Guardian Open Weekend

Posted on March 25, 2012

For the weekend of March 24-25 I was at Guardian Open Weekend, a sort of media ‘festival’ hosted at the Guardian’s offices at Kings Place, near Kings Cross in London.

An eclectic range of speakers, ranging from government ministers to journalists and novelists, artists and poets came together for the two days to discuss all manner of topics and issues.

As you can see from the picture above, it was busy. Very busy! The festival took place over the whole Kings Place complex, including a couple of floors of the Guardian’s actual offices (and their rather nice canteen).

My weekend started with a conversation between Will Hutton and Vince Cable, who spent most of the time agreeing with each other; this was a common theme throughout the event, perhaps next time they could try to have a slightly more varied range of views to provoke more debate.

One particularly cool thing that was created over the weekend was a wall depicting everything that went on, made up of content from the various talks and discussions and tweets from people who were there (it seemed that everyone there was tweeting from an ipad or iphone – the Guardian’s digital first strategy certainly seems suited to its readership).

The highlight of Saturday for me was definitely the Football Weekly podcast recording (and the shaky photo that was taken afterwards):

Sunday’s highlight? A how to dj workshop with DJ Yoda:

Overall, it was a fantastic weekend. Let’s hope they do it again next year!