Saturday's weather was kind to the planned Geeknic, an attempt to introduce geeks to the outdoors, if only for their lunch break. However, with free pizza on offer there would have been plenty there anyway.
There was also the traditional talk about MQTT, this time given by Andy Piper as a last-minute stand-in for a speaker who was unable to get there on time. MQTT is an open communication protocol from IBM that only had proprietary software until a presentation on it in "the house that twitters" at the first OggCamp. As a result, work started on an open source implementation within hours, and Mosquitto reached its 1.0 milestone release just before OggCamp 2012.
This particular story, while not the only example, highlights the usefulness of these events in bringing together people with overlapping interests, who wouldn't otherwise meet.
The final event on the main stage was a raffle, with the usual selection of goodies on offer and the main prize being a Nexus 7. The winner of this generously gave it straight back to be auctioned off, raising significantly more than the retail price, which should help next year's event get off to a good start.
Towards the end of the event, I managed to get Dan Lynch, one of the organisers, to sit down for long enough to share some of his thoughts on the event. Despite some hiccups, he was pleased with how the weekend had gone, and really happy with the new venue, but what came across most, not only from Dan, was how much all those involved in OggCamp enjoyed seeing the event come to life.
Dan said: "One of the nicest things about running OggCamp is seeing other people having a good time, learning stuff and teaching stuff," and there was plenty of that in evidence.
When I asked about the possibility of an event next year, he sighed wearily (it had been a long weekend for the organisers), but there is little doubt planning for it will soon start. If you are now wishing you had attended OggCamp, the website will have links to videos, photos and presentation slides from the event. There is also plenty of material on Flickr, Google+ and any other social networking site you care to log in to.
