Tuesday night saw the marvels of ignite hit London again, and it was great! Boy, has it grown from the fist ignite London a few months ago. Held in The Luminaire in Kilburn, more capacity, more atmosphere, more interesting graffiti in the toilets…
Now igniteLDN2 had a lot to live up to, I loved the first ignite. It was fabulous, you can read all about what I thought about that one here. Also ignite 2 had to beat the challenge of my being infected with the man flu, apologies to anyone who came down with a bought of the coughs and snuffles after Tuesday night. That was probably my fault.
There were some talks that I loved, some talks that were really really interesting and some talks that my lurgy filled head had no hope of understanding.
I loved, loved, loved. 2009: The Year in Twirls by James Ward, a comprehensive look into the mapping the availability of Cadbury’s Twirls in Central London. An absolutely brilliant project, some may say he has too much time on his hands, but for a lover of Twirls this information is essential.
I also loved the talk on British Sea Forts by Tristan Roddis and A Look at Daves in History by Dave Joyner, which had a hint of the Dave Gorman about his presentation, clearly all Dave’s present alike, brilliantly.
I was really interested by Felix Cohen and Eliot Fineberg, talking about Humour, Banality and Social Networks, and double teaming the presentation! Nicely done. The Journey of the metal Jew was also fascinating by Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris, as too was Russell Davies’ talk about newspaper club.
The talks I didn’t understand due to my lurgy filled brain I am going to watch again, in an attempt to make myself feel less stupid.
Also as an aside, there were soooo many more men in the audience this time round, which weirded me out slightly, normally I don’t notice things like that, Im not a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but seriously where were all the ladies? It was really noticeable that I was an minority in the full capacity crowd. Which poses interesting questions about ignites fan base. I challenge anyone who likes graphs and visulisations (that means you Mr Zambonini) is there any way you can crunch data like its nobodies business to come up with a gender ignite crowd analysis…??
But all in all a great night. Thanks to all involved.
Claire Bailey-Ross 
Another interesting gender issue is the number of female speakers. At the last one, I think we had a nearly 50/50 male to female speaker ratio, probably due in part to me actively recruiting the ladies. This time, I thought I just sit back and see how it all played out and alas, only one lady speaker (to be fair, we were meant to have two but one had to cancel at the last moment).
I know there are loads of women doing interesting things in the technology/cultural scene in London. So where are they?!!
i feel bad for not putting my talk forward, maybe all the lovely ladies doing interesting things in the techy cultural london are like me, rubbish at public speaking?
Agreed on the ladies. And my other observation is the sheer geekiness of some of the speakers – a couple were unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t work in tech-related fields (I couldn’t even tell you what some of them were talking about, and I don’t think I’m stupid, although you can correct me on that). I’d be up for making the next one a little more mainstream-friendly. More Twirls, less Hacker-y things.