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!