My mom got tickets for me, Berta, and the kids to see A Year With Frog and Toad today at the Arden theater on 2nd street in Philadelphia.

It's primarily a kid's show, a musical about two friends, Frog and Toad, who live in houses next door to each other. The show consisted of a series of short stories. In one, Toad bakes cookies, and he and Frog can't stop eating them. They go through great lengths to prevent themselves from eating the cookies, but end up eating them anyway.

In another story, including my favorite song from the show, Toad goes for a swim. He asks Frog to look away until he gets into the water, which he does. He explains that he looks funny in his bathing suit. Then Turtle shows up and Toad tells Frog that he must tell her to go away. So he tells Turtle that she must go, and when she asks why, Frog lets slip that Toad looks funny in his bathing suit. She thinks this is funny, and breaks into song, as more characters are brought into the former secret. Eventually, Toad gets out of the "water" (a creative use of a hole in the stage) and he indeed looks funny in his bathing suit. Of course, then you see Frog in his suit, and it's pretty strange-looking, too.

At the end of the show, the actors and stage hands took turns answering questions from the audience about the production, which was interesting. They explained how the big houses in the sets were able to rotate (on spindles with spools cranked by stage hands), and how the fire was made by the propmaster (a silk held in front of a fan, with light shone on it). Nothing surprising surfaced from beyond my experiences in theaters, but it was still entertaining and worthwhile for this production.

Abby and Riley had a reasonably positive reaction to the show. I think they liked the show, but were disappointed when we didn't buy them popcorn (did they even have popcorn?) at intermission, so Riley's remarks reflected his disfavor of that. Berta, Mom, and I had a good time.

I forget that the kids haven't been into the city often in their lives, and I want to make them familiar enough with it before they become adults that they're comfortable if they find themsevles there. After the show, we walked around the city, took the subway west of city hall to "see the skyscrapers" (which to the kids turned out to be less impressive standing beneath them than one might imagine), and then came right back to avoid being towed for leaving our car parked too long. Still, the things that the kids pick up on their trips (Look, a tunnel! Look, gum on the sidewalk!) is always an amusement, and I hope they benefit from/enjoy their overall experience as much as I do watching them experience it.

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.

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

Registration is something often flubbed at these unconferences. I'm not sure why campers think that a wiki might be enough, but when your attendence level starts to get above a certain number, you need more formal registration to allocate space. BarCamp Philly managed to accomplish this well.

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

Hmm. What happened here? There were 70 sessions and no central place for slides? Did anyone coordinate to obtain those things from session leaders? No video recorded in sessions?

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

3 points. Philly can throw down.

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

Time hasn't passed enough to truly evaluate this, but I do see some back-channel things going on talking about more events. I'm not sure we need more events, but keeping in personal touch with the contacts gained at BarCamp would be a good thing.

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.

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.

The next weekend, on the 27th, is BlogOrlando. I went to BlogOrlando last year, and it was a good time, but I had to leave for another conference immediately afterwards, so I didn't get to stick around for any of the good networking. Maybe this year will be different.

Once again, Ohio Linux Fest is on this year, and contrary to fears, it's not going to interfere with BlogOrlando, since it falls on October 11th. Ohio Linux Fest is the birthplace of Habari, and it's always fun to visit skippy and Columbus. If all goes as planned, we might even have a 0.6 release to announce by then.

Beyond that (or maybe in-between it), there are forces planning a BarCamp for Philadelphia, which is finally (possibly) the correct venue to start talking about how cool Habari is. That's why I go to all of these things anyway -- to spread the Habari joy while meeting other interesting people that do what I do.

Is there any other event I should attend? As if I need to add more to the list...

I've been doing a lot of things lately. Getting out of the house is becoming more common for me. And as I look forward to presentations at the PHP meetup at the end of April and PodCamp Ohio at the end of June, I've been attending little gatherings here and there as time allows. There are a couple trips in particular that require more elucidation than what effort I want to put into this seating, but I did want to write about something simple that strikes me every time I venture into the city for an event or meeting or whatever.

As I've observed in the past, you always take something with you when you visit somewhere like a major city, even if you're mostly retracing your steps. I've gotten in the habit of taking the R5 from Malvern to Market East on the instructions of folks whose company I enjoy but much less frequently these days than I like. On that route, I manage to walk through a good chunk of the Gallery, a kind of "train station meets three story mall". It is in this place that I've encountered one of my favorite Philly oddities.

It's just a matter of so many odd things being in one place at one time that strikes me, not that any one of these things in particular is odd. First off, I think that mall-on-station is probably a great idea commercially, but is still a tad strange. But then you add the fish and meat market. I think this is the only shopping center I've ever been in with a regular old Radio Shack, a bookstore, a CVS, a Game Stop, a standard food court, and... A fish market. Ok, maybe that's not weird, maybe it's just me. But then...

Then you have the Market/Frankfurt line, which runs right through there. Ok. There's a Septa station on one side, and the subway station on the other. Not too weird. The subway entrance/exit is right next to the fish market, which is somewhat convenient, I guess, if you're into a fast fish trip. Maybe Philly denizens would think it odd that I have to drive 10 minutes to a stand-alone building that contains fresh fish when it's just an easy trip to the mall for one-stop shopping of video games and fish. But that's really not the part that fires the neurons. Including everything up through this, I'm unaffected.

What gets me is that as you're walking through this section of the building, you're engulfed in the smell of fish. Clearly this place has been here for a while. And I'd expect any fish market to have a certain fishy odor. But what tips the scale on the "what the heck?" factor is that there is a perfume kiosk in the hallway right outside the fish market entrance. How..? Wha..?

This is just incomprehensible to me. I find this very strange. In the pileup of things that seem odd to me, this is the cap. I should be a patron of this kiosk some day, just to see what it's all about. Clearly there must be something to it that I'm missing. On every other day, I pass through the fishy odor down into the bowels of Philly subway.

Berta and I went to IndyHall's movie night on Saturday to hang out in the city and to watch the first of the two films in the double-feature, "Office Space". We got to talk to a few of the folks down there, both some people we knew and some people we met for the first time.

The event was sponsored by Philly Car Share, which is an interesting organization that offers shared vehicles to city-dwellers. You basically make a reservation, and you get a car for a few hours. It's kind of like renting, I suppose, but it's a more comfortable plan. The cars are where you might need them to be, parked in nearby lots, rather than centrally at a rental place. And they have all different kinds of cars, so if you needed a trunk or a van, they've got that, or for a night out on the town, a convertible or BMW is obtainable. Neat idea for folks that live downtown, especially.

We don't have much use for the service, since we'd have to drive our own cars to anywhere where a carshare car would be waiting, and that doesn't make much sense. In talking to people who have more use for these services, I discovered an interesting distinction of what is "city" and "suburb", and it was amusing to me to see how the line moves depending on which side of it you primarily dwell.

We were chatting about getting a suburban meeting together of people who work at home or independently in general, which is part of the idea behind IndyHall. The trick with suburbanites, I think, is getting in contact with them. We're all so into our little worlds, we don't often realize what's going on outside of our own neighborhoods. This is strange to say considering the differences I was going to portray between suburban life and urban life.

In any case, the idea of where to hold one of these meetings arose. Suburban to me means "where I live", and if I had to draw a line where the city ends and where "not the city" begins, it would be somewhere between King of Prussia and the Zoo. If you're not familiar with the area, neither of those places are really anywhere near the city proper. This distinction is interesting to me because on Saturday we met people who define the line differently.

Living on the other side of my line, folks define the city limits as "not paying the city wage tax", which I'm sure is a significant distinction to draw, but I don't think it's very realistic from a social point of view. I think it's more a matter of whether it's easier to get into the city (where you pay the wage tax) to do significant daily things, or it's easier to stay near home. Or perhaps the frequency of doing those things.

For me, once or twice a month into the city is plenty. Actually, I could (and have) go for quite a while never venturing near the city. So I feel suburban. Nonetheless, there are indicators that I'm still suburban and not rural, like the fact that the regional rail comes out this far. And that my major news still comes from city stations, and when they report the traffic, they talk about major roads that are near me.

For people who live in the city, my area has a few too many trees. There are horses down the street that are unsaddled, much less attached to handsome cabs. I have to drive to get, well, anywhere.

It's interesting to me what magnetic force the city - both Philadelphia and your nearest city - have on the dwellers outside of its boundaries. Where people draw the line also interests me, especially when taking into consideration which side they're on, and how that affects their reasoning. And I also wonder at what point a person considers himself "rural" -- perhaps when the lure of the city is simply a curiosity except when called to federal jury duty?