PodCamp Barcelona report

As part of the rapidly exploding worldwide phenomenon of PodCamps, the very first podcamp to be held on the Iberian Peninsular was held in Barcelona, Spain in September 2008. The brain child of Chris Pinchen of Cataspanglish and his wife, Ana Fernandez Mora, Podcamp Barcelona (PodcampBCN) was first in a number of other areas too!

The first tri-lingual PodCamp with sessions in Catalan, Spanish and English as well as the first tri-lingual website. PodCampBCN was held in El Masnou, a picturesque village just 18km outside of Barcelona made possible by the generosity of the local council – the Ajuntament del Masnou. The council provided the conference rooms at no charge along with other services such as poster printing and free wifi.

I was approached by Chris a couple of months earlier with an invitation to speak at the podcamp. As Barcelona is only a two hour flight from Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and serviced by our local budget airline, I didn’t take much persuading to agree to spend a weekend in beautiful Barcelona.



The PodCamp received extensive coverage in both the local and national press and generated a fair bit of excitement, especially with the announcement that Mark Pentleton of Radio Lingua Network, would be using the podcamp to launch a new series of podcasts following on from his Coffee Break series, this time One Minute Languages, importantly for PodcampBCN, One Minute Catalan.

The PodCamp started on the Friday in the local council offices with a mixture of mainly spanish or catalan speakers on a variety of topics, not just podcasting but a variety of social media, new media and web 2.0 topics. Thankfully Chris and Alex, another British ex-patriate were on hand to provide a personal translation service.

After a very pleasant evening in the local wine bar (with some very nice wine and tapas) the first full day of the podcamp kicked off the following morning. One of the issues that Chris and Ana had with running the podcamp is that the local attitude to timekeeping is a little bit lax so we ended up starting just a tad late, with the obvious knock on effects. But the relaxed atmosphere made sure that things just flowed along.

The sessions were wide and varied again, including internet based initiatives from government, web 2.0 in the media and culture, knowledge management in organisations, experimental mashups, wine blogs and some specific sessions on podcasting including my own on monetisation and podcasting in language learning delivered by Mark Pentleton (Radio Lingua Network) and Ben Curtis (Notes from Spain Podcast). We even had a session on Cava&Twitts explaining all about twitter and a local group of twitter users who get together to meet, chat and sample the local sparkling wine – sounds good to me.

The saturday afternoon late lunch (3pm!) resulted in us all decamping to a local outdoor restaurant to sample the good food and carry on the conversations.

The Sunday sessions were quieter as you might expect and included a session with representatives of five Catalan political parties discussing how they use and are thinking of using new technology, new media and web 2.0. The PodCamp was wrapped up with a session on Podcasting for beginners delivered by David Allen of Spondicious and Wizardgold.

After saying my goodbyes and thanking Chris and Ana for their hospitality, I managed to cram in an afternoons sight seeing before heading off for a late flight back to Liverpool.

As the very first PodcampBCN, the event was a great success and it was brilliant to be a part of such a wide and varied group. I’m sure Chris and Ana learnt many things that they will take forward into the next PodcampBCN.