This is a bit late, but last weekend, I’ve had a great time at a brilliant gathering of cool minds from around New Zealand’s technology industry, our minister of IT David Cunliffe and senior cabinet minister Judith Tizard, and some other special people from abroad including the lead developer of Firefox, and some key people from Google. It wasn’t like your average conference, no-one was air-marked as a speaker or attendee, instead a bunch of on to it people presenting, listening and discussing. Photo’s here

The Peoples Schedule

It was never going to be a normal conference as we headed north of Auckland in Rod’s Maserati (aka the incentive to succeed) arriving at the quiet sunny town of Warkworth to be greeted by a Powhiri (New Zealand Maori Welcome) from the local people and camp organisers Nat Torkington and his family and Russell Brown. After an hour or so, everyone was pretty relaxed and the weekend was kicked off with some word’s from Nat about how this was our gathering and we should make it what we wanted it to be. Some A1 sheets with time slots and nothing else were posted around the school common room which served as the conferenceHQ, and it was up to us to pick the topic of the slots to discuss what we felt was most worth discussions.

Great Organisers

The event, baacamp was pulled together by Nat Torkington who organises conferences globally for Orielly and Russell Brown. Kiwi born, Nat has built his profile in the international web community in the US, and we’re very fortunate to have him living back here in NZ His connections have already landed mail in my inbox from people like co-founder of Flickr Caterina Fake , and founders of recent google aquisitions Writely (now google docs) and jotspot. A cool network of people.

Look forward to this one happening again, met some very cool people that I look forward to getting to know better.