McFilter

I first heard about the O'Reilly Ignite events last year, when Leeds hosted one and I watched some of the live stream, but I hadn't attended one until this Thursday just gone when Liverpool held one as part of O'Reilly's Global Ignite Week.

I'd been involved in organising the event - although Neil Morrin, Andy Goodwin, Danny Callaghan and Allison Cordner did most of the hard work - which I think is how I got the "honour" of kicking things off.

I want us to have loads more interesting and fun events like this here in Liverpool, and running things like Howduino over the past year has shown me that it's not that hard to put things on; so I decided to give a talk about putting on talks...

Following me were ten great talks on a complete range of topics. When we put the call out for speakers I was a bit worried that we'd end up with lots of really hardcore techie talks clashing with a load of arty ones, given my links into the software community and Neil's links to the arts scene. It wouldn't have mattered, part of the idea with encouraging more events is to get that creative crossover, and friction even, between the groups so that interesting stuff happens as a result, and each talk only lasts for five minutes (it's a rigid format - 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide).

As it turned out, Dan's "Blagger's Guide to Linux" was a techie as it got, with other topics ranging from edible landscapes to art criticism; from music publishing revenue models to community involvement with both the Democracy Club and Bad Format magazine.

Thanks to Mike Nolan for compering the evening, Andrew Freeney and the rest of the LJMU Art and Design Academy for letting us hold the event there and to Ella Wredenfors, Jonathan Deamer, Mark Brereton, Richard Smedley, Maria Barrett, Robert Law, Rosie Martin Harris, Scott Jones, Francis Irving and Dan Lynch for giving a talk.

Chris Chadwick very generously helped out by filming the event, so we should have the talks online sometime in the future, and if you want to experience this sort of thing live then watch this space - there's been quite a bit of talk about holding such events more frequently, so we'll see what happens...