Every year a bunch of geeks travel to the lovely Wye Valley from all over UK, and trudge up the 80 meter climb to Highbury Farm. There they camp out for a long weekend, running workshops and presentations during the day and sitting around the fire drinking cider at night, or enjoying the eclectic Raveoke and accoustic sets on the open stage. The whole set up is called BarnCamp, the main workshop space is a barn, which also includes the bar, food serving area and washing up corner, and is organised by the hacktivist@s of Hacktionlab.

If you also want to polish your tech skills, check out the Internet privacy (anonymity, security…) workshop this Sunday, June 19, starting at 11:00 at LARC!

See also: (incomplete) list of sessions | session notes | media page, list of posts about BarnCamp2011 | Pics on Flickr: ludwig van standard lamp | churchofpunk | chickarama | Reports: Bristol Wireless | Charlie Harvey | Mike Harris | Video: Sunset timelaps photography | ravin’ geeks | Audio: Luddites, technology, sustainability | CatalysRadio started broadcasting from Barncamp, check out their stream!

This year saw an increase in ladies participating, both in attendance and running sessions. (And last years rule of women being discouraged from doing the dishes didn’t return). This year saw less involved geekery, maybe due to the geek gag, which was aimed at ensuring everyone could participate and meant to not use jargon or acronyms, but to explain things in clear terms.

A lot of session had a very direct focus on media production, with some amazing results, they inlcuded: The Drupal CMS, setting people up with their own copy of the bethemedia.org.uk site in order to take the next steps with the radical news aggregator; running anonymous blogging services using the Wordpress CMS, e.g. network23.org; setting up a 24 hour activist radio, using Sourcefabric’s Airtime CMS, catalystradio.org launched on Saturday evening and has been broadcasting full time since; translating Foodsoft, a software that helps set up and run food coops, an intro and feedback session on OpenConsent, a tool that aims to help with consensus decision making for distributed groups that need to make decisions outside of physical meetings.

The introduction to geomapping on Openstreetmap, and open and non corporate alternative to google maps, was a bit hampered by the rain, which discouraged people from going out and mapping the local area properly. A presentation on fractals, and how to display them using canvas tags in html5 required quite a bit of maths. We were introduced to TAILS, a live CD/stick bootable Linux distro, that puts security above all else, and to Bitcoins, which might just be the currency of the future.

Another working group played with VoIP on Android phones using Serval, a temporary, self-organising, wifi mesh network. It is used to make peer to peer telephone calls using Wifi connections, which can be encyrpted for secure communication.

And yet another hands on workshop helped people install Thunderbird and Enigmail and set up email encryption on their laptops. We also looked at Diaspora, the open source, distributed alternative to facebook.

There also was a presentation on the Ecological and Social Costs of IT Hardware (, talk starts at about 30 minutes, and a selected bibliography) – get us thinking about the sustainability and impact of all the cool toys we are using.