The Cape Town March 2007 GeekDinner was held last night, and I think it can be called a success. From my perspective, most of the geeks were mingling, there were lots of questions on the presentations, there was impromptu discussion and presentations in the form of open mic sessions, and so forth. I found it engaging, dynamic, and interactive.
The sessions worked well - we had one fifteen-to-twenty minute session on WAPA, the Wireless Access Provider Association - I guess we could call it the main attraction. This was given by David Jarvis, whose day job is running the wireless ISP Uninetwork. He explained that WAPA is an industry representative body for wireless access providers, to work together to ensure a sustainable wireless access service industry. They're there to self-regulate and live up to a code of conduct and to make sure they're all behaving properly, and ultimately would like proper legal recognition of this activity.
Then, a ten minute or so session announcing Teraco, the latest project by serial entrepreneurs Joe, Abraham (who are both behind the Frogfoot ISP and wireless access provider Amobia), and Matt Tagg (the guy behind Web Africa's success). Teraco is to be world-class vendor-neutral data centre in Cape Town, with N+1 redundancy throughout. They'll just provide the location - customers will need to get their own agreements to have their traffic carried from the multiple carriers in the centre, and customers will also be able to get direct links to other customers in the data centre.
Then, another ten minute or so session by Jonathan Endersby on a restaurant review site he'd like to work on, with full Web 2.0 buzzword compliance.
I gave a hopefully-very-short (and hopefully somewhat accurate) talk on OpenID, entitled OpenID in three minutes. There were quite a few questions during the talk and in the comments time though, so it was quite a bit more than three minutes.
Jeremy Thurgood gave a similarly quick talk on Erlang, a distributed, concurrent, robust, functional programming language with cool features like hot code upgrades and soft real-time scheduling. Andy Rabagliati did one on peering, and Morgan Collett talked about the Ubuntu-ZA community.
You can follow others' thoughts on the GeekDinner on the GeekDinner planet.