Asymptomatic

Build a Better BarCamp - What Was BarCamp Philly

November 10, 2008 owen

Over the weekend, skippy flew in to hang out with me at BarCamp Philly. This was not my first unconference, but it was my first official “BarCamp” experience.

I would like to say up front that the BarCamp Philly organizers did a great job at building this event. Of the many free events I’ve attended over the past few years, this one was the best run of its style. Kudos to them and thanks for the wonderful effort. I want to spend a little time in this post going over not just what I think they did well, but also where I think all events of this type could stand to improve, either by following their example or doing just a little bit more.

Event Promotion

It’s long been my belief that the people that would benefit most from the BarCamp content are people who would never attend. For example, in the suburbs there are many development groups using only Microsoft products, filled with (ok, a bit pejorative) wage slaves. Wouldn’t it be great to take some of the lessons learned from the largely freelance world back to those jobs? Wouldn’t it be great if those developers could run sessions introducing the skills and methods they rely on in their daily work?

I can’t imagine that these groups are particularly tuned in to the same scene that announces things like BarCamp. Nor do I think that hearing the name “BarCamp” would most of them even sit up and take notice. I don’t know what kind of promotional effort, if any, took place to get those folks - and others in unrelated disciplines who would benefit from a foundation in our skills - into the BarCamp, so I can’t really rate this category accurately. Let’s just give it an average 2 out of 3 points.

Registration

Still, I’m not pleased by Eventbrite. It bothers me that I have to go through all of the paces to “buy” a “ticket” that “costs” $0. Makes no sense. I realize that it’s easy and (I hope) free, but it’s a little odd, don’t you think? Plus it doesn’t match the branding of the site. The whole experience is a little less than seamless, especially if you want to draw in those users I mentioned, who wouldn’t normally come to something with “bar” or “camp” in the name.

Perhaps most of the “blame” here rests on Eventbrite. A no-cost (for attendees), branded version of their product would be an improvement.

BarCamp Philly gets 2 out of 3 points for solving the problem, but not the full 3 points for removing all of the “confusion”.

Lead-In

Summarizing what is going to happen at the event is a hard thing to do for an event where you don’t even know the answer before it happens. But when you take this into account, this is one of the areas where BarCamp Philly completely kicked butt.

The web site for the event (WordPress? Ok, I won’t dock points for that, but hey…) was utterly awesome. Profiles of attendees, update announcements, requests for ideas… It was not only what all of these other events should have done, it was the prime example of what every event should do in the future.

My only comment for improvement would be to move the back-channel communication (the stuff in the google group) out to where its integrated with the site, so that attendees can easily see the planning process and become involved if they chose to. That’s just a feed-as-content plugin away.

So for the Lead-In, BarCamp Philly gets the full 3 score for this category.

Venue

BarCamp Philly was presented at the University of the Arts, 211 Broad Street in Philadelphia. The conference convened in classrooms on several floors.

At first I thought it was kind of strange to choose a location where attendees would need to change floors to hit all of the sessions. Having experienced it, this was not an issue. Plenty of elevators, (what, like six?) and stairs made this no trouble.

I’ve had issues previously with class buildings being used in a conference, especially when regular classes were in session in other rooms at the same time. With the clearly marked locations of all of the active session rooms, this was not an issue at all.

The venue scores BarCamp Philly the full 3 points for this category.

Social Network Usage

Here’s another category in which every event I’ve attended has utterly failed. During the event, how hard is it to let attendees know of basic information about the event via our traditional social media tools, like Twitter? Apparently, it’s super-hard. But not for BarCamp Philly organizers.

I think this is one space that Philly just “gets”. The event schedule was online and updated all day. It had an iPhone interface. The Twitter feed for the event was chock full of actually useful stuff, not just pointless babble that had often filled that channel in other conferences.

For this category, BarCamp Philly gets full marks, 3 out of 3.

Sessions

Content is king, right? I was a little worried at the beginning of the day. The schedule wasn’t filling out very fast. Fortunately, by the end of the day, most if not all of the 70 slots for sessions were filled.

I’m sure that not all of the sessions were fully attended. But one of the things that I had discussed in a session I did attend was that sometimes the most valuable sessions can be the ones where it’s just you and one, two, or three other people. The session I attended on shell commands and tips only had 6 or so people, but it was chock full of exactly the kind of information I went to the session to get. It’s like looking for the perfect reference book and finding it.

I was so happy that I did not run into the overabundance of WordPress, Twitter, SEO, and “Monetize your Blog” sessions. As a matter of fact, the only session I attended that hit any of those topics was the last, which was my most disappointing sessions. I didn’t get clear answers to the questions I asked, and I didn’t leave the session believing that the prescribed formula for success would do anything for anyone who didn’t already have that million-dollar initial idea.

My favorite session of the day was the discussion session on education; specifically, what topics should be taught in a college course on web development so that graduates are employable. There were 20 people in the room, and only two people in the corner didn’t contribute significantly (at all) to the conversation. Great session.

My own session on using open source licenses was reasonably attended (although, most of them were there because they knew me - I’d like to think they were interested in the material), and based on comments from a couple of the attendees I didn’t expect, I think it was well-received. At least, I conveyed the specific points I wanted to make known, and was able to change the minds of the people who attended who I knew had incorrect impressions on how these license work.

Still, with 70 session slots, 10 per hour, two timeslots had nothing for me, and there were several during my own session’s time slot that I would have liked to attend. I’m sure that this is not the fault of the organizers, but in terms of my experience at BarCamp, I still have to give this category a 2 out of 3. 2 is good, just not excellent.

Media Coverage

I grant you, there are a ton of photos on Flickr, but that’s not the meat of the event. While I agree with anyone who proposes that being at the event is really the value, and that recorded sessions are lifeless and often less than 10% as valuable as actually being there, sometimes it’s all you’ve got. So where is the audio? Where is the video?

Oops. 1 point.

Afterparty

Lest you think that the party afterward is less important than the actual event, this is finally where you get to decompress with people, strengthen those real connections, and even (if you’re a real nerd) talk about what you learned at the camp. While playing Rock Band and drinking free beer.

Post-Conference Upkeep

I’ve always thought that a big failure of events like these is that there’s no mechanical means to track attendee participation, or even to see who else was in a session with you, in case you missed their name or didn’t grab a business card, or simply wanted to see what someone else wrote on their blog about a session you missed.

How to Improve the Camp

My last session was one where we talked about what we’d like to see in another BarCamp. Odd that none of the organizers picked up on this, or perhaps there was a better-attended identical sessions at the same time - I’m not sure.

Part of the issue, I think, is that the format is pretty well traveled. It’s timed sessions. It’s notecards on a tack board. It’s impromptu session leaders. No sponsor mentions. No follow-up group session. No forced mixers. And in this case, although many people ate at the same location, nothing was planned to coincide with food.

A lot of the good ideas we had in the session had to do with changing the format altogether. Sometimes we found that the really good sessions could probably last a lot longer than an hour. And the not-great or less feature rich sessions could last less time.

As I said before, “BarCamp” is a name particularly tied to geek culture. It’s not very friendly to outside groups, and it’s those outside groups we need to bring in to keep our community from being a gigantic echo chamber. Thanks to everyone who wasn’t in the “scene” for coming to the event, by the way.

One really great idea was to use the online tools to create tag clouds that represented the “mood” of a session. So if people are talking about a topic, people in the room would (ugh) “Tweet” that topic. An ongoing system would track those terms and let other attendees know the kind of discussions that were going on other sessions. That way, you could better focus your time. I think a lot of the reason that I wouldn’t leave a bad session is because I already chose it as the best for that slot, and didn’t have any clue what other session might be good. Even just a live ++/– system for voting on sessions in progress would be great for finding something cool to sit in.

There were a bunch of other good ideas, probably enough to fill out a whole post. It’s probably something I’ll do after I’ve let this experience wear itself in a bit. I’ve still got DrupalCamp to consider this month.

I’m glad that this event happened in Philly. We’ve gone too long without a major, all-genre event like this. We should definitely have one once a year. That’s plenty in frequency.

Once again, congrats to the BarCamp organizing team and all the volunteers for offering a great event this past weekend. I’m already looking forward to being part of next year’s event.