BarCampSydney

Wohoo! BarCampSydney2 rocked! Here are some of the reports, pics & discussions already up:

• Mick’s report at Tangler
• Mick’s pics from the event and some discussion at Tanger
• Elias Bizannes’s post about some of the startup lessons
• Nick Hodge’s list of sessions he liked
• Andy Howard has put his presentation up
• Rowan Bunning’s post about ‘Aussie Entrepeneurs’ and Agile2007
• Jean-Jacques Halans has posted his presentation on portability
• Ajay Ranipeta’s post about the differences between BCSv1.0 and 2 and the after,after party
• Bardia Housman gives it a two thumbs up
• Brett Welch (who is actually a Ninja) says Awesome!

Keep your pics coming in on flickr etc using BarCampSydney2 or BCS2 as a tag

Stuff to Keep

• Intro session at the beginning of the day (thanks Patrick).
• Having a Wii to play was fun (thanks ThoughtWorks). So, having something like that would be good.
• Ace people and sponsors.
• Pub at the end of the day. Need we say more?

Stuff to Change

• The venue. We asked for the same rooms as last time but because of the student event on the day we were issued with other rooms (but weren’t told). The venue never told us that there were two other events being held on the same day either. And, as many who have dealt with UTS before know, the events staff are not user-friendly.
• Camp. Next time we’d like to put the camp into BarCamp and actually have a sleepover. So, if you’ve got ideas for a venue let us know!
• Wifi. The venue promised us wifi access but that didn’t happen. Next time we will include wifi in our budget.
• Session times. There were too many people who missed out on giving talks before other ones ran over. In particular, it was fantastic to have some folks from Canberra drive all the way, but terrible to hear Nathanael didn’t get the chance to present. We’ve got a few ideas on how we’ll balance the need to converse for a while about popular topics whilst still allowing everyone who wants to present to get the chance to.
• Diversity of topics. Encourage a wider range of topics.
• T-Shirts. Although we didn’t have the slim-fit this time, we did end up going the opposite direction and didn’t have enough smaller-sizes in the new regular fit. Also, inspired by Mike’s comments about cool tech t-shirts, we’re working on a cool BCS t-shirt for the next one. Either that, or we’ll just continue the BCS tradition of creating t-shirts that for some reason everytime just stuff up.
• Online/RL identity: having some way of associating websites with people as most knew each others websites and avatars but not what they looked like! 

Sponsors

BIG thanks to our ace sponsors:

• Atlassian
• CodeGear
• Freshview
• Newgency
• Tangler
• ThoughtWorks

UnOrganisers

Big thanks to all the unorganisers:

• Christy Dena
• Russ Weakley
• Jason Yip
• Jan Devos
• Ben Hogan
• Dylan Egan
• Patrick Crowley
• and Rich Buggy before he had to be a slave to a client
• and Mick Liubinskas for helping out with accounts and general backseat heckling

On-the-Day-UnOrganisers

and Big thanks to all the on-the-day-unorganisers:

• Ajay Ranipeta
• Jean-Jacques Halans
• Alex North
• Anurag Chakradhar
• Matt Jones
• Ritesh Agarwal
• Jodie Miners
• and Anne Bartlett-Bragg for doing extra stuff on the fly

Let us know about your posts and pictures, and also let us know your ideas or thoughts about BarCampSydney 3 either here in the comments or at the BarCampSydney discussion at Tanger! Yippee!

Despite starting relatively recently in 2005, BarCamp has a long heritage. Open Space Technology, for instance, started a couple of decades ago. The method involves workshopping rather than presentations, with the aim for a particular outcome.

Open Space Technology is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. Over the last 20+ years, it has also become clear that opening space, as an intentional leadership practice, can create inspired organizations, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity. 

AboutOpenSpace

Harrison Owen, one of the core drivers of Open Space Technology, describes it as follows:

“At the very least, Open Space is a fast, cheap, and simple way to better, more productive meetings. At a deeper level, it enables people to experience a very different quality of organization in which self-managed work groups are the norm, leadership a constantly shared phenomenon, diversity becomes a resource to be used instead of a problem to be overcome, and personal empowerment a shared experience. It is also fun. In a word, the conditions are set for fundamental organizational change, indeed that change may already have occurred. By the end, groups face an interesting choice. They can do it again, they can do it better, or they can go back to their prior mode of behavior.

Open Space is appropriate in situations where a major issue must be resolved, characterized by high levels of complexity, high levels of diversity (in terms of the people involved), the presence of potential or actual conflict, and with a decision time of yesterday.

Open Space runs on two fundamentals: passion and responsibility. Passion engages the people in the room. Responsibility ensures things get done. A focusing theme or question provides the framework for the event. The art of the question lies in saying just enough to evoke attention, while leaving sufficient open space for the imagination to run wild.”

We don’t have a theme or outcome in mind for BarCampSydney 0.1, so anything goes.

Tim O’Reilly developed the Open Space Technology approach and applied it directly to the theme of technology. He created FOOCamp and held the first one in October 2003. His description of FOOCamp was:

We’ve invited about 400 people who’re doing interesting work in fields such as wireless, web services, open source programming, GPS, and all manner of emerging technologies to share their work-in-progess, show off the latest tech toys and hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems together. We’ll have some planned activities, but much of the agenda will be determined by you. We’ll provide space, electricity, a wireless network, and a wiki. You bring your ideas, enthusiasms, and projects. We all get to know each other better, and hopefully come up with some cool ideas about how to change the world.

For BarCampSydney we’re adopting most of what O’Reilly outlines here, except for two factors. 1) We’re making topics open to those beyond software in particular to include creative uses in entertainment, art, marketing, podcasts and so on. Other camps that have explored this as a theme include: ArtCamp, MarCamp and BlogCamp. Rather than see BarCamp as a technology-only event, we’re using the term to encompass all the possible conversations that could be had about digital media. 2) The other approach we won’t be employing is the invite only model. Indeed, this is why BarCamp was invented.

The spirit that you can see in the Open Space Technology and FOOCamp approaches holds true in BarCamp too. Some quotes from the BarCamp wiki, The Rules of BarCamp:

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.
When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

Looking forward to experiencing this event with you all…wherever it leads…

BarCamp is pretty unstructured, but it’s good to have a bunch of things happening throughout the day. We had some ideas on the wiki;

• Panel
• Presentation
• Goldfish Bowl
• Soap box - Just stand on a box and spout your wisdom.
• Half-Geeked - Half-Baked, but tech focused.
• Demo new stuff
• Debates
• Games
• Competitions
• Races
• Rolling story

What else could we do? Any ideas???

If you have an idea, just prepare it and run it sometime during the day. Ideal time frame is about 5-10 minutes. Keep it nice and simple. Least props required the better. Keep it legal, keep it clean and keep it tech.

I’ve been speaking to a range of people over the last week and there has been a bit of concern about the “no spectators” phrase.

So, what does it mean?

It does not mean that you have to present. BarCampSydney is not about formal presentations. It is about discussion, debate, involvement and energy!

The event is designed so that EVERYONE can participate - in whatever capacity you choose. This could be helping organise rooms, sitting on a panel, moderating a discussion or even helping with network issues.

But most importantly, it is about everyone taking part in lively debates and discussions - whatever form they may take.

No spectators. Just lots of energetic and enthusiastic participants!

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

Upload all photos to Flickr, all presentations to Slideshare, all videos to Youtube; use the tag BarCampSydney for everything!

Whatever structure the session needs to be in is the right structure.  Here are some ideas:

• Panel
• Presentation
• Goldfish Bowl
• Soap box - Just stand on a box and spout your wisdom
• Half-Geeked - Half-Baked, but tech focused
• Demo new stuff
• Debates
• Anything goes…

In terms of time, slots will be around 5-10 minutes of talking and 10-15 minutes of Q&A. If the group wants more time, it’s okay to self-organise and reshuffle the schedule or find another location to continue the discussion.

There are more presenters registering their interest and topics now. Check out the people (listed in the sidebar too) and their topics at: http://barcamp.org/BarCampSydney2007Signup