For those that don’t know, bar camp is a free tech conference that’s put together by whoever has the energy to pull it together. There’s barcamps everywhere, “all the time”. They’re centered around technology, but the topics range all the way from love level things like optimizing databases to “high level” topics like community gardening.
The free and ad hoc natures of barcamp mean that the conference is as good as the attendees make it. As with the first BarCamp Austin which was held during last year’s SXSWi, this means BarCamp Austin II has a strong chance of being great. There’s all sort of people fly into Austin for SXSWi, so there’s even more interesting people in the area that usual.
The other aspect of BarCamp that’s nice is that anyone can do a “talk,” “presentation,” or whatever you want to call it. Now, there is voting that happens at first to select the talks, but in my expierience, if you want to talk about something, you won’t miss out.
For individuals with no agenda, this means it’s a fun mix between hanging out, dorking out, and attending an industry conference. If you’re someone who has an agenda — an individual or vendor — it means a chance to interact with a whole different set of people than you’re used to. More correctly, it means a chance to be genuine and real — yourself — if you can pull it off. We spend a lot of time talking with people about simply being themselves instead of super-polished, booth-ready marketing, and events like barcamp are the chance to see why it’s valuable. In that sense, it’s like blog version of a conference: there’s incredibly value if you are there, but you’ll get eye-rolls if your marketroid self shows up instead.
Here’s one thing that’d be fun: driving up a Blackbox for people to play with. Call it the “bring it to it’s knees” challenge and see if anyone can crash it.
So, if that’s your thing — agenda or no — I’ll see you there.
To my own agenda: I don’t have any ideas for sessions to do. Anyone have suggestions? It’d be nice to do a panel or group discussion of some sort.
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