DemoCamp Toronto # 21 will be happening on July 28, 2009. We’ll be posting registration details in the next week or so. See http://democamp.com/ for details.
Guelph’s 9th DemoCamp is happening on Wednesday, May 13; Missisauga’s first is on June 25. Tickets for Toronto’s 20th, on May 25, have once again sold out before most people knew it was happening—schedule is now online.
Tyler Turnbull and Paul Crowe are organizing a TED-like event for Toronto this September — progress reports on their blog, and of course volunteers would be welcome.
Take a couple of minutes and read these two recent posts by David Crow:
Both are about creating or nurturing a vibrant tech startup community in Toronto, which I think is important for the city as a whole, and vital to the long-term health of the university as government funding becomes less dependable. But did you notice what’s not there? I’m the only faculty member named in the first, and while the second lists MaRS, the Ontario Science Centre, and OCAD, it doesn’t mention the University of Toronto. Can you imagine someone in Silicon Valley not mentioning Stanford or Berkeley when describing who’s involved in the local tech scene? I wish I knew how to fix this (how to get more university faculty involved in the local tech scene, not how to edit David’s posts to include them), but nothing I’ve tried so far has worked. I’m open to suggestions…
Put the date in your calendars — more details to come.
…and here they are: http://democamp.com/2009/04/21/democamp-toronto-20/. Once again, the first batch of tickets has sold out almost immediately…
I had to cut out of DemoCamp 19 early tonight to put my daughter to bed, but Mike Conley (a U of T student and first-time attendee) blogged the demos and presentations in real time. I’m glad I got to see some regulars, and meet some new people; very sorry to have missed Leigh Honeywell’s talk about the Toronto Hacklab.
The cheapest kind of social graph is just a count of how many people in the room you know. Going through the Eventbite page for DemoCamp 19, I came up with:
| Current/former project students: | 12 |
| Other current/former U of T students: | 6 |
| U of T faculty: | 3 (including me) |
| Other U of T contacts: | 5 |
| People I know through DemoCamp: | 20 |
| Names I don’t recognize: | 95 |
45 I know vs. 95 I don’t: I’ve got some work to do…
David Crow has posted a schedule for DemoCamp 19 — still looking for a couple of presentations, if you have something cool to show or say.
DemoCamp Toronto 19 was announced on Thursday, after a 7-month hiatus. It’s moving to a smaller venue as part of an attempt to get away from the “trade show” feeling of the last few ‘camps — lots of people had said that they were too big, and that the proportion of attendees who might plausibly one day present had shrunk too much.
Unfortunately, a smaller venue means there’s only room for smaller — er, I mean “fewer” — people, which in turn makes it harder for newcomers to break in. The day before the announcement went up on his blog, David tweeted, “DemoCamp Toronto details coming tomorrow. Wowsers looks like we’re full UPSTAIRS before the announcement, I love the back channel.” On seeing this, one of my students swore and said, “OK, so how do I sign up for the &*@!ing back channel?” The only comfort I could offer was that I didn’t find out about it ’til after all the tickets had gone either…
I don’t think there actually is an answer to this problem. Big get-togethers have low signal-to-noise ratios and require unsustainable levels of effort to organize; small ones have all the problems mentioned above, and meeting more often isn’t feasible for people who have children to tickle, companies to run, or assignments due at school. As David says, there are lots of other ‘camp-style events now in Toronto that make it a lot easier than it used to be to get to know the community; maybe we just have to accept that you have to choose between thousands of fans in a stadium and the intimacy of a coffee-house show.
The good news is that after a long hiatus, DemoCamp is back: Toronto’s 19th high-tech show-and-tell/meet-and-mingle will be on March 3 at the Imperial Pub. The bad news is, tickets appear to have sold out within half an hour of the announcement, so the only way to get in now is to volunteer to give a demo—details are on the announcement page. Stay tuned for more information…
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