Toronto ICT Cluster

Hello Everyone,

Recently there was a BarCamp conference held at the University of Waterloo Accelerator Centre. It was held on Saturday, March 29, 2008 from 1:00 PM – 7:00 PM. One of the key features is that it is organized and run by the attendees instead of a central organizing committee and anyone can modify the event details through the Wiki-enabled, Web 2.0 interface. This is a dramatic shift from traditional conferences and shows a movement towards increasing collaboration in the tech sector, especially within the ICT cluster in the Waterloo region, as evidenced by the BarCamp conference.

Here are some highlights from the conference:

Presentations/Demos

Open Source for Fun and Profit, Drupal as a case study. Khalid of 2bits.com will do a presentation on how an individual or a company can participate in the Open Source community, and make money at the same time, using Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS).
1. Noter.ca – An online note-taking program for students that has some neat stuff that other people don’t (re: Yahoo tagging engine, auto-save AJAXness, note printing for courses, no restrictions open knowledge concept). Probably will also discuss CSRwire.ca w/ people and the cool model of building websites that feed off other websites in a really extensible way (how to roll out dozens of specialized services on different domains and have it make sense).
2. Rebuilt CastRoller Demonstrate the new, rebuilt CastRoller taking in feedback given at StartupCampWaterloo1
3. Avery Pennarun: I (heart) COBOL
4. websequencediagams.com — Going from 0 to 3000 diagrams a day in the casual UML market. (Steve Hanov)

Sponsors 

The follow organizations support BarCampWaterloo:

• Waterloo Accelerator Centre
• TechCapital
• WatStart
• Communitech

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

http://barcamp.org/BarCampWaterloo