Last Sheep Standing
So it's the last day of New Zealand's first (and hopefully not last) Baa Camp up here in Warkworth. Yesterday I managed miss several sessions that I was looking forward to seeing (Atom, From Startup to Google) and instead spent the afternoon geeking out with Greg Luck of ehcache about various java related foo (with the amount of ruby folk here we have to stick together!).
Baa Camp has been a great experience of both learning, and imparting knowledge and ideas between like minded people, one thing that's come up quite often in my various discussions is the vast number of small, isolated user groups in Auckland - from the java user group, the agile development group, the python/ruby and php groups, to the usability group. It would be interesting to see what could be done to bring a lot of these disparate groups together for a large generic "developers group" - maybe as an irregular unconference around developers, and the interoperability of our various factions.
Having seen the success of Baa Camp - I could easily see how such an event could come together - but I also see a lot of insular apathy amongst the New Zealand developer community (at least amongst the java ones - they like to do everything online via email or irc). Theres a vast wealth of IP creators and consumers in this country and we make great efforts to let people overseas know that - and maybe its time we started to tell it to ourselves.