It’s almost that time of the year again. Last year on September 2nd and 3rd we organized the first Barcamp on Portuguese soil - and this year we’re doing it again (only a day sooner - the 1st and 2nd of September).

If you remember last year’s announcement, the goal of bringing Barcamp to Portugal is to stir things up a bit and to give back to the place the team here at Webreakstuff calls home. Bringing people together seems to ignite change, so we’re bringing people together again.

Don’t know what to expect of a Barcamp event? Here’s a quick summary: exciting discussions, ad-hoc presentations, workshops, interesting people, great dinners, hilarity. Take my word for it, you’ll be addicted.

Roll up those sleeves and participate!

If you want to participate in this year’s event, drop by the Barcamp Portugal 2007 wiki page at Barcamp.org and add your name (password to edit is c4mp). Also, make sure you join the BarcampPortugal mailing list so you can stay on top of details and help organize the event itself.

If you’ve never been to a Barcamp - even if you have, it’s always a good thing to mention - keep in mind that it lives and breathes participation. This means that if you have been working on exciting stuff, or have some technology or idea you want to rave about, setup a presentation slot and get cranking on those slides and demos.

Sponsorship opportunities

Interested in sponsoring Barcamp Portugal? We love you already! We don’t have any major needs (this is a labour of love), but it would be great to have group meals sponsored by companies. Please get in touch with us at barcamp@webreakstuff.com - thank you!

Photo credit: Scott Beale @ Laughing Squid

In a few hours I’ll be on an airplane to Copenhagen, Denmark for Reboot 9 - a conference on the intersection between people, technology and innovation (the definition is mine as there’s no official one, and honestly I don’t believe you can correctly define an event with such a broad - but amazing - program).

I’m attending both as an attendee and as a speaker. I’ve been invited to talk about my view of the global workplace and how being in a specific location does (or does not) influence the success of any endeavor (technological or otherwise). It’s as exciting as it is worrying because although it’s a topic quite close to my heart (posted about it three different times, at least), it’s also not the easiest.

It will be a blast - there’s actually quite a lot of people I know and admire heading out too, so it will be a good opportunity to catch-up. If you’re flying out to copenhagen too, might as well come by and say hi.

Note: Sorry about the lack of activity on this blog recently, I promise I’ll make up for it as soon as I get back - There’s a lot of things I want to talk about.

Two weeks ago I presented before an audience of ex-colleagues and friends. I talked about several things, amongst which the notion that in order to succeed all you need is an idea and brilliant execution - and that sometimes even the simplest concept wins.

In conversations after that presentation quite a few people asked for ideas about what to actually do (looking for both new ideas and guidance with their ongoing projects). The answer to those questions is never easy, and being honest I’m a firm believer that sooner or later you’ll come into problems that lack solutions, and thus opportunities to do something about it.

I just read an article at Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog that fits quite well into this world of untapped problems and situations. Go read The awesome power of spare cycles and see do something about it. The simplest of problems (human boredom) definitely needs solving.

You probably noticed how I failed to properly blog in the last couple of months. I guess it’s worth it to mention a couple of updates before we go on with the program.

Goplan: It’s now been one month since we launched Goplan (our project management and collaboration web-app)- it’s been quite exciting to get real people using the application for real projects. We’re really happy with the outcome, and I posted a lengthier update on it at the Goplan weblog. The goplan homepage is here.

New page: Yesterday we silently launched a new homepage here at Webreakstuff. The previous iteration didn’t include as much information as we wanted it to, and we upgraded to a system that allows us to update it often with new case studies and information about our work.

Hackday Europe: Yahoo! Hackday is coming to Europe, and Tom Coates has a lengthy post about what you can expect from the event over at Plasticbag. Europe doesn’t get this kind of “love” often, so if this is your cup of tea, make sure you drop by hackday.org and sign-up (this is an invitation-only event, limited to 500 people).

New project: We’ve been working hard with Bell Canada (specifically with the Bell New Ventures group) on a new project - which has been taking quite a big chunk of our time, but that we’re pretty excited about. Once the project’s out and rolling, we’ll be publishing more information on our webpage.

Got design/UI chops? To meet growing demand, we’re looking for User Interface experts and User Experience people to join our project teams. You can be anywhere in the world as long as you’re a great communicator and are ready to deliver great results. Have a blog or a page with your work? Email us at jobs@webreakstuff.com. No agencies, please.

Back to the regular program

Okay! That’s out of the way, so now that we actually have (some more) time to breathe, you should see posts around here more frequently. My apologies for skipping on blogging a bit there, but our clients and our work took the best of me for a while.