Beaver Bar Camp 8 was a large success. For those who don’t know, Barcamp is ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. This year, Mozilla signed on to generously sponsor BBC8 and gave a focused, hands-on workshop on Web Security. Along with Mozilla was ThumbArcade who also sponsored BBC8 and hosted a couple speed-hack sessions and commentary on how Apple killed the publisher.
Not only did companies give talks but students and former students as well. For example, Ben Kero, who recently gave a talk last meeting about PGP encryption and GPG keysigning, gave tips on advanced SSH usage (aka magic). Several PSU students came down from Portland and gave a talk on Puppet. Mike Cooper, LUG vice-president, gave a talk about his static webpage generator, wok, which this site so happens to run on. Tim Harder talked on extending Vim. Some offbeat talks included frugal cooking and beer brewing.
The last session involved Dr. Carlos Jensen, a professor at OSU researching the usability aspects of Open Source held a planning session for a possible reboot of the Open Source Education Lab, which would greatly involve LUG. Thanks to the refreshment budget, there was a lot of free food (sandwiches, coffee, bagels), and thanks to Mozilla a lot of free swag (not including the free Barcamp t-shirt). At the end, a Kindle Fire was raffled off to a very lucky guy. Keep on the lookout for BBC9!
