk about novelty detection “Detecting stuff you don’t know about”. I introduced the concept of novelty detection, described my previous research in machine learning and explained how it could be applied in a variety of applications including network security and software testing.

Image by Gemima G, some rights reserved.

I often find the sessions at conferences of little relevance and that the main learning and the interesting conversations occur in the lobby or over lunch.  At Barcamp the sessions are different. Whilst the range of topics is extremely diverse, people gravitate to those topics they really care about and it is easy to find people with shared interests. For instance during a session on  “PDF to XML” not only did I learn from the speaker’s expertise, I met another guy who was also interested in extracting timetable data and who turns out to work for a travel data company. Just one of many happy encounters over the weekend.

Saul Klein originally tipped me off about barcamps and said I had to go to one. I can echo that recommendation as they are way to meet like-minded people and learn lots of “stuff you don’t know about”.

Posted by Alistair