This week was our third iteration of Educamp, we’ve run 3 events in 13 months with events in Sheffield, Edinburgh and Cambridge. So, with it being in Cambridge I was really nervous. A lot of the organisation had happened while I was on parenting leave and one of my senior product managers, Karen, had taken the lead in getting the on-the-ground stuff done but then was off on holiday the day before (which is my baby-holding day) so we had to do a handover with lots of plastic wallets and my son trying hard to pull her hair/grab any hot drinks on the table.

Anyway, the day arrived and aside from running around learning how the University’s printers worked after three years of working here, it all went off without many hitches. We were a bit low on numbers, we’d allocated about 85 tickets and about 45 turned up (we’ve previously moved the same number of tickets and had 65 in the room). We’ve also anecdotally noticed that we haven’t had a great deal of repeat customers. Whether that’s a function of dried up hotel cost budgets, time off being hard to get for CPD or what, we don’t know but we’re going to dig into it in our event retrospective and surveys.

I love unconferences because each contribution is actually a contribution, it builds up gradually and a session that starts in cacophony with people having different questions and ideas will usually find its theme and gradually the voices form a single chord. It’s all quite relaxing really. Anyway, we had that I think. There were a lot of first timers, especially from Cambridge so I spent a bit of time walking people through how it all worked. If anything though having a small crowd made that a bit less daunting. I went to sessions on “why can’t we make a decision”, “why big implementations are hard”, “design systems in HE”, “do you need service owners and what do they do?” and “technology strategies in HE”. I had been a bit careful this time not to pitch as a) I didn’t want teams who work into me to follow my lead b) I wanted to hear what they were most bothered by c) I didn’t need the stress of worrying about running a session and compering.

As ever, I was struck by the similarities of peoples’ experiences. It looks almost the same working on this stuff in Cardiff, Open, Cambridge, Sheffield or Arts. We’re all dealing with a really shonky set of governance, a constricting economic outlook and perpetually higher demands on service and product teams.

What I’d love to do next is think about how we start moving the organising to a more sustainable footing and get some of the other big city universities involved. We really don’t want to repeat an event city just yet, but we don’t get more volunteers to join up at the moment, nor any potential hosts. So, that’s the next thing to work on. If you’ve got ideas or want to get involved, do drop me a line.