Fri, Sep 09, 2005
BAR Camp 2005 Redux
#
Thoughts on BAR Camp. Yeah, yeah, a little
late, I know. Less late than the rest of my WikiMania
notes, though. (JQX)
The most bizarre experience for me at BAR Camp was the number of
people I knew from different worlds. My brain was constantly
context-switching. It made me painfully aware of the number of
different hats I wear, all in the name of BlueOxenAssociates. (JQZ)
- PurpleNumbers guy. (JR0)
- Wiki geek. (JR1)
- IdentityCommons contributor. (JR2)
- DougEngelbart translator. (JR3)
- Usability guy!!! Obviously because of the
sprints I've organized, but awkward
for me, since I have no actual background in usability. (JR4)
- PatternLanguage hat. I've been doing the collaboration
PatternLanguage dog-and-pony show the past few months, and some
folks who've heard me speak on the subject were there. I'll be
doing a lot more of it too, so stay tuned. Patterns are damn
important, useful, and interesting. (JR5)
- Facilitation / event organizer hat. (JR6)
- Nonprofit hat. The lack of nonprofit contingent was disappointing,
but I had a good conversation with HoJohnLee, who's done some great
work in that space. (We were also both wearing
our Korean hats, along with MinJungKim, a rarity at events
like these.) I also met PhilKlein, a nonprofit guy who also
participated in our usability sprint the following week. (JR7)
- Ex-DDJ hat. Some fogies, young and old,
remembered me from my magazine days. (JR8)
All this was testament both to my ADD and to the job ChrisMessina,
AndySmith, and the other
organizers did in only one week. Three hundred people walked
through the doors over the weekend. Amazing. (JR9)
The best part of the event was strengthening familiar ties and
building new ones. I met lots of
great people, including
folks I'd only known on the 'net. I wasn't blown away by the talks
for the most part, but some stood out. (JRB)
- KaPingYee did two talks, one on
voting methods and
another on phishing. Sadly, I only caught the tail end of the latter, but the
Wiki page is
fairly complete. I've never seen Ping do anything that I didn't
find interesting or, in many cases, profound, and these talks were
no exception. (I'll have more to say on Ping's
latest work
in a later blog post.) (JRC)
- XiongChangnian presented some interesting
quantitative
analysis of the Wikipedia community.
I didn't have as much of an opportunity to talk with Xiong as I'd
like, but for those of you who have interacted with him, try not to
be turned off by his bluster. He's doing some good work, and he
seems to mean well. (JRD)
- RashmiSinha and I did a
roundtable on
OpenSource usability on the first night. Afterwards, we both agreed
that we didn't learn much new, but simply having the conversation
and especially listening to a new audience was valuable. One
unintended outcome: A participant (who shall remain nameless, but
not unlinked!) complained
about SocialText's usability, which I dutifully reported on the
Wiki. AdinaLevin and RossMayfield quickly responded, saying they're
looking to hire a usability person. If you're in the market,
let them know. (JRE)
I was so busy chatting with people, I also ended up missing a bunch of
good talks: Rashmi's tagging
session, RowanNairn on
structured
data for the masses, and TomConrad's
Pandora talk, which seemed
to generate the most buzz at the camp. (JRF)
Throwing Great Events (JRG)
I toyed with the idea of doing a techie session, but in the end, the
talk I should have done was one on patterns and throwing great
events. BAR Camp was great, and as with all great collaborative
events, there were some common patterns: (JRH)
- [Food]?. One of the most critical and, amazingly, most overlooked
element in an event. Lots of credit goes to KittHodsden, who made
sure there were enough snacks to feed a small country, and the
sponsors, who kept the
beer flowing and underwrote the party on Saturday night. (JRI)
- IntroduceYourself?. The organizers borrowed the FOO Camp tradition
of saying your name and three words to describe yourself, and they
did it each day. (JRJ)
- SharedDisplay and ReportOut?. Folks did a great job of documenting
on the Wiki and on their blogs and
Flickr. BAR Camp owned the
foobar Flickr fight. (JRK)
- BackChannel. I'm not a big fan of IRC at face-to-face events, and
there were definitely times when I thought it detracted from the
face-to-face interactions. But, it was there, and it was useful.
It wasn't logged, though. (JRL)
- PermissionToParticipate. Lots of OpenSpace techniques were present
-- again, borrowed from FOO Camp -- like the butcher paper for
scheduling sessions. Lots of this was also cultural, though. I
think this is the hardest thing for folks who do not live in the
SiliconValley to get -- the spirit of sharing that comes so
naturally to folks here. (JRM)
I'd do two things differently at the next event: (JRN)
- Incorporate a ritual for new attendees to make them feel welcome and
to avoid clique-formation. (JRO)
- Add slightly more structure. Now that the organizers have done it
once, they can use it as a template for the next event -- for
example, publishing the time slots ahead of time, and actually
enforcing them, at least as far as room usage is concerned. Also, I
like scheduled ReportOut? sessions. (JRP)
In the postmortem, we talked a bit about what BAR Camp is supposed to
be, and I really liked how Chris positioned it: As a model for
organizing grassroots, free (or very cheap) alternatives to more
expensive gatherings. I'm toying with the idea of incorporating BAR
Camp-style alternatives to complement some non-free events I'm
organizing. (JRQ)
/events |
Posted at 2:21pm
EEK Speaks
A blog about collaboration, community-building, and the various
goings-on at Blue Oxen
Associates, with occasional digressions on food and other vital
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