Jon, Jo, Ellen and myself would personally like to thank all of our sponsors. Without YDN, PayPal, Metranet, The Guardian Open Platform, Madgex and Vodafone Group UK, and all our microsponsors; the event would not have been possible. And without all of you, the weekend would have been rather empty, so thanks again for coming! Great to see many new faces and to hear so many good talks. A personal favourite of mine was High-Altitude Balloons – Electronics, Radio and Teddies. Let us know what you liked!

Some of the criticisms aren’t that unexpected; it’s also possible to see why people might get the wrong end of the stick and in a few days I’ll post a breakdown of the costs involved.

We’re thinking about running BarCampBrighton next Easter, although as ever, we’d really like some help.

In the mean time, I’d like to leave you with this lovely, tour round our fantastic venue…

Registration opens at 10am. Welcome is 11am-12pm. First sessions begin at 12pm. Venue is The Old Music Library, right opposite the Brighton Dome. We finish around 6pm on Sunday.

Yes, we’re overnighting!

So bring sleeping bags, bean bags, inflatable mattresses, bed rolls, tent inners, etc. Those wooden floors are pretty hard and you’ll be cold and uncomfortable otherwise. There’s loads of room, so go crazy!

Don’t forget

As well as a sleeping bag and something comfy to sleep on (did I mention how uncomfortable and cold the floorboards are?) you’ll want to bring; your laptop and its power adaptor. Probably a 4-way (or moreway) powerblock and a VGA adaptor to connect your laptop to our projectors and screens. Please don’t just hope someone else will bring one along – there are at least four different kinds of Apple mini-DVI to VGA now, so the likelihood is that the one that someone else has, won’t fit your laptop.

Not only but also

So sleeping bag? Check! Something comfy like a bedroll or beanbag or inflatable mattress or lilo to sleep on? Check! Perhaps the pop-up inner of a tent? Check! Laptop, power adaptor, 4-way power block, VGA connector? Check! That just leaves your talk. Or discussion. Or other scheduled participatory form of interaction with our attendees.

As the ‘Mericans put it, “No tourists!”. Everyone attending BarCamp is expected to do a 30 minute slot about absolutely anything you find interesting, and think others might too.

We’ve had talks on architecture, robot building, social hacking, rock climbing, tea making and many, many other topics. Go crazy! Have a look at previous BarCampBrighton talks to see what kinds of thing people do. Remember, it doesn’t have to be 30 mins of you talking about slides. The best talks are often discussions or roundtables or demos. Find out more about the BarCamp ethos and what the grid’s all about.

CreditCrunchCamp

We’ll feed you pizza and some beer on Saturday night, provide tea, coffee & squash plus a few biscuits throughout Saturday and Sunday. There’ll also be a small breakfast on Sunday morning (juice and fruit-bars) but you’ll want to bring some cash to get breakfast & lunch on Saturday as well as lunch on Sunday. Unless that is, a lovely last-minute sponsor wants to grab the glory of feeding some geeks.

Re-use. Recycle

It’s turned into a bit of a theme, so we’ll be having a free-cycle/swap-shop/gifting table.

Got some tech you don’t want? Got design or tech books that are no longer of use? Got 15 mini-jack to phono leads and think you could probably live with a few less? Bring them along! Give them away! I bet someone could use them…

Leave a comment below with stuff you want to give away and/or stuff you need, and we’ll hook you up.

100 Robots

Brighton’s very own 100 Robots will be playing live on Saturday night, after the sessions finish. Are you in a band and want to play? Drop us a line.

Stick it on!

After the 100 Robots gig, we’ll be running a “Stick It On! Spotify” session. Put 3 tracks from Spotify into a shared playlist and email us the URL. We’ll blow 99p on a 24 hour pass for advert-free choon!s.

Parking

You won’t be able to park your car in the city centre for 48 hours. There are some NCPs, but they’ll be expensive. The station car-park is also quite pricey for 24 hours (not sure if they do a 48hr tariff). Most of central Brighton is residents-only parking. If you’re driving to Brighton, you might want to park in the Preston Park/Surrendon Road/Preston Drove area, which is restriction-free and get a bus ride in (£1.80 single fare). Catch the 5B into town from outside the Park View. There’s space for a couple of motor-bikes to park at the venue. You do so entirely at your own risk.

Backscatter

At some point by Saturday, there’ll be a BarCampBrighton lifestream (http://barcampbrighton/stream). We’ll search Twitter for barcampbrighton, and look at anything tagged on Delicious, Technorati and Flickr with barcampbrighton, barcampbrighton4 or bcb4 and aggregate it all. Let us know if we should be looking elsewhere too.

Da grid

Here’s the schedule for Saturday and Sunday. It’s pretty empty at the moment, but subscribe to the iCal and we’ll keep it updated from the board (which will remain the canonical reference). The board will be open from 10am onwards, so get here early to take your pick of the times! First talks start at 12pm on Saturday afternoon.

Happy happy joy joy

Hey, don’t stress! BarCamps are fun! They’re social! You’ll meet a whole raft of interesting people and hear a lot of really great talks. The central prop of any BarCamp is the social interaction; so don’t worry about your talk not being polished enough, or that you don’t necessarily know anyone. We promise that by Sunday you’ll know loads of people, will have made some great new contacts and you’ll really be kicking yourself that you didn’t lynch that villager when you had the chance.

“I’m doing an experiment: I’m collecting bags/suitcases/rucksacks for an project around the idea of ‘bags with a history’ for an event called Barcamp in about 1 week’s time (so the pressure is on!) – I need 150 of them.

Any old Sainsburys or Infinity Foods string, jute, canvas bags, rucksacks, handbags, suitcases, man bags, chic paper bags and things like that are all accepted, but not plastic bags.

Do you have any old ones kicking around anywhere (even just one or two)? I can come to you if its central Brighton (or your workplace) and collect them next week at a convenient time – name a time and I can pop over.

Or you could even buy me a very special bag from a charity shop (thanks Michael for the idea).

That would be really lovely and you’ll get credited too.

Lets hope I manage it! Thanks for your help!”

So if you’ve got a bag or two that you’d like to donate, drop Ellen a line.

There are still allocated tickets available for geek girls, BarCamp newbies, members of the BCS or IET and students.

This time, they’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty and have put in a temporary site-specific, dedicated 5mpbs symmetric uncontended WiMAX connection. It involved a little more than just plugging in a microfilter and an ADSL router. Take a look at the photoset.

If you’re a Brighton and Hove business and want a service with prices which significantly undercut alternatives such as SDSL, IPStream or leased lines, then get in touch.

The Guardian has opened up their services so that everyone can benefit from their journalism, their brand, and the technologies that power guardian.co.uk.

Learn more about building applications with the Guardian by visiting guardian.co.uk/open-platform.

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Whether you are looking to PayPal to process all of your payments or to add PayPal as an additional payment option, you can rest assured that you are partnering with the internet payments leader.

You should be able to grab the hcard with the details straight off this post. Tickets will be available from http://barcampbrighton.eventwax.com/barcampbrighton4.

There will be at least one more ticket release between now and September 5th. We also have reserved tickets for the following groups of people, in order to diversify the attendees:

• BarCamp newbies
• IET and BCS members
• Geek girls
• Students

Leave a comment below with your email address, drop us a line or tweet us for details.

The final ticket allocation will be a lottery: we’ll take everyone’s details and then will randomly select names from the list. More details on this later.

You should be able to grab the hcard with the details straight off this post. Tickets will be available from http://barcampbrighton.eventwax.com/barcampbrighton4.

There will be at least two more ticket releases between now and September 5th. We also have reserved tickets for the following groups of people, in order to diversify the attendees:

• BarCamp newbies
• IET and BCS members
• Geek girls
• Students

Leave a comment below with your email address, drop us a line or tweet us for details.

We’re extremely pleased to officially announce the dates for BarCampBrighton4; September 5th & 6th September, 2009. Once again it’s the weekend immediately after dConstruct. What’s more, we’re really excited about our fanatastic new city-centre venue. Directly opposite the Corn Exchange, BarCampBrighon4 will be held in the old Music Library on Church Street; currently an art gallery and somewhat down-at-heel, it’s the perfect Brighton venue. “Derelicte” if you will.

Tickets will be released in tranches. We’ll announce the ticketing dates the week commencing August 3rd. Make sure you’re following us on Twitter! We’ll have reserved tickets for first-timers, students, girl geeks, and other groups. Details on these will accompany the ticketing announcement.

Sponsors

Our last-minute change of venue away from Sussex University has meant that we’re running close to the wire on the sponsorship front. We’re really chuffed to be supported by Yahoo Developer Network as our first sponsor, but we need more!

The sponsorship package is as follows:

Gold £2000 – 2 slots. Each Gold sponsor gets 4 alloted tickets.
Silver £1000 – 4 slots. Each Silver sponsor gets 3 alloted tickets.
Bronze £750 – 8 slots. Each Bronze sponsor gets 2 alloted tickets.

If you’d like to become a sponsor, please get in touch with Jay Caines-Gooby jay@gooby.org or call him on 07956 182625.

Microsponsors

Following last years successful model of local micro-sponsors, we’re once again looking for £100 donations from freelancers and micro-businesses. If you’re a Brighton company and would like to help the Brighon geek-tech-hack-startup-social-design-gaming-mobile-robot-photo-blogging scene, or indeed, if you’re a local geek-tech-hack-startup-social-design-gaming-mobile-robot-photo-blogging business and feel like you have benefitted from the events that the community runs, why not give something back and help some others. It would only take 70 microsponsors to pay for the whole event!

All microsponsors will get their logo on the BarCampBrighton website plus all signage and literature.

If you’d like to become a microsponsor, please get in touch with Jay Caines-Gooby jay@gooby.org or call him on 07956 182625.

Thanks to our first four microsponsors; Web Positioning Centre, Latitude Hosting, The Skiff and emosaic.