Photo Credit David Pearson CC-BY-SA 2.0 license
Last Saturday I attended my first ukgovcamp conference in London. I went along with Jukesie, who wrote about his own experience of the day and Lauradee for a day of unconferencing. I was surprised by how few people had previously attended an unconference but this also made it enjoyable as then at least folk made it into sessions.
For me personally it was well worth the early start as there was a good bunch of people, many of whom i’ve stumbled across online. I haven’t paid much attention to local authority and central Government differences until this day. There seemed to be a much heavier group of central types which was a welcome eye-opener to their types of problem.
I think I was the only museum person which wasn’t really a shocker. For me, its important to widen my view of the entire public sector as there are many similarities even if the lingo is slightly different.
I picked a range of sessions to attend including the hardcore stats session which Jukesie was roped into. Stat IT nerds are a special bunch! I discovered a huge new field of using open data – though i wasn’t sure if this was for work purposes or just for tinkering in their spare time.
As always for me, its the meeting of new people that makes an event. For example I really enjoyed the session on creativity by Emma Allen who delivered a nice session that was closest to my line of work and thinking. A genius tip Emma suggested was to look at the Argos and Ikea catalogues, not just other archives as they of course are heavily dependent on getting them right for survival.
Another key takeaway was that regionally we could all make more effort to organise and run small evening or weekend events. Part of my 2015-2018 strategy at work mentions this type of activity so i’d better put my money where my gob is!
Thanks to all the organisers and my fellow attendees.
I make a cameo in the video below at the 0:40 sec mark