BarCamp Dublin is on the way, followed closely by BarCamps in almost every parish in the country. The last two BarCamps held in Ireland were brilliant. I was at both and met a whole lot of great people, learned a whole lot of great things and drank a whole lot of great beer. But there was something slightly incestuous about them that I’m afraid BarCamp Dublin will inherit too if we’re not careful. Damien picked-up on this when he mentioned how it’s becoming too cliquey. Let’s save BarCamp Dublin from that by opening it up to a wider range of folks who can no doubt enlighten us in ways we can’t yet imagine. Here are four steps for saving Barcamp Dublin:
- People who’ve been to BarCamp before should bring someone who hasn’t (robbed from Damien).
- Let’s remove the requirement / request for a blog link on sign-up (the message this sends to people without blogs is “this conference isn’t really for you”).
- Run an ice-breaker / intro session at the very start of the day where everyone must say in turn their name and what they do (this will let people make a shopping list of people they want to talk to during the day and kill the “I didn’t know he was here today” problem).
- Approach the offline media before the event. BarCamp and how it’s organized is a great story and I’m convinced would be of interest to some of the papers.
What do you suggest? Please add your ideas for saving BarCamp and if you’ve never been to one before, please come to BarCamp Dublin and introduce yourself.
5 Comments
Eoghan, great ideas, I had planned to hit the mainstream media. As for the sign-up on the wiki, you can change the instructions yourself - that’s what it’s all about.
I had also considered running the Pecha Kucha session early in the day, maybe combined with the intros - it’s a great ice-breaker… much better than last thing in the day.
We also need to make sure that at each of the session times there is one ‘non-technical’ talk running for people to go to.
Top ideas Eoghan.
Damien actually blanket bombed the media before the first one and get big fat zero response. At least for the second one there was some coverage afterwards.
Agree about the link too.
Intro session could take a while if lots there but definitely helps put names to faces. I still don’t know who certain high profile people are who have been to both!
Pecha Kucha at the start is a very smart idea. And like Elly did at the last one, you could widen it so that people can just show N sites they think people might like but may not have heard of - AltaVista, Gopher, Usenet, Fidonet ;-)
I hate saying it but the wiki is still putting a lot of people off. One person gave up in disgust on a previous BarCamp as they couldn’t get their head around it. Not sure what the solution is there. I know they can email the organisers (and that’s what happened a lot towards the end of the planning for BarCamp Cork) but it seems to create some sort of annoyance in people.
And absolutely have to have hard-assed timekeepers at every session counting down from 10 mins left.
Definitely good suggestions Eoghan, its fundamental to the growth of these events that cliques are only in the background.
Hello there,
Some thoughts from someone without a technical background who was at the BarCamp in Cork and thought it excellent.
1.) Wiki is a headwreck. Other form of signup vital.
2.) Media will respond to a Dublin event that they ignore in Cork.
3.) Greater encouragement of people to suggest what they’d like to see/hear and then headhunting the people who might help. Don’t presume that everyone who might go along knows they can.
4.) Not negotiable, I know, but everyone I mentioned it to gathered from the name that it was some kind of tent-based event.
Well, Mr. McCabe… Do I get to be the “plus one” at the next event?