The first time I found out about eurucamp was during the euruko 2011. Some people talked about this “unconference” close to the venue that a few people had organized. The tickets for the euruko had been sold out too quickly and everyone who could not buy one was invited to meet there instead. At that euruko I gave my first real talk and because of that I was way too nervous to take the U8 to visit them. I should have done it.
In 2012 I visited for the first time and never missed one since. This year was special though. I was not only helping eurucamp like last year, I was part of the lead team together with Fanny Krebs and Ute Mayer.
If you don’t know eurucamp and think of normal conferences, you might have something like this in your head right now:
Talks are an important part of every conference. But besides great talks about Crystal by Luís Ferreira or Cultivating Empathy by Dajana Günther and Leslie Hawthown and many others, eurucamp also tries to be a little bit different.
Sitting in a hall together with 350 people during the summer does not sound that great to lots of people. Luckily eurucamp has the tradition of a 4 hour long lunchbreak filled with activities. Activities like this one:
Other activities included biking, swimming, slacklining, pair programming, stiching, board games, a very special screening of Code: Debugging The Gender Gap, a Sketchnote Workshop and lots of other things. Thanks to the beautiful location of the Uni Potsdam right next to the Griebnitzsee, eurucamp could offer all of this.
This year’s eurucamp took place over a weekend, kicking off with the keynote talk on Friday, followed by fireside drinks on Friday at Söhnle Werft, talks and activities on Saturday, and ending with the traditional after-party at Prater Garten. For the early birds lucky enough to be in Potsdam on the Friday morning, there was eurucamp’s little sister conference, jRubyConf.eu, organized by Lucas Pinto and bitcrowd’s very own Tobi. The timing was more than perfect with jRuby releasing Version 9.0.0.0 just a few days before the conference. jRubyConf.eu saw talks by Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo and lots of others.
eurucamp also tries to be a community leader with live speech to text transcription, a code of conduct publicly visible as a poster, childcare, blind selection process for the talks and much much more. To organize all of this takes time. More time than most people might imagine. We at bitcrowd are thankful that we could help the team by hosting the regular meetings every month since October.
Thanks to everyone who made eurucamp and jRubyConf.eu possible!
If you missed jRubyConf or eurucamp, the talks have been recorded and will be online on confreaks in a few weeks.
Ps: you might ask if there actually was a camp on the eurucamp. Yes, there was:
Putting the 'camp' in #eurucamp @eurucamp pic.twitter.com/Ov3y9rYFt8
— Andreas Finger (@mediafinger) August 1, 2015