HomeCamp is a home hacking, automation and green technology community that will be gathering in London tomorrow, Saturday 25th April 2009, 10am until 6pm BST (GMT + 1), and in an OpenSim event running alongside for virtual participation, to brainstorm new possibilities for distributed sustainability, creative smart meters, monitoring, graphing and visulaizing energy usage.

More details and videos on the blog. The wiki, which includes signup, is the main portal to all the online activity.

As James Governor notes here:

there has been a huge amount of code and applications released focused purely on using technology for home energy monitoring and automation.  We have an active google group and quite a few videos and content showcasing the various applications and hardware currently being used by geeks to save money and live greener.

Now the challenge is to see how this seedling home energy management movement can really grow into widely adopted distributed sustainability solutions that everyone can use, and participate in.

Both Chris Dalby (see here), Andy Piper, James Governor of Monkchips (see here),  and Tom Raftery of GreenMonk (see here), have posted on tomorrow’s HomeCamp event. So I am just going to add some quick notes, especially to highlight some of what will be going on virtually for those of you, like me, who can’t make it to London.

You can tune in either on the live video ustream, or sign up on ReactionGrid and join the OpenSim event. Also, you can keep up on what is happening on Twitter #homecamp. I highly recommend that you catch Tom Raftery’s talk which will be streamed from Spain live into the London meeting, the OpenSim event on ReactionGrid, and Ustream. Tom Raftery, a leading Green technology analyst at RedMonk (see also GreenMonk), will be picking up, in depth, on some themes raised in his brilliant ETech 2009 presentation, “Electricity 2.0: Applying the Lessons of the Web to Our Energy Networks.”

There will be homecampers dropping in to virtual homecamp in ReactionGrid throughout the day, including Chris Hart (the awesome “girl-geek”@dstrawberrygirl), MiketheBee, and Cminion, who has a number of cool projects to demo, including his energy turbines.  Dave Pentecost (pictured above with his Tweetawatt, Pachube Orb) and I (see our presentation for EarthWeek SL here) plan to be at Virtual Homecamp on ReactionGrid between 9am and 10.30am EST. Dave has done a number of cool energy monitoring hacks including a Pachube link to and from OpenSim.

Also keep your eye on Dave’s blog, The Daily Glyph, for what’s new in distributed sustainability. Dave just posted some great links on Sustainable Interaction, design and work by ITP researchers and others in sustainable use of technology.

Sustainable Interaction | Main / Papers

Sustainable interaction design | Sustainable Minds

Design For the Other 90% | Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

If you are in London, look out for Oliver Goh of Shaspa as Oliver will be at Homecamp in London. As I mentioned in my previous post, Oliver will soon be launching both Shaspa commmunity and enterprise hardware and software packages for “Intelligent Energy Management.”

For a bit of homecamp history, James Governor (picture below from Chinposin), recaps  some of the successes of  the first HomeCamp here.

And last but not least, a big thanks to sponsors, CurrentCost, Greenmonk, Pachube, Onzo, and ReactionGrid,  and media partner theattick.tv who are making the London and virtual homecamp events possible.

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