Trust Tania to put together a pretty reasonable and equitable political history of the Cape Town technology get-together scene since BarCamp Cape Town through 27dinner, GeekDinner, and towards *Camp.

We've just had our first post to the starcamp-planning mailing list, where we hope people who are interested in helping out will join us to plan *Camp.  Our main aim over the next month is finding a venue, but more publicity and discussion about what people want out of it is always useful.

Even thought I was told many times during the evening that I was described as being involved in organising a "rival" (I assume, jokingly), I have to say that the 27dinner held in Cape Town yesterday was great.

Perhaps the largest difference between the February 27dinner and this one was the amount of networking that seemed to be going on.  I think this was a function of many things.

The venue (the hotel training school near the Waterfront) was more intimate and dedicated to the event, and had smaller and better positioned tables.  This meant that you had a potential audience of ten people, instead of the six or so from the previous venue (Relish), and that nobody was in "the back row" behind everyone else and away from the speakers and everyone else.

The speakers were kept pretty short, and more time was thus available to networking.  It also meant that people remained pretty upbeat and willing to chat to people.

I sat with Jaco and Joe, and the others at our table were the MyVideo.co.za people, and later Uno.  Dave also sat with us (and, well, everyone else) between MC'ing (which went down very well).  The other denizens of the geekdom were spread amongst other tables in small patches, alone against the dark side...

Of the talks, Ian's talk on technology and morality (in combination, and somewhat in separation) was probably the most profound, and Mike Scott's introduction to the backstory of Bru and Boegie and the creative process was the most interesting.

As I said, a lot more networking went on - I chatted briefly with Mike (checking to see if he knew Jeremy's brother from his time at Rhodes), chatted with Dave about Barcamp Cape Town (you'll hear more about this after the weekend), also with the Myvideo and Zoopy guys about getting enclosures into their RSS (please!), introduced myself to Victoire (who it seems also works with a friend from Rhodes - hi Zweli), said hello to Henk (who raised over R2k for iCommons), dissed PHP and MySQL at Jacques, and so forth.

Altogether, a great evening, and I think it really shows how wrong the people who made silly comments about how Capetonians are just too cliquey are.

Only a few seconds after the last 27dinner in Cape Town, the next one is ready for people to sign themselves up for.  Unfortunately, there's no permalink for the particular next one yet (I imagine it'll be 27-4, but it isn't yet).  Considering the feedback on the last one (you can read up a lot from my reportback on the event), it will be interesting to see how the form and content of the events change over time.  Don't forget to sign up to the event if you have a web log - it's on 27th April (a Friday), and the venue will still be decided.

One outcome of the last dinner was the rehighjacking of the Geek Dinner concept.  Joe has done a lot of infrastructure work to get a new (nicer) domain, a logo, and a new event with venue and sign-up page.  If you're a geek and want some stimulating geeky conversation and Python-vs-Ruby-vs-PHP and web-vs-command-line posturing, then this is something to attend.  It's also sooner than the 27dinner, on the 28th March (a much more sensible Wednesday) at Barbarellas (in Constantia Village, which is thankfully close to where I stay).

(At least three of JOCUAMAOE will be there.  How can you go wrong?)

The 27dinner on Tuesday (aka 27-2) went off pretty much the way I expected it to.  In summary, not geek-accessible, but a great place to meet new people (if they were into being met) and to reconnect with old friends.

Relish was great in terms of location and scenery.  The pre-drinks extended, as one should expect they should for Cape Town, quite significantly past the published starting time, and the less prompt arrivals may have been a problem except for the cocktail glasses distracting those less stereotypically Capetonian about time.

The price (of the food) was high but not exorbitant, but I was a bit disappointed with the relative quality thereof.  Salmon, avocado, and creme fraiche generally sell themselves, but they did not inspire me in the form of my starter.  The crepe with wild mushrooms and blue cheese was, frankly, not that inspiring either.  And was the only vegetarian mains option.

The problem with the pre-drinks was that it was hard to figure out whether people in the bar area were involved with the event (most, it seems, weren't).  Name tags would probably be overkill (geeks love those, of course), but some sort of tag saying "I'm here for 27 dinner" might've been useful.  In their absence, besides a wave at Dave who seemed very seriously into a discussion with someone, I was forced to hang around and wait until I saw people I knew were with the dinner.

The restaurant event could generally be described as having four zones.  Facing the stage, the left table was the Barcamp Cape Town/Geek Dinner/27dinner-in-crowd.  On the right, it was the Quirk-and-friends brigade.  I'm not sure what the middle table was about.  The back table seemed to be the geeks - at the very least:

• my former boss at Independent Online (IOL), Ian Gilfillan;
• geek-with/despite-multiple-businesses-and-suits, Johann (Joe) Botha;
• the arbitrary Jonathan Endersby;
• my colleague and fellow Python fanatic, Bryn Divey;
• the blogless sysadmin wunderkind, Jaco Engelbrecht;
• and some people who seemed to be saying quite geeky things but I can't remember their names.

Which, I suppose, is why many people are calling the Cape Town response to the event to be cliquey.

The actual talks ranged from generically-interesting to marketing-specific-and-self-promotion, and all were too long and not tight/directed enough.

• Graham Knox's StormHoek story was interesting, as usual - I didn't get as much from it, since I'd heard the story from him before, and I'd done my own research.
• Verity's story about pre-selling an album to be created was interesting, but could have been a lot shorter.  (I wasn't personally taken by her music either - and it cut into time to talk to people.)
• Shelly Levin was, unfortunately, unprepared to speak and/or was too nervous to put together something as compelling as more seasoned speakers like Graham (who has improved quite a bit from BarCamp Cape Town).  The talk was all around the place, and was a little too abstract in nature.  It also sounded a lot like an advertisement for her business.
• Angus Robinson was quite a good speaker in terms of confidence and voice control, but the topic was all over the place, and a shorter "Lessons learned at 3GSM" or "Keep your eyes on these things" talk would have been more valuable. ``Make sure you grab the .mobi domain'' made quite a few people at the geek table laugh...
• Guy Lundy was a good speaker, with a good enough topic, but wasn't tight enough for me.  Also, I guess he had to deal with a crowd that'd been put through a lot of other talks, so it may not be that much of a problem.

In total, not really worth attending solely for the spoken content.

Someone should write or present a "How to market to geeks" for the marketers (yes, I'm volunteering).  But then, Geeks are just another market segment and it's "your" job to understand the market segments of interest to you.  Good marketers don't blame their audience when their campaign doesn't succeed.

Of course, what's the point in complaining if you can't suggest improvements? 

More, shorter, talks are a good idea.  Even if you're talking about something I'm not interested in, I'm quite willing to give you five minutes.  Force me to sit through 25 minutes, though.  Have one, experienced, speaker giving a longer speech - a guest that hopefully will inspire more and different people to attend the particular evening.

As part of having more talks, be accepting of a wider variety of talks.  For example, you can allow two or so people to give a short introduction to their company and what they do and what they think they do better, and what they can offer the group, and what they need to improve.  You can have someone explaining a new technology - a new standard, programming language, device, or service - or just showing a demo of it.  You can also have someone explain the problems they've had starting a business or marketing one or making the technology behind one, and have them give the results of their proposed solutions.

See if you can incorporate the "audience" more into the conversation.  It felt like being in an audience, whereas my experience at Africa Source and the Developer Roadshows has led me to believe that single-speaker-"teaching"-an-audience is the worst way to organise both learning and people.  Have a short talk followed by a well-facilitated brainstorm session of options.  Have a panel answer questions from those not on the panel.

Maybe the thing to do, over time, is to have smaller events.  It felt like there were a lot of hangers-on at the event - people who were in the industry but not passionate about it and what they do.  They're dead weight - drowning out the potential contributions of those that are.

Force everyone to speak - even if it's just to introduce themselves to everyone else.  Name, the associative relationship they're most proud of (ie, project, company, activist movement, &c.), and their favourite cocktail.  Called an "opening circle" in facilitation terms.  And, at the end of the official programme, have everyone (or a sufficiently large number) say out loud what the most valuable thing they took away from the event (aka, a "closing circle").

Depending on the venue, one can even do a quick group exercise to lessen the impact of just sitting back and "listening".   Maybe force everyone to move three chairs to the left after every talk to cycle the people sitting opposite them at the table (while still keeping people you're comfortable with next to you).  Maybe have randomised assigned seating - pick up a seat number at the front as you enter...

Over time, hopefully the format and shape of the event should change to make everyone who is willing to put stuff in feel like they've got stuff out.

Other posts to read about 27-2, the first 27dinner in Cape Town:

• Joe really started the pro-geek resistance movement, and has promised to bring Geek Dinner back to Cape Town
• Aubrey gave the event his usual BugEyed treatment
• Jacques Marneweck also came out "pro-geek", and supported the re-highjacking.
• Tania, somehow, seemed to think I was one of the better things about the event (showing obvious taste, and thus being someone I should speak to next time)
• Dave Duarte posted a summary of the event
• Mike Stopworth tried to turn the cliquiness into a Cape Town Thing, and forwarded the marketer's side about the geeks - but, frankly, geeks don't like weasel words and layers of indirection in criticism, and Mike didn't come chat to us either, so...
• Rafiq wrote something profound that unfortunately I can't parse
• Ian Gilfillan wrote a counter-point to the geeks' feeling of entitlement but confirmation on not having handled them well.