Barcamp and Unconferencing
We had New Zealand’s first BarCamp today. A BarCamp is a way of doing a ‘conference’ in a very unstructured way. From the BarCamp website:
“BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.”
BarCamps are also planned in an ad-hoc way, generally using a wiki, an email group etc. This particular BarCamp was focused on the Chch tech community sharing knowledge about hardware hacking, mobile applications, open source, search, wireless mesh networks and many other things. About 50 people attended over the course of the day.
The BarCamp methodology is similar in some ways to Open Space Technologies. The rules of BarCamp are:
- You do talk about Bar Camp.
- You do blog about Bar Camp.
- If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
- Only three word intros.
- As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
- No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
- Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
- If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)
They tend not to be as goal directed as Open Space sessions, and are more focused on sharing knowledge, building social networks, and bouncing ideas off each other. They do have a lot of the same attributes as OST though, in terms of developing the agenda at the beginning of the day, things taking as long as they need to, everyone is a contributor, voting with your feet.
There’s another one in Wellington next weekend on e-Government.