The weekend before last I travelled down from Dundee to Barcamp Leeds 2007 with my colleague Rick Moynihan. From the outset Old Broadcasting House, a tastefully refurbished pristine innovation centre, was humming with a sense of energy and anticipation. It didn’t disappoint - with the exception of those who couldn’t get in due to over subscription. Amazingly, brought together under the .North banner, the whole thing was organized in just 27 days. The attendees, an eclectic group of entrepreneurs, developers, students, artists, academics and corporates set a dynamic agenda by marking out slots with Post-It notes on a large board. I went to Ben Dalton’s session on Future Forecasting and got to draw on large pieces of paper with coloured pens. Primary school nostalgia aside, Ben demonstrated a direct, simple and creative approach to service innovation. Paul Robinson’s thoughtful talk “Why Futurology Sucks” stimulated an interesting debate. The essence of Paul’s thesis was that Futurology is contaminated by corporate interests (for example automobile centric 1939 Futurama, sponsored by GM) and that methodologies such as Causal Layered Analysis cannot address real world complexity.

Ikem Nzeribe provided an interesting critique of Google Maps as functional but impersonal web maps that lack cartographic flair. Ikem conjured up images of Google’s B52 carpet-bombing the world with pins and directing hungry restaurant goers in the northwest of England to chinese restaurants in Manchester, New Hampshire. Ikem’s alternative vision was to overlay the existing provision with social networking over personalized, hand drawn maps. He ended with a Balmeresque call for developers.

Ian Hay, a strategic advisor on emerging technology at Orange, straddles two worlds by combining an understanding of emerging technologies with a strong grasp of telco business realities. A difficult task, but this is the guy who turned up to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the Paris Embassy - and looked quite at home. He shared his observations on hardware, platform and user interface trends in a talk titled “Is that a computer in your pocket?”. Ian also referenced work on Ethnography previously presented with Imran. Imran himself missed the Post-It note stampede and was consequently blown out of his own event (he’s far too honourable to move other people’s notes - yes, it did happen!).

When we left to catch our early evening train the event was still in full swing - and the free bar hadn’t even opened.