Posts Tagged: barcamp-bangalore

BCB 5 over BCB 4 – What can be better

On August 1, 2007 by Anant With 5 Comments - Blogging, Internet, Rants

I’ve been on the Barcamp mailing list and I’ve been following the “post barcamp” discussion. While Barcamp itself was successful, this being the biggest Barcamp ever, in the world; there was discontentment and a longing for improvement in the next iteration of the event (which by the way has been tentatively scheduled for November of this year)

Issues I identified which could have been better or should be next time (This is my opinion and open for discussion)

Main points –

  • Too many tracks, too little time. The sheer number of collectives was overwhelming.
  • Too many newbies, not enough interaction
  • Giving tees on day 2 was a good idea
  • Entry fees goes against barcamp philosophy (already agreed upon)

How/what we should change:

Change in facilities –

  • Have fewer projectors. Allocate them only who really need it
  • Let anyone initiate a discussion. But to make a formal announcement, the initiator needs at least 5 participants(including or excluding the initiator. That’s a no point). Otherwise they can still have the discussion but no formal announcement (via sms)
  • In addition to collective charts, have a couple of impromptu talk/discussion charts. Slight conflict with the previous point. Need to resolve that. If we have these, have them in more replications so that participants don’t have to go from one end to the other to check the posters
  • Preferably, try to get the rooms/auditorium closer to each other as compared to bcb4

Possible alleviations –

  • Don’t prefer to have formal talks by one speaker. Encourage discussions
  • But do keep a few slots for formal talks; ‘presentation’ if you want to call it. Call for presentation ppt in advance to filter/approve and pass the presentations and then assign the formal presentation slots. Some might argue that it is against the spirit of barcamp. My opinion is that it’s a barcamp. We can add a limited number of those to mix up types of interaction. There are no formal rules. Let’s define for our convenience
  • Noticed that a couple of collectives were trying to be too organized so time management was an issue
  • A lot of of talks were talks. And not discussions as it should have been. Demos, prod launches are exceptions
  • Educate collective leaders on how to lead more effectively. Encourage more BOFs(birds of a feather)
  • Stress on participants that those who are a part of one collective can attend other talks and they don’t necessarily have to sit through all talks to attend just one talk

Lastly, my pics from BCB4 have been uploaded to a Flickr Set.

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Barcamp Bangalore 4 – Day 1

On July 28, 2007 by Anant With 3 Comments - Blogging, Desicritics, Internet, Yours Truly

I attended my first BarCamp today held in Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
It was scheduled to start at 9 AM but I overslept and reached there only by 10. But as IST (Indian Stretchable time) goes, I wasn’t late and the registrations and the introduction session was still going on. So I did not miss much :D

I wanted to be a part mainly of the Bloggers collective and the Photo(graphers) Collective, hoping to learn, mostly in the latter and more to give a talk in the former. The bloggers collective started of fairly decently but was delayed as people trickled in fairly slowly and almost everyone had a problem getting the WiFi to work on their laptops.

But once that was done, the first talk on Podcasting took place. I was not interested much in that so I went around helping people configure their laptops to connect to the WLan.

The next talk by Kishore Krishna (aka Kpowerinfinity) was on Widgets but due to some conflicts, it was delayed. So my talk on Blogging Platforms and setting up your own blog was advanced and his postponed to after mine.

My talk started on a fairly positive note with lot of discussion and interaction but once I got on to the setting up a self hosted blog using wordpress, people lost track. The topic got far too technical for most of them so I decided to stop and instead move that to a demo after the talk for those who were interested by making it more basic and easy to follow(the demo did not happen eventually)

After my talk, I moved out from the bloggers collective to check out the other collective. I entered the Internet collective where a talk on MS Silverlight was just about to start. Not much interest there so I moved on to the Startups collective. That was in the fag end with the speak just starting to take questions so I left there too and went back to the bloggers collective. Kishore’s talk was just about over when I reached there and soon we all went for lunch.

Immediately after lunch, the bloggers collective seemed to have disappeared with only a few visible from the earlier 40-50. So I held a discussion on micro-blogging (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) with a few of the interested attendees. After that, I discussed the various blogging platforms and what would be a good choice for a non-techie beginner blogger and set up an Livejournal account for her.

That was the end of all blogging topics as the photography collective was having it’s first (and only meet for the day) where a lot of discussion went on and Amoghavarsha and Jace and few others. Learnt lots of basic tips and got a lot of information.

There was a band jam happening later in the evening but having tired myself out earlier, I decided to skip that. Day two of the un-conference is tomorrow. Watch for a report about it tomorrow.

Oh and I got a chance to meet Aaman and Deepti Lamba, the chief editors of Desicritics. That was really great. We discussed the upcoming changes to DC, the current happenings and how it is really growing as a community. That was really great.

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Barcamp Bangalore 4 – Live Blogging

On July 28, 2007 by Anant With 1 Comments - Blogging, Yours Truly

Blogging live from Barcamp in the bloggers. I gave a talk on Blogging platforms which I’m not sure how successful it was because I think I went fairly technical while the crowd was mainly non-tech.

The next talk is by Kpowerinfinity on widgets (technorati, flickr, desktop widgets etc)

I’ll be flitting around to various talks to blog about other talks.

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