In spite of having to stay in online contact with work last Saturday I still made it to BarCamp # 5 in Sydney. It was a great day and the new venue – the Australian Technology Park Innovation Centre – was ideal (if slightly chilly in the Atrium).

Again I am struck by how much progress we have made in building a real community amongst geeks, start-up people,  entrepreneurs, technologists, thinkers, activists and web folks in Sydney. Community & collaboration based events like this bring us all together to share ideas and enthusiasm.

We are getting to the stage where many of us know each other both online and in real life.  Between @STUB tweetups, Silicon Beach Sydney drinks and BarCamp the sense of familiarity and friendly community has definitely grown.

A really nice feature of the day was the number of families who attended & the very cool kids who presented sessions. The sessions branched out from pure technology or business focus to include whimsy such as origami and paper aeroplane creation. Check out the pictures below.

I really came away from BarCamp energised and enthusiastic about the future of technology in Australia. Funnily enough I also won a prize (a nice bottle of scotch) for something too (there’s a long story about that – but too long to go into here).