This year I’ve helped out with organising and running the Northern Lights conference. For those that don’t know, Northern Lights is a modest tech conference held in Aberdeen each autumn with a simple manifesto – “to inspire geeks of all creeds to improve themselves, and their communities”.
I particularly enjoyed helping make the event look more polished with banners and lanyards carrying some new creative work from Owen at work. It gave everything a more legit feeling, without detracting from the community feel that has always made Northern Lights so great to attend.
I could write up my take on the speakers, but better to point you at an attendee for the unbiased take on events. Tom Ireland @tom_ireland on twitter did a great write up of his experience at the conference.
The best part of the day though, was that I got to catch up with a bunch of folk I haven’t seen in a while. The openspace section of the day gave a great opportunity to talk shop during the sessions, and catch up during the runarounds without feeling time pressured. I suspect openspace is here to stay for Northern Lights – it worked really well – despite most attendees never having taken part in openspace before.
I’ve posted a bunch of photos to the Refresh group on Flickr. I’ll add any other coverage here, and on lanyrd.
We’ve already started planning next years event. The current forerunner for the theme is “context”, but if you came along last week please do chip in your ideas by tweeting @northlightconf.
Steven Milne 