Pencils out, diaries out - two events I plan to attend.

Yesterday I registered for Perth Barcamp. on 30th June. The Perth Library Unconference is tentatively set for 3 August from lunchtime to after dinner time.

PERTH BARCAMP

Where: Central TAFE, 140 Royal St, East Perth WA 6004
When: Saturday 30th June 2007 9am-5pm
Cost: TBA (Probably around $10)
Registration here.

PERTH LIBRARY UNCONFERENCE
(All To be confirmed)
Where: State Library of Western Australia
When: Friday 3rd August 2007 12 noon - after dinner
Cost: TBA

Barcamps are unconference kinds of gatherings that presume “whoever turns up is the right person, whatever we discuss is the right thing”. It was initially a response to “FooCamp“, which is an annual invitation-only event run by O’Reilly Media (the guys who publish those computing books with etchings of animals on them).

It tends to have a techie focus, but if everyone wanted to talk about Championship Farnarkling instead then we could. I’d love to have a posse of librarians there to talk about the techie end of what we are doing in Western Australia. ..or just to learn from the other participants.

Many of the people who will be at Perth Barcamp will be the same mob who go to the monthly Perth Weblogger meetups. I went to the May meetup on Wednesday night. About a third of us were women, and the conversation - while with a techie focus - was much more “let’s all be involved and share” than “I’m going to discuss esoteric computing things with strange initials just to exclude you lesser mortals”.

There were three librarians at the meetup - me, CW and Matthais. I enjoyed discussing more than just “Library2.0 Lite”. I’m interested in widgets dammit! I think we formed the Western Australian Chapter of the Library Society of the World while we were chatting.

There may be fewer posts from me in the next couple of weeks. I’m away for the weekend on a respite camp for mums of kids with disabilities, then need to sit down for a few weeks and do a few life-based things that don’t involve blogging. The theme of the camp is Rome, so I need an outfit for Saturday dinner. Am I going as Sophia Loren or a Venus?…oh no….I’m going for a look much more like this:

Saredgna - Laconi - widow Uploaded to Flickr on April 27, 2006 by CharlesFred