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
Interestingly, I think this may be the hardest one for me to judge because I'm not a promoter and I've got enough of a tap on our local community that I hear about events easily in advance of them happening. So instead of trying to see how they got people to attend, let's talk about something slightly askew....
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Starting in September, which is right around the corner in case you hadn't noticed, there is a series of conferences that have entered my radar as something that might be edifying for me to attend. There may just be too many of them.
Podcamp Philly is the first of these, on September 6th and 7th. Like each of these conferences, this one has a theme. Being that this is a podcamp, the topic is "new media". I've been following the PANMA list for a year and a half and I'm still not sure what anyone really means when they say "new media", but I think it has something to do with blogging and podcasting and stuff like that.
Later in September (20-21) is Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. I'm waiting to hear more glowing reviews of this event from last year's attendees. This is a pretty expensive conference for blogging, and I wonder who the target market really is: bloggers or blog integrators. I think it's the latter, which it might be nice to pitch Habari at, but I'd like to get real users, not SEO people and themers. Maybe that's just me. Still, it would be nice to hobnob with the big players....
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I've registered for PodCamp Ohio on June 28th, which takes place in Columbus. Podcamp is all about podcasting - having some kind of beyond-written blog with syndication. I think PodCamps aren't going to be my best venue -- I'd like to try more of a barcamp. It would be ideal if there was another BlogPhiladelphia, alas I've heard nothing and the people who I might have expected to be involved aren't talking about it. Oh, well.
I've been thinking about presenting something at the PodCamp to accumulate more for item 30 on my 43things. I'll be adding to this count shortly with another Philly PHP meetup presentation at the end of April, this time on PHP testing. For the PodCamp presentation (which is really more of a group-leading, since it's an "unconference"), I was thinking about talking about software tools for podcasters. more
