BarCampLondon: What to do?
I was lucky enough to snaffle one of the 80 places up for grabs at BarCampLondon when it was announced the other week, but I now find I don’t really know what to do when I’m there.
In case you don’t know, the Rules of BarCamp state that:
Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer/contribute in some way to support the event. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall. The people present at the event will select the demos or presentations they want to see.
It goes on to contradict itself a few times, and is basically a bit vague about whether you need to prepare anything particularly detailed in advance, but the general theme is participation.
Now, I have no problem with that – I enjoy presenting, talking about web stuff and generally disseminating knowledge – but the vagueness concerns me. How many of the 80 will be arriving with a presentation (semi-)prepared? All of them? None? And what will people be talking about – CSS? Javascript? Microformats? Flex, Comet, something so cutting-edge it doesn’t even have a silly name yet? Or just showing off their crappy rip-offs of existing web-apps, perhaps. I don’t know.
My forte is probably Javascript, but I’m fucked if I’m getting up in front of Christian Heilmann and Jeremy Keith to talk about Ajax. Accessibility, maybe? Who goes to these things, anyway – a load of designers who want to hear about scripting, or a bunch of hax0rs who’d like to learn the principles of good UI design?
Perhaps I’ll just offer to pick up litter or serve coffee…
Reader Poll!
Help me out. If you were (or are) going to BarCamp, what would you want to watch someone mumble about for 20 minutes? Or, to put it another way, if one imagines a spectrum with creative designers at one end, accessibility and semantic hawks in the middle and script hackers at the other end – where would you place yourself?
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Comments
- Ben Metcalfe
- 713 days ago
- Hey, this is a really useful post as I’m involved with organising this and I’m noting your confusion.
The RulesOfBarCamp date back to the original BarCamp in San Francisco. Most of it will be same as London but I can see where there might be some ‘contradictions’ and I’ll look to sort that out.
To answer your questions:
Presentations
Everyone is expected to present something. You can prepare something in advance if you want or can choose to do something on the fly if you are feel up for it. Some people like to be more prepared than others and some like to do be spontanious – so we try not to prescribe what you should do.
Perhaps one thing we didn’t make clear is that you don’t present in front of everyone. We have 5 rooms and so it’s only presenting in small groups.
Type of people attending
There is going to be a real mix of technical and non-technical folks, so don’t be too concerend that what you have to say might be stuff some people already know.
There may be as many as 5 talks going on at any time and so I expect people to attend the talks that interest them – and even if there is someone who knows more about AJAX then you there are bound to be many people who will be very interested to hear what you have to say.
You may also find that people who also know about your subject want to come along to listen to you anyway just to hear your perspective etc.
BarCampLondon is an informal event so please don’t get too concerned about it. The idea is to meet other folk, talk and discuss and perhaps even have some fun too.
I look forward to seeing you on the 2nd.
Ben - #2
- paul haine
- 713 days ago
- “The idea is to meet other folk, talk and discuss and perhaps even have some fun too.”
You see what I mean? Hell! - #3
- Matthew Pennell
- 712 days ago
- Cheers for the reply, Ben (and the email today, excellent subject line!) – I think the most valuable information is the mix of people, as the impression one gets from previous camps is it’s a non-stop mashup-designing geekathon.
Pity you’re not coming, Paul – was looking forward to learning how to get a book deal ;) – talking about Refresh Cambridge is certainly one of the ideas I’m playing with. - #4
- Thom Shannon
- 708 days ago
I think I’m just gonna go for chatting about something that interests me, with as much prep as I get time to do and then welcome anyone in the room who knows more than me to join in and correct me! See you there
- #5
- Matt Rink
- 706 days ago
I still don’t know what to talk about…
I havn’t been to anything like this before and I don’t really know what people are going to be talking about so it’s made it a bit tough for me to think of anything…I’m also a bit worried about standing up in front of people who I know have been doing this for years and I’m going to present my couple of years of experience to them.
I’ll was thinking of just doing a discussion rather than a presentation, as it it’ll give me a chance to hear other people views and I don’t think I’d be able to talk just by myself for 30mins.
- #6
- Matthew Pennell
- 706 days ago
I think that’ll be okay, Matt – as long as all 80 people don’t all expect to just have a general discussion!
I just finished my slides and printed out my notes, but they’re a bit rushed – I might have to re-do them tonight…
See you there, hopefully. :)
- #7
BarCamp sounds like my hell, to be honest – the idea of presenting in front of a load of knowledgeable people fills me with a cold terror, so you’ll never see me at one.