Its been a busy March.  A talk at Pittcon in New Orleans, then directly over to Microsoft in Boulder, Colorado to visit Rob Fatland about the SEAMONSTER project, and finally SciBarCamp in Toronto.

I was one of the SciBarCamp organizers (Scimatic Software was also a sponsor).   As tired as I am today I can tell you that it was definitely worth it.  There was a lot of discussion about how judge the success of a BarCamp ... my suggestion would be that if are getting quotes like this one, then things must have went well.

"... the most interesting meeting I’ve attended this millennium."

Joel Sachs

I don't need anymore metrics than that... Thanks for the comment Joel, and thanks for giving a talk!

It is nearly impossible to give a full review of the entire weekend.  The best summary of the event can be found on the Technorati aggregation for SciBarCamp.

This event went off even better than I expected.  My initial fears for a conference of this format was the audience is lack of participation.  On the opening Friday night we received more than enough talk/presentation/performance proposals to likely last longer than the 2 days of the event.

I would also like to thank some of the TorCamp regulars that took time out of their busy schedules to support us (David Crow, Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore).  I would especially like to thank David and Paul who were not only sponsors (Microsoft, Idée) of the event, they also gave talks on the Saturday.

I would also like to say thanks to Andrew Hessel who flew in from Alberta and lead two of my favourite sessions over the weekend.

One issue that will have to be thought about for future events is how to scale such an event after the first time around is a success.  We had a session at SciBarCamp about SciBarCamp and we all agreed that a number around 100 participants is the preferred level.  Our problem for the next time around will be how to get the right mix of people (~100) without turning people away at the door.