I love what they’re doing… the idea that so many injuries are ‘accidents’ that just happen is rubbish and has annoyed me for a long time. “No – you crashing into the back of that car at the red light was NOT an accident. It didn’t happen ‘acidentally’. You hit him because you were driving too fast and/or not paying attention” etc etc. If people thought more about what they’re doing, thought about the risks inherent in their activity and took an extra minute or two to counter that risk then things would be much safer.

One of the things that Preventable point out is that the leading cause of death in BC for people between ages 1 and 44 is preventable injuries (notice that… I didn’t call them accidents). 1,200 people a year dead and 400,000 injured in BC alone.

Preventable’s big PR push at the moment is to get people to take care over Halloween. To be honest, Halloween is one of my least favorite times of the year. Probably a result of not having grown up here! It’s not the small children dressed up as princesses and pirates that annoy me. It’s not that I never get invited to the cool parties (this year’s an exception – more about that next week if I can rig up a costume at the last minute). It’s more the gangs of drunken teenagers roaming the streets and setting off fireworks. And yes, alcohol and explosives don’t mix… but they’re a harder audience to get to pay any attention!

Preventable’s been reaching out to the social media community recently. They have a great blog full of information on their website, they’re big on Twitter and yesterday they invited a gaggle of bloggers down to The Network Hub to communicate their message face-to-face (cos sometimes that’s just the best you know?) and hand out treats.

Yes, I went. Yes, I was bribed. Yes, this blog post is (partly) the result of their flagrant attempt to sway my judgment. An interesting evening was had in the company of some great Vancouver bloggers and social media folk. In the interest of transparency I should also point out that I profited from the evening to the tune of two plates of delicious sushi, a couple of handfuls of candy and a reflective trick-or-treat bag which has been passed on to a small child for use trick-or-treating – that’s one 6 year old who’ll be very safe out on Saturday night.

Last weekend’s Vancouver Barcamp was my second and I enjoyed it even more than the previous year’s event. I know I’m not alone – all the comments I’ve seen have been positive. But what has it achieved? I’m intrigued to find out about things that people learnt during Barcamp which are going to make measurable differences to, for example, their lives, their products or their working environments.

I ask this partly because I’m a little skeptical. Maybe I’m attending the wrong sessions so I’m wondering what it is that I missed. The experience that I personally get from Barcamp is totally positive but it’s about soft things:

• meeting face-to-face with people I’ve only previously communicated with using 140 characters or less. Monica Hamburg pretty much fell into this category
• reconnecting with people I haven’t seen for a while – Tyler Ingram for example
• chance meetings with interesting people. For example two of the many fascinating strangers I bumped into over the weekend turned out to be Zak Greant and Steve Tannock
• comparing war stories with other developers. The “freelance is not free” and “designers vs coders” sessions were great examples of this. It’s nice to know we’re all in the same boat, nobody has a perfect solution. Did we solve anything? Nope. Did we feel better about it afterwards? I think so
• listening to how other people use technology. The “non-profits and technology” session was very interesting in that regard

So Barcamp was a great day and I can guarantee that I’ll be back again next year. But it’s hard to put a finger on any dramatic pieces of information that will change my life this week.

Do you disagree? Have you rushed into the office today armed with a new approach for something? Which session did you get the most out of? Who did you meet who changed your world? I’m eager to hear about it. Of course you might say “Barcamp is what you make it” and I agree. So what did YOU make it?

First impressions? Besides the rather unsavory neighbourhood (two blocks North of Hastings, just East of the docks). Bigger than I expected… a 60′x30′ receiving area stacked to the 12 foot high ceilings with cases and PCs, one person disassembling incoming PCs and cleaning them, another person testing the components and a third person disassembling the junk to be sent off for recycling. Then upstairs a 30′x10′ office that looks kinda like my study on a tidy day – components and part-built PCs everywhere! Four people in there building customer PCs and loading them up with Ubuntu (and presumably OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird).

They also have a little thrift store where they sell surplus components – if you want a 3GHz Athlon Thunderbird or 256MB of PC133 memory this is the place to go!

Amongst all the cookie-cutter PCs that people donate to them, there’s also a lot of historical gems… in the hour I was there I spotted a Commodore Pet 2001 (Qwerty keyboard, not the original chiclet keyboard), TRS-80 portable, Apple IIe, an original Macintosh and, something I didn’t even know existed, an extremely late model 8000series Commodore Pet looking remarkably like this.

One thing I hadn’t realized about their business model: the majority of their output goes to non-profit organizations who fill in a hardware grant request and get whatever they want built for free. The rest goes for free or ultra-cheap to individuals who want to get online but can’t afford a new computer. As far as actual revenue to pay the rent, I think the majority of it comes from scrap sold for recycling and money from the thrift store.

I think I can be quite useful there – 15 years experience dismantling and rebuilding PCs for fun and 5 years experience in Linux. Now I’m ‘trained’ I can’t wait to get back there for a proper day’s “work”!