Submitted by arianek on Fri, 12/14/2007 - 12:01 –
5 comments
I know, I know, I'm totally slacking on the blogging. A week later, it's almost not worth blogging an event, but I just don't feel right about letting this one slide, so here goes--a rundown of Vancouver's first TransitCamp:
Organizer extraordinaire: Karen Quinn Fung who's been doing research on Toronto's TransitCamp at SFU.
(photo by Roland)
When/where: December 8th, 2007 at Workspace.
What it is: TransitCamp is an un-conference, in the same style as many of the tech un-conferences that go on around here, like BarCamp[Wikipedia], DrupalCamp, DemoCamp. Un-conferences are just like regular conferences, except that the content of the conference is totally participant driven--attendees choose the session topics and present the sessions themselves.
Karen was so inspired by the TransitCamp she attended in Toronto that she decided to try one out at home, and she pulled it off just great! She got a good amount of publicity[Vancouver Courier] and I was impressed with the turnout as well as a respectable diversity of participants from tech geeks to transit geeks to a few reps from Translink. There were definitely some heated discussions--it'd been a while since I've debated urban planning type issues, and forgot how worked up I can get!
Sessions I really enjoyed: 2 meshing tech and transit--brainstorming on interfaces for schedules and how to communicate between transit services and users led by John from Handi Mobility (who make really cool stuff by the way, you should totally go check their site out):
and the other on wireless on transit led by Joe from FreeTheNet with lots of interesting commentary from DaveO:
And one on creativity and transit led by Jason Vanderhill, which introduced me to Jason Turner who writes great zines and graphic novels set in Vancouver many written (figuratively and literally) on transit:
If you want to know more about what went on at TransitCamp, there are lots of other detailed reviews and photos by some of the other attendees:
- Miss604
- John [1],[2],[3-not really about TransitCamp, but perhaps inspired by it?],[4]
- Roland [1],[2]
- Dustin
- Karen
- Richard
- Paul Hillsdon
- Stephen Rees
- More Flickr photos
ps. I drew this:
(photo by jmv)
Almost not worth blogging an
Almost not worth blogging an event? Nonsense, this post was well well worth the wait. Thank you!
hah, thanks lloyd :-)
hah, thanks lloyd :-)
Great wrapup. I love the
Great wrapup. I love the balconies with fences on the trains. :D And I'm glad you had a good time! I know bupkis about urban planning so it'd be interesting to get to talk to you more about it in the future.
[...] from Ariane [...]
[...] from Ariane [...]
hey, thanks karen! it was
hey, thanks karen! it was great, you did an excellent job pulling it all together! i'd love to geek out on planning with you sometime :-) i keep telling richard he's gotta come hang out with everyone and bring you along so we can chat!
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