BarCampSydney

Congratulations to Alan James for being the 101st person to RSVP on the wiki. (Rhandy was actually number 100, but since he was from Tangler, I disqualified him to avoid bias). Woohooo!!

An important number since their are only 100 free shirts. First 100 to get there on Saturday who are ON the RSVP list get a shirt - if your not on the list, no shirt!

An important day today too. More sponsors. Freshview and Linux Australia (I don’t know how an open source community has dosh, but I’m not arguing). Plus, I got to see the venue for post-barcamp-bar work. The Point Hotel Margot Lounge. Bit of a walk, but good location.

It’s all happening.

(Image courtesy of Seismocat and Flickr)

Tags: barcamp, barcampsydney

Our sponsors now includes:

• Atlassian
• Microsoft Australia
• ThoughtWorks
• Tangler
• UnWired
• Hothouse
• Google
• Yoick
• Linux Australia
• Freshview

Tags: barcamp, barcampsydney, Atlassian, Microsoft, ThoughtWorks, Tangler, UnWired, Hothouse, Google, Yoick, Linux, Freshview

Thanks to everyone for your comments and suggestions. The final t-shirt has now been decided and is about to go off for printing.

Tags: barcamp, barcampsydney

Initially we were going to have BarCampSydney go over two days, both Saturday and Sunday, but then we thought, gee whiz, that’s quite a lot of time to give up. Sure, we could all talk for days, but give up a whole weekend?

So we thought, let’s just have an action packed Saturday and have another BarCamp in April/May.

So the plan is;

1. 9am to 4pm, Saturday March 3, 2007 - BarCampSydney
2. 4pm ish, find a great pub nearby and have some beers. (suggestions for pubs around UTS?)
3. Go home, think about all the stuff that got thrown around, and see what happens.
4. Sunday - DON’T COME TO BARCAMP - no one will be there. Just stay at home, do some laundry, walk the kids and think back to how cool Saturday was.

Please help us spread the word of the change.

Tags: barcamp, barcampsydney

So we are trying to work out how many people are going to bring laptops to BarCampSydney. So tell us two things.

1. Are you going to bring a laptop?

2. What percentage of BarCampSydney people do you think will bring laptops?

(Image courtesy of justintosh, Creative Commons license)

Tags: barcamp, barcampsydney

So we are going to try and get some shirts done.

We need a catchy slogan. Any suggestions?

My Ideas:

• BarCampSydney - March 3 - Mardi Gras for Geeks [it's on Mardi Gras night]
• BarCampSydney - Geeks Unanonymous
• BarCampSydney - Ad hoc, ergo, ad hoc.
• BarCampSydney - I pwn Sydney

(Image courtesy of Massless, Flickr and Creative Commons)

Tags: barcamp, barcampsydney

I’ve been encouraging people to come to BarCampSydney and some people get it straight away; “Yeah, that sounds awesome!”

But some people tilt their head to the side and give me a; “Huh?”

I know what they’re thinking. Why would you go to so much trouble putting together a ‘conference’ and then just let it go chaotic? Isn’t it going to be a useless mess? Isn’t it going to fall apart?

(Image ourtesy of Eris Doll and Flickr)

“No! You’re missing the point”, I want to shout. But I’m diplomatic.

Here’s a couple of reasons why it’s a great idea.

1. Most people find normal conferences, seminars and the like boring as bat poo. “Blah, blah, blah, my product is the best, blah, blah, blah”.Tech people find them especially boring and we dropped out of uni specifically to avoid boring lectures.
2. Smart people will be coming. We don’t have to make them form lines and tell them what they are interested in. They can walk around and work it out for themselves.
3. The content is so fresh and so changing that to try and formulate a schedule would make it out of date as soon as it was finished. Whatever happened the day before will be the big topic and worthy of discussion.
4. The people at the barcamp are the experts. They don’t want to hear from industry politicians, they want to talk to other experts like themselves and ask/answer/argue directly. No middle man. No taking notes.
5. Our jobs, companies, industry is crazy and messy and wonderful because of it. So our gatherings should match.

OK, that’s a start. Come on people, give me some more…

BarCamps are meant to be…camps. You’re meant to sleep over for the weekend. But that was just too difficult to arrange for this first BarCamp in Australia (maybe next year though!). We’re really keen to still utilise this rare opportunity to spend time with people who have come together for this exciting and interesting event. You may meet your future busines partner, a genius inventor or an old friend. So, we planning on a get together on Saturday night, somewhere in the city. Any ideas?

We’re looking into getting a t-shirt for BarCampSydney — part of the first BarCamp in Australia! — but for now, if you’re keen you can buy a general BarCamp t-shirt. They’re available at Goodstorm. If anyone can help out with the design and or printing of some t-shirts, ping us: orgs@barcampsydney.org.

One of the things we were worried about was wireless. But now UnWired have come to the rescue. They’re supplying BarCampSydney with wireless for the event. Wohoo Unwired! So, as a recap. We’ve got the venue to supply a computer with net access in each room. And we’ve got wireless now for the area. No reason not to blog and podcast your way through the event! hehe