Raising the Bar

[Dave Birch] I thoroughly enjoyed the first two BarCampBank "unconferences" in London in 2008 and 2009. So much so that I have persuaded my colleagues at Consult Hyperion to support a third which is very kindly being hosted by PayPal UK at their offices in Richmond, west London, on Saturday 30th January 2010. I know that persuading people to travel to the far reaches of Greater London on a Saturday might be difficult, but let me tell you why I'll be going.

James Gardner is absolutely correct that the lack of a set agenda is the power of the BarCamp format

[From Digital Money Forum: BarCampBank "near money"]

The agenda is set on the day by the people who come along. Personally, I'll be interested in discussions about decentralised finance (community credit, local currency and so forth) as well as the innovative use of new technology to provide services via mobile devices, but my experience of the previous BarCampBanks was that I found myself sitting in on discussions I had no idea I would be interested in, and I'm looking forward to the same this year. I'm shameless about my motivation: our customers expect us to come up with new ideas, and one excellent way to obtain new ideas is by cross-pollination between sectors, products, services and strategies. The BarCampBank is, frankly, an easy way to do this. So if you have ideas about the future of financial services, thought on the changing role of the financial services sector or you just want to kick some ideas around with some different people, I look forward to meeting you there.

banking and finance, innovation, social and community

You can signup for the BarCampBank London 3 at PayPal UK on Saturday 30th January 2010 from 10am to 4pm with lunch provided via meetup here. I'd hope to see 30-40 people there so that we can run 3-4 discussion simultaneous, but we'll cut it off at 50. If you have any specific ideas for the agenda then please let me know in advance and I'll do what I can to try and group together birds of a feather, so to speak. And once again, many thanks to PayPal UK for their generous hosting of the event.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]