Friday night and all day Saturday Washington DC held the inaugural WidgetDevCamp.
It was a gathering of local geeks to talk about the issues relating to widgets and other modular social applications ( like Facebook apps.) There was also a lot of widget and social application hacking.
On Friday night we gathered to talk about the overall goal of the event, we discussed high level issues and uses related to widgets, and also brainstormed widgets we wanted to build. Before and after there was also lots of time to hang out and relax. It was a good opportunity to get to know others who were interested in the space. I think there were 50-60 people who were there on Friday night.
On Saturday while only 30-40 people there, we had folks leading GREAT discussions. There was everything from how to use widgets with the social graph, an overview of the Clearspring platform, widget best practices, desktop versus Web widgets, JavaScript vs. Flash vs. Flex for widgets, Facebook app development 101, and much more. It was great!
Also we had a number of folks who spent a lot of time Saturday doing some coding. We had guys writing widgets, Facebook apps, and some even playing with Google’s Android mobile platform. At the end of the day on Saturday, we gave the different developers time to demo what they’d been hacking up and the demo’s caused some really great discussion too.
One conclusion that I walked away from the event with is that all too often people work on their various projects and home by themselves but they’ll have a TON more fun if they can do it with or around other people with like interests. We need more co-working in Washington DC. I’ll write more about this later.
If you’d like to have a WidgetDevCamp in your city, please e-mail me at justin AT clearspring DOT com. I’d be happy to help however I can.
Note: First photo was taken by Jason Garber. The second photo was taken by me.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
There was even someone with a Dvorak keyboard MacBook Pro! 😉
Thanks for organizing this, Justin.