Thankyou for a great Apticon this year!
We all thoroughly enjoyed Apticon last week. It was great to see old friends of Aptivate, meet some new people and have most of our team together. Even Sarah was able to join us, all the way from San Francisco. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to step back from daily project work and think about the sector as a whole. The day had lots of offer, new discussion topics and great ideas were sprouting up all over the place! Check out our Storify of the day with all our #Apticon tweets, photos, blog posts and notes.
Firstly, a big thank you to Mozilla for the perfect venue. This was the 2nd Apticon at their space in London and it works really well for an Open Space ‘Unconference’. We had 5 different discussion spots around the room and 6 time slots thought the day.
People came with some great ideas and we started the day by putting these up on the wall, creating our timetable for the day. Some of the most interesting topics were based around the theme ‘Moving toward mobile’, for example ‘Mobile development guidelines’ and ‘Mobile discovery workshops’, where we considered how some of our web processes could change for mobile projects. We also discussed some wider areas, like ‘Participation in IT projects’, ‘Working with social network services’ and ‘Evaluation tool kits’.
Nate ran a workshop called ‘The Unarguable Truth - Skills & Play’, where we practiced describing body sensations, naming feelings, thoughts and stories as well as listening accurately. It was fun to learn in a refreshingly different way. Nate asked us to interact with techniques that made us feel a little bit uncomfortable to highlight how the body reacts in certain situations.
One thing that struck me about the day is how great an Open Space is for allowing relaxed discussion without a pressure for a particular result. I left the day feeling more in touch with other people in the sector and with our clients, as well as full of ideas for the future.
We will be publishing our notes from some of the sessions soon. To keep up to date with what we are up to sign up for our newsletter. If you’re interested in joining us for the next Apticon in 2015 join our Meetup group too.
