Barcamp Antwerp reflection

Last weekend Antwerp saw it’s first Barcamp organised by Anne. I was there and had another great and very inspiring day. I was also happy that my “presentation” had all the success I could have wished for. Not less than 6 couples attended my 20 minutes Swing dancing course! I think I reached all the Barcamp-ladies. :-)

My other contribution that day was taking care of the WIFI, together with @amedee. I dare say it worked out pretty well. I learnt some interesting stuff however:

• When setting up a WDS with multiple hosts, iPhones, blackberries and similar clients can only successfully determine the route to the Internet when associated to the main access point, because of a faulty gateway setting when they have to determine one themselves. This was easily fixed by setting the DHCP server optiont 3 (router) to the IP address of the main access point.
• A mixed daisy-chain and star WDS setup actually works! We had as main access point, WDS connected to and . was WDS bound with and with . (By the way, only very few people seemed to recognise the hostnames of the access points as large Pakistani cities, less my relation to them. Maybe next Barcamp I should bring a short presentation about my ventures in Pakistan. :-))
• Only have one access point serve DNS to the network. Then, set all of them to push the DNS setting to the clients via DHCP, just like with the gateway.
• The X-wrt graphs show that from time to time we had no connection to the outside world. All seemed to work fine those moments, but for a failing Internet connection. The -network had the same problem at the same time. Don’t blame me for that! :-p
• Barcamp attendees cannot live without an Internet connection. They don’t care about network encryption however. :-)

I think next time I’ll push this further and enter a proxying and monitoring gateway into the system. Must result in some pretty interesting graphs, I’m sure! :-)

Of course, next to contributing, there’s a lot of consuming to do on a Barcamp as well. I really liked some of the presentations I attended. Coming to mind are Thomas Vande Casteele’s explanation about Google Analytics. He sure is an expert there! Second, I was dazzled by Wouter Kampmann and his presentation about Semantic Web Services. This is really interesting for one of my ventures The Data Tank! I also particularly enjoyed the movement therapy session by Aster Saerens.

This Barcamp ended in a session questioning the very concept of Barcamp and how it ought to be organised. I really appreciate the conclusion we reached: it’s up to the organiser to decide how he/she wants to arrange those matters. A Barcamp can be in a tent with 50 people, or hosted in a professional environment costing so much money, sponsor dependency can’t be ruled out. A camp where everyone grabs some food from a nearby friterie during lunch break, or smoothly organised catering. All are equally fun!

Talking about sponsors, we had quite a few this time. Thanks to

• Nucleus, for the venue;
• Devia, for the soup;
• Chocolateque, for the chocolate;
• 10to1, for the lunch;
• The Parking Lot, for the T-shirts;
• Nespresso, for the coffee.

Even though the whole day was pretty exciting and exhausting, I had to rush off and miss the after-barcamp-dinner for a improvisation theatre show I was performing in that same night. All went well however, and having spent half my weekend in such an awesome way, I went home for a great sleep.

Looking forward to the next Barcamp already!