Mini-Woodstock moment at OCC Limerick
Aug 11th 2007NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
Along with many others I’ve been struggling to come to terms with the mini-Woodstock moment we experienced during OCC Limerick this week.
I’ve reposted some snippets below to give some idea the reaction to the event, but can’t really capture the moment.
Still, if you missed it you can watch the video of the livestream and read the comments that were coming in from remote viewers like myself.
I even got to ask the Collison brothers about the percentages involved in the equity deal offered by YCombinator and got a great fully rounded answer.
But no moment, personal or otherwise or combination of moments can adequately describe the frission we all felt during and after the event.
And it had nothing to do with typical techie excitement over ‘the amazing things made possible by technology’ but had everthing to do with pure and simple chemical buzz that can happen in the living moment in a group.
09.1254 Eoghan McCabe: “OCC Limerick video (+plus Twitter, Jaiku) stream was spine-tinglingly good. I felt genuinely connected from a couple hundred miles away.”
10.0939 Walter Higgins: “still buzzing from yesterday’s opencoffee limerick. Must try to attend next one in person.”
Conor O’Neill — “Blog post on today’s game-changing Limerick OCC.”
This is pure gold - a deep inside view into moving to the Valley and making something happen.
I’ve been quite dismissive of the whole PodTech/Scoble thing, finding it boring and echo-chambery, but what happened this morning is genuine new-media. Useful, informative, entertaining, interactive, fun!
Well done LOCC guys, you’ve just upped the bar for everyone. Bernie is 100% right when he says “This is mainstream“:
Jame’s Corbett @eirepreneur trying to come to terms with the moment
I read Conor’s blog post on Conn’s mobile phone… trying to digest what I’d just witnessed, both first hand in the Brainbox boardroom and virtually through the video stream…among the group of us interacting with a slew of remote viewers from all around Ireland and internationally from places like Boston via Twitter, Jaiku and Conn’s Ustream chat room.
Final word to John Kennedy, who set up the wi-fi (and I have it from Bernie Goldbach an exceptionally nice guy)
The buzz is infectious, I leave OpenCoffee on an absolute high, it’s my fortnightly battery recharge, yesterday was incredible.
Well done guys.
5 Comments »
James Corbett on 11 Aug 2007 at 5:57 pm #
“Mini-Woodstock”… hehe, I love it.
Considering the whole event was very much ad-hoc I think there’s lots of room for improvement too. For one thing I’m going to concentrate more on the Ustream chat channel than Twitter in future and ask participants to sign in so we can relay their questions by name. And do it from the very start of the discussion instead of leaving it until the end, as an afterthought. I love the idea of people all around the county, and further afield, being able to participate almost as if they were there in person. Hmm…. here’s a thought…. how about getting a few remote participants to setup their own Ustream channels (it’s easy) and pose their questions via their own webcams (Ustream works with webcams too). We could attach one of the laptops to the overhead LCD projector and pipe those video feeds up on screen. Woah….. another hall-of-mirrors moment ;-)
John Kennedy on 11 Aug 2007 at 8:34 pm #
Sorry Niall, I am not John Kennedy from Silicon Republic.
niall.p.larkin on 12 Aug 2007 at 12:03 am #
My humblest apologies John. Corrections made. Still the best wee summation quote of the lot.
I See Smart People « Edgecast Media on 14 Aug 2007 at 11:38 pm #
[...] I’ve been so busy I hadn’t time to blog about my experience of Limerick Open Coffee Club last Thursday. Much has been made of the excitement caused by our live broadcast. James describes the twitterstorm, and there is more about it by Bernie, Conor, Niall and many others. [...]
Clunky Flow » Serious about your Irish start up? Then you really should go to Silicon Valley. on 11 Oct 2007 at 1:08 pm #
[...] Weren’t we all astounded to listen in to that interview with the Collison brothers in Open Coffee Limerick ( 2 very young brothers from Limerick making the kind of splash in SV that you have to admit would have been much less likely here ). [...]