I (along with several other OSAF'ers) made it to DCamp for Friday night and Saturday. During my career, I haven't had a huge number of opportunities to interact with designers, and my stint at OSAF is probably the best and longest of those opportunities. I think that the interface between developers and designers is an important area for people who are interested in open source, and that there is some bridging that needs to happen between the two communities. So while I did participate in several sessions on open source and design (most of which were framed as "open source usability"), my real goal was to immerse myself a little more in the world of designers and usability folks. I tried to say as little as possible and listen as much as possible. Fellow attendees will have to be the judge of how well I did that. I do have some detailed thoughts and observations on open source and design, but I think that I'm going to save them for a separate post (or two)

The best session that I went to was Sarah Allen's session on Cinematic User Experience. Perhaps it's because I'm not very up on the design world or because I don't have a deep appreciation for cinematography, but I found Sarah's presentation and the ensuing lively discussion to be very thought provoking (which is the highest compliment that I can give to a session).

I have some photos of the event, but I'm probably not going to post them. Conferences are getting photo'ed to death these days, and I wasn't really in the mood to spend a lot of energy on photos (I guess I got it out of my system at the SFlickr meetup). If you're interested, there are a ton of pictures on Flickr.

This was my first BarCamp inspired event. I've been to Foo Camp, and am one of the organizers of the Seattle Mind Camps, so I was curious to see the difference between the different family trees. The DCamp organizers grabbed the Foo Camp three word introduction, which wasn't useful to me because many people used very frivolous words, so the introductions didn't help me find other people that I might be interested in spending more time with. There was an icebreaking game that involved asking people with similar attributes "Who isn't from the San Francisco Bay Area" to identify themselves. This was a bit more helpful, and I would have preferred more time in this particular game. There was more explicit mention of the open space method, although I'm not sure that actually meant much to many of the attendees. One interesting thing was the use of a group scheduling time between some of the session blocks. This gave session organizers a few minutes to explain what their sessions were supposed to be about. It seemed like this was a good way to help people find something that they'd find interesting.