Campus Mac 2003
Hi everyone,
I'm writing this to promote the successful event that happened on August 13 -17.
Last year 2002 some Mac MUG leaders on the Apple community in Spain decided to work together to build a new king of "computer party at Spain."
Here at Spain there are several computer parties where people bring their own computers and spend few days with others with the same interest. Usually they are dominated by Windows computers. There are no other facilities that will hold the event than a big covered space like a gym or basketball camp just bigger, with tables and a lot of cables to let people to connect to the internet and with servers. Usually these parties have around 1,000 to 3,000 people.
So the idea was to make something for the Mac community, maybe not so big but more organized and with more facilities to make it more attractive. Last year was the first CampusMac and was held at a convention center in a location close to Malaga. At that event there were 110 Mac users, many conferences and lots of enthusiasm. Everyone went back home happy and the ones who didn’t attend were applying for this year.
The CampusMac was created as an organization, so at the end of each edition, they renew their Board of Directors and the new ones had a lot work to do. The expectations for the next edition were big, and they couldn't disappoint all the Mac users.
They used the same location and I have to say that was very good one. The convention center could accommodate around 300 people in several rooms, had facilities for sports and a swimming pool, and also a cafeteria that served breakfast, lunch, snaks and dinner. Then there was a big salon that accommodated 120 Ethernet points for connection to the Apple Xserve and to the Internet with a high speed connection, and two Airport Extreme base stations so you could get connected from different locations. But one thing that make this CampusMac edition "different" was the inclusion of the GRIM Project which is an educational project in Spain to add computers to the schools and make teachers familiar with software developed for schools and kids. For the teachers, there were 16 ethernet point connections and 16 iMacs brought by two teachers from their schools.
What does all this mean? Mac users could come with their families, and they could spend the days there too sharing activities other than just computers.
The organization this time focused CampusMac on multimedia, so most off the sessions were about Flash, Video, Photography, and the Internet, but also there were sessions about FileMaker and of course Mac OS X and its relationship with Unix. There were three sessions and 1 conference in the morning and 2 or 3 sessions and 1 conference at the afternoon. We had a videoconference from Valencia, Spain about copyright in the digital era. (It was supposed to be from Oxford but the speaker had to go to Valencia.) The complete agenda is listed on the offical site (listed below).
They planned a photograph and a video contest, and the content had to be related to the CampusMac event. The winning video was made by kids in the GRIM Project (listed below).
And what happened? Well as a Mac addict and leader, I don't know how, (but it couldn't have happened any other way) I was helping the day before to set up the Internet access, and other stuff, and then was one of the 230 people that attended. It was a great experience and a new one for me. I met a lot of people face to face, so a lot of nicknames came alive.
One thing that was funny was that Faq-Mac was the first group to have a big banner back in their area, and suddenly more appeared: GUM Sevilla, GUM Malaga, GUM Madrid, Macuarium, GUM Alicante. Everyone were making banners to promote themselves. (GUM means MUG in Spanish.)
We had a meting one night talking about relationship between GUMs in Spain and their relationship outside Spain. They were promoting maing more contact between themselves and exchanging info and resources, and planned to create a chain or ring for that task. They were a little surprised about being one of the countries with more groups outside US, close to Germany and United Kingdom or Australia. One surprised for me was thatone group didn't know about the Apple User Group Locator, so my guess is that we still have a lot work to do as Regional Liaisons and Ambassadors of our groups.
So my conclusion is that I really enjoyed being able to participate in this kind of event, enjoyed meeting so nice Mac users, making crazy things, giving away some Panther X tatoos, sharing my experiences and learning from these wonderful people.
I would like to be next year. I have to mention that there were a few outsiders on this event: 2 Argentinians, 1 Norwegian, 1 Peruvian, 1 from another country (Southeast Europe) and me from Venezuela. All except me were here for the second time.
Here I add some links referrals to the event and to the videos. Texts are in Spanish.
