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Yahoo!’s Open Hack London was held at the TUC Congress hall on 9th and 10th May. It was another great opportunity to learn about APIs, hacking stuff together and generally geeking out.

[Yahoo! boss David Filo welcomes the geeks to Open Hack 2009]

I had a play about with the BOSS search API, but wasn’t in an actual team as such. I also enjoyed an evening bike ride on the Flickr Bikes – which automatically took a photo every minute when the bikes were in motion. Riding round central London on a push bike was a bit of a hairy experience, but we returned unscathed to tell the tale!

[The two Flickr Bikes were available for a ride]

There was, of course, a little problem with the wifi (isn’t there always?) but the team from Yahoo soon sorted it out. And the was, of course, plenty of fuel for hacking geeks:

[Essential supplies for the hacking geek]

It was great to be in the company of such innovative minds (and a little intimidating too!). There were some great ideas put together during the session. Mr Duck was even on the winning team for Best Harware Hack! Clever duck…

After all the excitement and hard work organising BarCampLondon6 last week, quite a few of the London contingent decided to head to sunny Bournemouth for the first ever BarCamp to be held there, organised by Mark Ng.

Alistair and I went down to the coast a few days early to do a spot of caching too. There are hundreds of caches around Bournemouth so we couldn’t resist.

[Sunset over Sandbanks]

I really enjoyed the BarCamp. Another relaxed, friendly get-together and the University setting was great for that sort of event.

Dom and Tim were up to their usual antics and decided to fill a Smart Car with boxes of the Sponsor’s Tea:

[A Smart Car full of tea. Why? Why not!]

Having attended so many BarCamps over the past couple of years, I thought it was about time I helped to organise one. And so I found myself on the team which put together BarCampLondon6, held at The Guardian’s swanky new London offices in Kings Cross.

It was lots of  hard work, but really rewarding to see everything come together over the weekend. At times, we might have felt a little headless (it happens to the best of us!). I never thought I would spent 2 hours putting together Lego figures for the schwag bag on the Friday evening, but it was fun.

We had some great sessions and loads of people seemed to enjoy themselves. Thanks for all the feedback folks!

Here are some more images I took during the weekend:

[VIP pass for Mr Duck]

[The awesome BarCamp logo made from Lego during the introductory sessions]

So would I do it again? Probably. Just not for a while

A quick reminder about BarCampLondon6 – it will be held on 28th-29th March 2009 at The Guardian’s swanky offices in Kings Cross. The first wave of tickets are due to be released at 3pm on 16th Feb – see the BarCampLondon.org website for more details.

If you miss out on the first wave, don’t worry – there will be other opportunities to sign up.

As a regular BarCamp attendee, in London and elsewhere, I’ve always admired the folks to actually get the thing going and organise the events.

So, when there was a general call for help to organise the next London BarCamp, I thought I would throw my hat into the ring.

Now we have our venue and major sponsor 99% sewn up, we are ready to announce BarCampLondon6.

When: 28th/29th March 2009
Where: Central London
Who for: Anyone who’s interested!

The first tickets will be released mid-February – please see the website to subscribe to up-to-date information.