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On Tuesday I was at TeachMeet Falkirk_09<\/a>, we had a great night. As usual I was amazed at the amount of work put in by the organisers lead by Margaret Vass<\/a> and folk from Falkirk.<\/p>\n This time I had the honour of MCing the meet. This was particularly nice as I was not involved in all of the hard work. It did mean that I didn’t really fully concentrate on what the presenters were saying, as I was trying to thing about what I was doing and saying. I did gain a lot of great ideas form the presenters and am currently working my way through the FlashMeeting<\/a> audio. It is hard to pick out any particular presentations, but for me, Nick<\/a>‘s Webcam desktop visualiser (pictured above) embodies the DIY aspects to TeachMeet. <\/p>\n Margaret had asked me to talk a wee bit about how TeachMeet started, on listening to the meet I realise that I might not have been to clear or informative, concentrating more on the fun and Guinness rather that the principles. I hope to remedy that in a blog post soon.<\/p>\n In the run up to Falkirk there was some discussion about the ‘rules’ of TeachMeet and they were tweeked a little. As I prepared to talk about the history of TeachMeet I realised that the rules are not really rules. There is a perception that these are fixed, but over the early TeachMeets at least they changed to fit the event. A while back John Connell posted Time For A TeachMeet Alternative?<\/a> and generated a lot of discussion (Be sure to read TeachMeet Alternatives: follow up<\/a> on John’s blog too). As TeachMeets are organised by whoever has the energy and good will it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like the format: you can change it. The power of TeachMeets is not, for me, the format but the proof that people can organise and share in a way that is not top down.<\/p>\n As is now customery with TeachMeets the meet rippled out:<\/p>\n\n