Second BarCamp in Antwerp in two months: ZooCamp. A BarCamp in the Antwerp Zoo (surprise, surprise). One of the most beautiful locations for a BarCamp I’ve ever been to. There were around 50 or 60 people this time so it was a rather small event which was nice as I met many new people.

Geomajas

Geomajas is an open source, web-based GIS framework I had never heard of. Look at it as something you can use on top of a map (like OpenStreetMap) to present georeferenced data. It looks just like OpenStreetMap but with a way to use your own database which may be useful for companies. This company can now share their data if they want or import third party databases. The idea looks promising, but the installation procedure and user interface was a bit cumbersome.

What I learned from organizing a conference

I gave a presentation about the things I learned from organizing twiist.be, which we organized last week. The presentation sums up 18 points I must keep in mind for the next time and hopefully some of the ZooCamp attendees got a little insight from my tips.

How to tame an RFID rabbit

Gil Plaquet demoed his Violet mir:ror, an RFID reader I was planning to buy. It’s a fun little device to play with, nothing more, nothing less. Gil showed the perfect use case for this thing: when one of the children comes home, he puts the little rabbit (an RFID tag) on the mir:ror which sends an e-mail to his mom. A bit of an expensive toy if you ask me. I would love to hack my own RFID reader though.

ZooCamp

The zoo is a beautiful place for an event and the sunny weather made it even better. Big thanks to Filip Borloo to pull this off! There are some more ZooCamp presentations on Slideshare.