December, 2008

Yesterday I spent another great day in Ghent, at the second Barcamp to be hosted in the nice IBBT environment. It was, without doubt, the greatest barcamp I ever participated in. They quality of the presentations goes up and up each time. Also, my own presentation, this time a hands on demonstration of some cool new features in HTML5, attracted more people than ever. Maybe, because the Netlog lead designer and I decided to do a 40-minutes dual-presentation.

There was much ado about the main language of the unconference. Obviously, 99% of the participants are Belgian out of which 99% are from the Flemish region. Of course there’s no doubt that most of the presentations will be in Dutch. I didn’t like it that much, however, that it was specifically announced before, that the complete event was to be held in Dutch.

I’ve been to unconferences in France, Germany and Norway. In France and Germany, they were single-language unconferences, too, and I found them far less accessible for myself, even though I do speak and understand French and German. (In Norway, most of it was held in English.) I found it very nice of our own barcamps to be very easily accessible for non-native-Dutch speakers. Pitches were held in English and before every presentation, we used to verify if somebody in the audience didn’t understand Dutch. Is that so hard to keep up? After all, most of the slides of the talks I attended were in English anyway, and so is the wiki where we self-organised the event. It’s also very striking to see how much English sentences and constructions we use in our talks anyway. Moreover, sharing our barcamp experiences with the world afterwards is so much easier if all was prepared in English anyway. Think about the videos, presentations and all other material that was captured.

It’s a very small world already, so let’s try our best to include foreigners and non-Flemish Belgians too!

Don’t get me wrong. 115 Flemish people should not speak English amongst each other. But let’s not send out the message that it’s a Dutch-only event. Of course, at the end of the day, it’s up to the presenter himself to decide which language to use.

(And, whatever we do, let’s agree on a single #tag to use: is it #barcampgent2 or #barcampghent2?)

Word on the street is that next barcamp will be held around April in Antwerp. Before that, there is a Mobile Webcamp announced in Hasselt, next February. See you there!