Thanks to Nur Ahmad Furlong and a couple of iterations inspired by Jonathan and I, StarCamp now has a logo.  Nur also made a badge to put on your page so that people know that you're going and can find out what it's about - you can get the code on the StarCamp main page.

I'm going to be checking out a venue tomorrow that sounds perfect for us.  Just in time too - only two more weeks to go!  We've had more trouble finding venues than I thought we would, as evidenced by the running commentary on the venues page for StarCamp, and I've certainly learned a lot about what's out there and what people expect and why my "perfect dates" for getting school halls weren't quite so perfect after all.

Hopefully we can finalise the venue in the next day or two, and then we can stop holding back on inviting people.  We have 50 people signed up on the wiki page, which is a good start, but I want to see at last 75 people on that list by mid-next-week.  I know I've delayed sending invites until things looked certain, and they're looking fairly certain to me now. 

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.

It's just under one and a third years since the first BarCamp Cape Town and it's just under two months until *Camp, the next BarCamp-style technology unconference in Cape Town.

One things that struck me about BarCamp Cape Town was the breadth of those who came - anything from hard-core C programmers through the Python/Ruby fanboys to more run-of-the-mill PHP programmers to those who couldn't program at all as well.  Those who work in marketing to those interested in it to those who find the entire field a bit distasteful.  Businessowners to wannabe-entrepreneurs to those who'd just like to code and have pizza slid under the door every evening.  It was a place to meet new people in your area of interest - existing groups weren't really growing the pool, and also a place for inter-pool connections to be formed.

BarCamp Cape Town was the catalyst of a few ad-hoc "Geek Dinners", from which sprang 27dinner (in Cape Town and Johannesburg mostly, and also in Durban) and GeekDinner (mostly in Cape Town).  While there are some who move between the two, there hasn't been the sort of mass integration the likes of BarCamp Cape Town since then.

I want *Camp to be the place where that interaction can happen again.  We'll probably have separate "tracks", so that nobody is forced to listen to "marketing" or "geek" speak when they'd rather not, but there should be plenty of opportunity to swap tracks for a bit and to mingle between talks or in the Games Room.

What excites me is that I feel we've become more aware of our surroundings, and we've started to build local heroes (people and sites/businesses), and we've got a bunch of interesting startups to talk about.  There was no Amatomu or Afrigator back then, and Muti was still young.  I'd love to hear from the people who've built the businesses and/or technology behind these and other South African "Web 2.0" (much learn not to feel so bad saying the phrase) social media/user-generated content/&c. endeavours.

While there are probably hundreds of people employed as Linux systems administrators, and hundreds more people using Linux at home for fun, in Cape Town alone, our Linux User Group, CLUG, isn't growing along with these numbers.  It should, though.  It provides two talks a month, on weekday nights, by some of the best people to talk about them, on both beginner and advanced topics, on programming to administration.  And it also has a dinner afterwards for people to meet and learn more about each other and help each other.  CLUG meets on the second and last Tuesday every month, with roughly 20 people attending the talks and about 10 people going to the dinner afterwards.

Growing the pool is making new connections, bringing new people into the community, providing new people to learn from and new opportunities for work or play.  It isn't necessarily about bringing new people into the field (but it is a by-product) so much as it is about making everyone in the field more aware of each other.