Barcamp Gent has been more more than 2 weeks now, but I still felt the need to give some credit to those who did great, interesting, good and/or remarkable presentations.
One of the first talks I attended was the one by Werner Raemakers demoing Channel.TV and talking about the efforts VRT and BBC are making to get their video recordings digitally distributed. It was cool to see how they’re experimenting with Apple TV and own linux based set top boxes.
Elise Houard later on did an introduction on OAuth (waf? o-af? open-waf? … What a nightmare to pronounce this correctly), the open protocol for secure API authentication between web and desktop applications. (You’ve seen a protocol similar to OAuth, if you’ve used any application using the Flickr API before.) I fully support this standard, ’cause I’m sure it’s more secure and correct than eg. most screen-scraping-based contact-importers used mostly, and it’s good to have a standard for API providers, because they’re all dealing with the issue of authorization.
I’m still waiting to see some more sites support this standard, though, and I’m also keen to know in which way implementing the OAuth protocol affects the user experience, because I assume navigating away from a site could potentially scare a user maybe even more then asking for a password. I do see the advantages in allowing for partial access (in features – read and/or write – and in time – eg. limited for a week), but I think for most users it comes down to: “do I trust this site or not?”, and if they do, will make OAuth or asking for a password of another site really make any difference?
Must add I’ve been impressed by the recent implementations of ‘check who of your whatever-online-addresbook-service are on here too’ by Flickr and Dopplr recently.
Later that day Kris Buytaert ranted about the fact (!) the web 2.0 services of today still don’t work together the way they could, and should. Why can’t all the services aggregate all the information one publishes on all the different sites, and eg. show me the restaurant tips from NotSoSo created by my best Netlog friends for the trip next week I’ve been planning using Dopplr? Should be possible … Anyways, we’ve all definitely got some work to do to make this possible. The discussion took an interesting direction when Pascal Van Hecke spoke about initiatives in further decentralising your online presence, kind of returning to the subjects related to OpenID and OAuth.
Frank Louwers shared his enthousiasm for the Baobab Health project, running in Malawi. In his Africa On Rails talk he spoke about how a small team of developers is using Ruby On Rails to create kiosks that help suggesting the amount of drugs for HIV positive patients. This way not only the 160 doctors of Malawi can help out the 1 000 000 people suffering of AIDS. Their main concerns are power & budget, but in an interview with one of the developers it was interesting to see how they appreciated and disliked the same things in Ruby as local Ruby developers, albeit in totally different circumstances. Definitely check out baobabhealth.org.
My last session for the day was another demo, given by Bart Claeys. He and a friend did a quick tour through the most important features of Adobe Lightroom. I hope a demo of Apple’s Aperture is up next, so I can decide where to start managing the photos of the newly bought DSLR (Wooha!).
I left with a whole bunch of ideas, new people to follow on Twitter and lots of inspiration. Thumbs up for Thomas Bouve, he organised a great BarCamp edition (for the very first time in my hometown, yeey!).
More info and linkage at: http://barcampgent.wikispaces.com/.