As with all the London-based BarCamps that have occurred so far, this one was heavily oversubscribed. When signup opened, tickets vanished in the blink of an eye and plenty of people were upset that they hadn’t managed to get a place. Eagerness to be involved was so high that the first ever BarCamp London Spillover was organised as a one day event to let some of the people who had wanted to be there have their own mini event.

Then the day of BarCamp London 5 came, and a lot of people who had managed to get tickets didn’t bother showing up. Anecdotally, between 40 and 75 people just didn’t come. If those people had handed back their tickets prior to the event that could have let a lot of the people who went to Spillover come to the main event. Not turning up is just not cricket. Part of the fun of a BarCamp is the diverse number of people who attend and contribute to the event. Not turning up just dilutes that horribly.

I’m not the only person who feels this way. In fact, chatting to people over the weekend it was a common theme. Various people were mentioned who have done this on more than one occasion, and the general feeling seemed to be that something should be done about this trend before it continues. Maybe that would involve naming and shaming. Maybe a blacklist to stop no-showers from signing up during the first couple of rounds of tickets for the next BarCamp? Maybe charging a nominal fee to attend, like BathCamp did, would be a way to make sure people turned up? I don’t know what the answer is, but I really don’t want this trend to continue.

What I do need to applaud the organisers of BarCamp London 5 for though was the large number of newbie tickets. New people and diversity are the lifeblood of BarCamps, so it was fantastic seeing them going the extra mile to bring new people in. Likewise, the sponsors were great and a special “shout out” has to go to MyMuesli who provided some awesome custom muesli for breakfast on the Sunday morning which seemed to go down incredibly well.

I had a great time at BarCamp London 5, and I look forward to the next one. The only thing that could make it better would be if everyone turned up next time!

So, what changed?

Firstly, moo has an API now. Previously if I’d automated the image creation process for the Ten Word Moo Cards that’s all I would have been able to do, and then I would have had to upload them all myself. So, having an API allows me to press a button in one place and magically have a set of cards created for me. Awesome.

Secondly, in his talk, Stefan mentioned that the revenue sharing for cards, stickers etc that people bought would be set at 15%. Now that’s pretty damn high. Not only that, but it will be applied retroactively, since they’ve not actually got the payment stuff working yet.

The final thing that’s pushed me into finally making the cards is that there’s a prize for the best hack on the Moo API that came out of the BarCamp – a little handheld camcordery device. Obviously, I’d quite like to win that.

So, I made a “Ten Word Moo Card Creator”. It takes the best rated reviews from The Ten Word Review (where you can review anything you like as long as you do it in exactly ten words) and creates moo cards from them. If you want to create cards purely based on the reviews that you have written, you type your username into the textbox below. That’s it, simple really.

There are, of course, a couple of caveats. The first is that it might take a little while getting to Moo’s website after pressing that button. That’s because up to 30 images are being created, and each one needs to determine the optimal font-size for the review it contains. We’re not talking hours here, but it might take a few seconds.

The second caveat is that I haven’t set any default text for the back of the cards or set a default crop. The reason for this that if you set a crop then Moo steps straight over the cropping step of its wizard, which unfortunately is also the place where you choose whether you’d like to discard any of the images that you’ve chosen. Likewise, if I set some default text on the back of the card, then Moo seems to take this as a directive that the user wouldn’t want to edit that themselves and puts the cards straight into the user’s basket. In this instance the user hasn’t even been able to see what the cards look like on Moo’s site before they arrive in their basket.

Of course, if I’m wrong about these caveats, and I can add default text to the cards whilst still allowing the user to enter the flow on Moo’s website at the image cropper stage, that would be fantastic.

Overall, the Moo API is pretty easy to use. There are rough edges, but it isn’t a finished thing, and it’s not at a 1.0 release yet, so it’s utterly forgivable (as long as developer comments are taken onboard, and I’m convinced that they will be). Hack around at it like I did, and see what you can make.

Hmmm, I just remembered that I while back I wrote a Moo Sticker Speech Bubble Generator. I should really hook that into the API too, shouldn’t I? One day. One day…

These are the slides I put together for my talk:

If you just want to download the Code, go right ahead. If you want to know more about the project, read the WikiSlurp Project page.