There are many days when I feel proud to be part of various groups of people that work on things that matter. And today was one of them.
It started with the Limerick OpenCoffee in the morning. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish by having coffee with like minded people once a month! Talking about a possible home for the MiLK Labs and the many things that could happen once we find it with James, planning joint events for our students with Bernie, exploring social graphs and couchsurfing, adding events to my diary and meeting new people.
And it ended at the university, in the Concert Hall, where I went for this month’sICO concert. We are so lucky to have this world class orchestra in our vicinity and to listen to them every month!
Tonight, after the interval, this little video was shown, and Kathleen Turner, the ICO education officer explained how part of the money we pay for tickets goes to support initiatives like Sing Out with Strings:
I felt proud. My finances are not at their best these days, but this is a really worthy cause. Music can bridge many differences and transform people!
At the end of the video, the signature of Shannon Images brought back nice memories from Padraic O’Reilly’s talk at 3Dcamp back in 2008.
Life is good. And I am a very fortunate human being to live around so many people who work on things that matter – to them and to me!
This created a lot of buzz and the idea of organising a BarCamp focusing on entrepreneurship and start-ups
Then, I came across Stephen Kinsella’s post and listened to the podcast- he was talking about a University initiative group. It occurred to me that we should join forces, so I drew his attention to the LOCC idea.
Twitter did the rest. Other people jumped in, so on January 23, we met in UL for the first time to discuss how, when, where, who. Why was obvious: trying to turn a bad thing around… The discussion started with Stephen Kinsella, Hughie Tiernan, Bernie Goldbach and myself around the table. David Quaid, Evert Bopp, Ger Hartnett and Shane McAllister joined us shortly. We were all buzzing with great ideas about speakers, sessions, advertising and so on. The only problem we had was with the date: Stephen had already made a provisory booking of the lecture hall and break-out rooms in the Kemmy Business School. And the date was March 7. Bernie told us he just spoke to Keith Bohanna and that was the date they had picked up for Bizcamp Dublin. A short conversation with Keith on the phone, a tentative of bringing the Dublin Bizcamp to Limerick alltogether, the frightening spectrum of having two competing events on the same day, a check of the rugby calendar, and we agreed to move the event to March 21. Dellcamp became Bizcamp Limerick!
We went to see the facilities and everybody was impressed by the new KBS building.
Stephen Kinsella has the whole story in this blogpost.
