baacamp

“All had fun, and came away physically exhausted but mentally recharged” - Nat Torkington

baacamp was a great experience. Here’s a selection of my memories from the weekend:

Networks
Friday evening saw Minister David Cunliffe give his pitch on the government’s approach to ensuring NZ has the necessary infrastructure in place to compete online. He seemed genuinely surprised by the consequences of de-peering which was communicated to him by the room. As noted by others in the room he took that issue away as a priority.

Energy
David Haywood gave a talk on energy. Starting by explaining the difference between store and flow based energy. Then looking at each of the flow based sources and discussing their merits. Including work he’s been involved with around wave generation and sterling engines. Peering also raised its head here, in relation to the difference between what an electricity network will sell and buy electricity. This is an issue when you have home based wind or solar generators with excess electricity that can offering to others back on the grid.

Copyright
Judith Tizard fronted to give her position on the whys and wherefores of the Copyright Amendment Bill. Followed by some analysis by lawyer and policy foosters.
Judith started out by recounting a meeting with a music executive who had urged her to continue making formating shifting - of music - just a ‘little bit illegal’. She also explained that a goal of the bill was to put in place copyright law that would continue to relevant in the face of future technological developments. I wish the bill truly reflected a policy and rights based approach. However the exclusion of format shifting of video from the bill demonstrates the political reality that the movie industry continues to trump consumer rights.
It would be a shame if the bill was to be passed in this state. Video format shifting of material is happening now across NZ in exactly the same way the music is being format shifted. This bill would then create law which continue to make things a ‘little bit illegal’ for those: copying their DVDs to the media centres or transcoding and copying their DVDs onto their video iPod.
There was very limited discussion on TPMs (aka DRM), some this was around the desire to access DRMed content sans DRM. In the music world there are signs that DRM is dying. The latest being Steve Jobs’ open letter reaction to Norway’s stance. Of course there will be plenty more opportunity to discuss the bill next week at the InternetNZ workshops. I intend to get to the Auckland session.

Xero
As someone with a couple of recently created small trading entities the Xero preview was of direct interest to me. It’s accounting Web 2.0. style for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Naturally that means great data integration/interchange and a well thought out user experience.
Rod Drury, the man behind Xero, talked about the capital bootstrapping process that has got them to where they are. The trade sale of email archiver AfterMail was part of the process. In the world post Sarbanes-Oxley archiving email is required for many companies. Accounting is another activity that is required. Do I spot a MO? Find an activity companies are compelled to do - then provide a solution which makes the activity as painless and as valuable as possible?
Its certainly not a bad starting angle for startups.

“Fucking big web sites”
Artur Bergman from Six Apart gave a wonderfully deadpan presentation on how to handle seriously loaded dynamically generated web sites. In-between dissing filesystems, databases and codecs he explained the pragmatic approach that LiveJournal has taken. Their Perl based tools (Perbal, memcached, GearMan and MogileFS) created for this end are open source and were in use by a number those in attendance. This presentation from OSCON 2005 provides insight into their architecture.

Auckland City
The talk by Richard Simpson on how to punctuate Auckland was remarkable for two reasons. Firstly there were almost as many non-Aucklanders in the audience as those living in Jaffaville. But more importantly the discovery that there is someone in council who has big, ballsy and in many respects, beautiful ideas on how we can transform Auckland into the city it deserves to be. Including a new bridge - for all transport, a national stadium that would help link the CBD with the Domain and a canal between the two harbours. Shame there are no plans for an aqueduct on the canal though;)

Thanks!!!
Big Thanks for organising/supporting the whole experience to Nat, Russell, Jenine, Vern and the sponsors including Google, Xero and Karajoz.