31 August to 2 September
So I jumped on a train from Glasgow to London… then London to Milton Keynes to head off to EMFCamp. I first heard about this from Amir at the London HackerSpace when I was talking about Chaos Camp in Germany and heard that the HacerkSpace wishes to repeat this type of camp in London with EMFCamp, how could I not attend. I also decided to put in for a talk to discuss the UK Communications bill changes that are recently being discussed. I thought with some of my recent study focus in UK IT Law this would be a great arena for a talk.
Arrival
I get to the camp and greeted by huge welded signage and people running around in zombie outfits and steampunk gear… I felt at home… My badge was a flashing tilder badge that I was welcomed to hack, and I was ushered into the sold out event.
There is not much to say about the event but OMG, early on I caught up with a dear friend of mine who was helping to organise the event and I got a tour of the networking. There was a 300mb uplink radio tower shouting out of the ground with a tect next to it and a massive array of servers. I think I counted 3 dedicated minecraft servers. The camp sites were powered with portable loos filled with not toilets but power converters and cat5 cables.
Saturday Night
There were talks late into the night and music and open hardware hacker abound. There was so much going on I did not know what to do… Oh did I mention the bar? There was a bar set-up under an overhead bridge which helped to create a sound barrier for the cars above. The bar was set-up like a small micro brewery and had great music and projections abound. The Saturday night there was Dr Who on which I thought i would miss, but no of course not this is a geek camp. They had the projector set-up and we all sat down beer in hand and watched the next Dr Who episode of a large screen projector.
Sunday
The next day I gave my talk and it was fantastic and created a great amount of feedback and also discussion within the viewers. This was great as the main aim I try to get with my advocacy is discussion and people thinking, lecturing is something I do not like to do and this was not a lecture but a discussion.
The End for now anyways
The conference ended on the sunday which was sad… So I decided to stay back with the London hackerspace team and help them pack down. We ended up staying until Tuesday packing up with the best night of the camp being the Monday night. On Monday night we had to get rid of the rest of the beer oh no what a shame… So we ended up all lying in a large hammock made from fish netting ¬†with about 12 of us in the hammock, now when I say big it was about 10metres of so of netting. Sam decided that he wanted to drive the gold buggy around so we were using the hand radios to ask Sam to deliver us beer and sausage sandwiches. This was great and hilarious.
Where to next
All up it was an awesome Hacker Camp and well on its way to being as big and good as Chaos Camp so hats off team you pulled off the first year. They plan to do this every 2 years where as Chaos Camp is every 4 years… So the next one with be 2014… and I plan to be there… Hope to see you there…
Video Archive of 2012 talks
http://wiki-archive.emfcamp.org/2012/articles/e/m/f/EMF2012_Video.html