Notes from NotCon: Introduction

So it’s Sunday morning at 11.30am and I’m going to start taking notes of the goings-on at NotCon. Probably the best way to describe the feel of the place so far is that it’s somewhere between the sensation of being at ETCon and how I felt when I went to a Doctor Who convention in Norwich aged around fourteen. The organisation is refreshingly haphazard (the Geolocation panel is supposed to start in about four minutes time and they’re still assembling the stage and trying to work out how to project computer screens onto a paint encrusted theatrical backdrop), and the cost of entry (at around £4) is around a five hundredth of what it costs for an Englishman to get to its (perhaps slightly more distinguished) American analogues.

NotCon has two concurrent streams across two rooms – one is on the ground floor and is completely full as of this moment. The other is on the second floor, marked by a succession of hand-scrawled notes and is almost completely empty.

My current plans for the day (should anyone care) are:

• 11.40 – 12.30pm Geolocation (2nd Floor)
• 12.30 – 1.30 Hardware (Ground Floor)
• 2.00 – 2.50 Brewster Kahle (GF) or Mashups and MP3s (2nd)
• 3.00 – 4.00 Social Software (2nd)
• 4.30 – 5.20 Blogging with a point (GF)
• 5.30 – 6.20 Peer-to-peer review (2nd)

I’m going to try and keep some rough notes of what’s going on over the day as and when I can, but no promises (it looks like power sockets are going to be hard to come by today and my Powerbook is a hungry beast).