Digibury Weekender 2014

A round-up of my visit to Digibury Weekender 2014 in Canterbury, Kent.

This year's Digibury Weekender was packed full of speakers from a whole spectrum of digital industries and organisation embracing digital technologies to improve, enhance or change the way we do things. Rarely do I think does Kent get to welcome such a range of attendees and speakers from far away as well as locally.

English comedian and science presenter: Robin Ince did a fine job of introducing the speakers and filling in for the all too predictable technical hiccups that occur when projecting anything more complex than a simple PowerPoint presentation in front of a large audience.

Aral Balkan's keynote set a general direction for thinking throughout the day as well as providing a good reason to stay to the end for his latest news regarding Indie technology. Aral introduced some new features of Indie OS including Pulse pier-pier distribution to the development community. We also caught a brief sight of the Indie Phone production model.

Dave Walker spoke favourably of life long education and courses taken beyond further education. Quite astonishingly only 10% of adults here in Europe will ever return to any form of formal learning once settled down; typically with a full-time job, family and mortgage. With the widespread availability of mobile internet, smartphones and tablets; it’s never been easier to learn on the go at little expense and with the most up to date information and resources.

Alberta Soranzo led on a sombre note based on personal tragedy to talk about the challenges of accessing or deleting your social media presence by those you leave behind once you have passed away.

Barbara Cooper from Kent County Council presented a positive outlook for areas like Canterbury and Ashford in providing a highly attractive location for tech start-ups typically based in Shoreditch, London thanks to the High Speed 1 rail link and hence close proximity to our capital.

Digibury Weekender 2014 was superbly executed with a diverse range of people from all backgrounds both speaking and watching. As a regular conference/evening talks attendee seeing presentations decorated with slide after slide after slide of code extracts; it's always a fresh breeze to see talks purely about the philosophy or theory of a topic of digital technology. Digibury Weekender certainly attempts to do this well.