I promised I would blog about my Public Sphere experience tonight and I'll do my best. However brain is a tad fried so be gentle.
Woke up this morning at 5 o'clock. Had organised a lift down and back with James Dellow (also known as chieftech on twitter). He turned up about quarter to six and we headed off into the fog. Turns out that I haven't lost the knack for falling asleep during long car trips.
Anyway, we arrived in Canberra at about 8:30 and met up with Reem Abdelatey and Diana Mounter from the LGSA as well as Nathanael and a host of people I had only met on twitter. The first thought on everyones mind was "Coffee" (except Diana, who was thinking tea). However there was much sadness as we realised that the cafeteria was closed, and would remain closed until 9:30.
After that we were shown to the main committee room, where there was conference coffee on hand. It would do.
As the event started the room was buzzing. The first Public Sphere had whet the appetite and Public Sphere 2 wasn't going to disappoint.
I really like the format of the Public Sphere events. 15 minutes per talk means you get to pack in a lot of talks and the frequent breaks meant that we had time to absorb more information than if we'd gone with the standard morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea model. We did start to run over time however some presenters took a bullet and reduced the length of their talks from 15 to 5 minutes.
My own talk went better than I thought. People were receptive to the idea of OOOG and I had some good discussions about how the proposed OOOG Survey could be done.
I'll put more up about the OOOG survey tomorrow, I'm shattered right now.