Geek-i-odic Table of the Elements

Last night following the Sydney BarCamp 3 Unorganisers meeting I unveiled the ’secret BarCamp project’ I’d been working on for the last few weeks. At an earlier meeting we were talking about the idea of having Mikons but they weren’t quite right for us. Instead I had the random idea to come up with a list of things that people can identify with and then just write a one or two letter ‘code’ for each thing on the bottom of your name tag. The others thought this was quite a novel idea and it was suggested maybe doing it in a table, which led to the suggestion that we modify a periodic table. Bingo! Since I had no other tasks I offered to take on this project with a fellow unorganiser, the lovely JodieM. The project took flight.

JodieM found a periodic table online and created a shared GoogleDoc that we could work from. Then as tends to happen she got busier and I got less busy. This resulted in most of the element ideas coming from my side and taking suggestions from others. It was easy to come up with the things that I could relate to but more than a few times I was concerned that I’d missed something glaringly obvious.  I ran my ideas past a few people during the development stages and was pretty happy with the spread I’d created. Hopefully not too much of some things and missing other. A moment of quiet humour led to me add ‘Ni’ for Monty Python and that has by far been the most commented on ‘element’.

The finalised table (for now)  is able to be viewed here.  It’s been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License . I’d love to see it used in other BarCamps as I think it really does embody the whole BarCamp spirit and other geeky networking events. There are way more elements than space on the table which is no bad thing as it lets each group update the table and add the elements that mean the most to them. I’ve also deliberately left the space at the bottom blank. The element list is going to be printed up and put next to the table. On the day the bottom spaces can be filled in by Sydney BarCamp3 attendees with what they’d like to add.

I’m pretty excited that it’s been so well received. It’s also the first project that I’ve CC Licensed which is also exciting, for me at least. A couple of people have mentioned that it’d be a cool t-shirt idea. I think so too and may look into doing a run sometime. Keep an eye out here and on my twitter timeline for more details.

Thank-you to everybody for their feedback!