Camping in Toronto

I suppose it's no surprise given that it's Toronto Tech Week this week, but my week so far has been filled with more TorCamp events than my typical week. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend my first official BarCampToronto. Seems kind of odd, given that I go to lots of events with the local "barcamp" crowd, and I've been to other official barcamps, but this was my first one in Toronto (technically BarCampToronto #4).

As I've related to some folks who've asked already, I thought BarCamp went really well. My entire morning was packed with very interesting conversation : talk of a Canadian mobile users advocacy group (to help instigate change in our wireless data rates, followed by an excellent discussion about Mozilla with Mike Beltzner, and then a pretty killer debate/discussion about the new Facebook developer platform. Perhaps it was just me, but I was pretty well spent by lunch so the afternoon seemed a little less jam packed. I did lead a session on OpenID which spurred some interesting questions and discussion, but after that I kinda just hung out.

Yesterday, I spent the day at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference down at the Metro Convention Centre. While sometimes referred to as "enterprise camp", this was nobody's unconference. Despite some scheduling snafus (we ended up having to hold both tracks in one room and things ended up over an hour off schedule), I think it went well. Of course, I was there doing my OpenID song and dance again (to a slightly different crowd). There was more interest in OpenID than I had guessed there would be amongst "enterprise" folks. I also learned that a very large insurance company here in Toronto implemented a very openid-like identity system in house a few years ago, and are considering migrating it to an openid-based solution. Very cool!</a>.

Sadly, however, I think that about wraps my participation in tech week. No, for those who keep asking, I will not be attending Mesh today and tomorrow. Maybe next year...