Congrats and thanks to the organizers, volunteers, Red Hat and other sponsors for making
BarCampRDU a great success. I really enjoyed it. In case you have no idea what a "barcamp" is here's the deal. According to the
BarCamp wiki, a BarCamp is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."
The event started around 9AM Saturday morning with a quick introduction from conference organizer Fred Stutzman. Everybody who wanted to propose a session lined up at the front of the room and gave a 30 second pitch for their idea. Most of the proposals were technical like "linux systems admin" or "atom publishing protocol," but there were some non-technical ideas too. For example there was a session on "how to juggle" and one on "how to dance with girls" (not sure how that turned out, given the M/F ratio).
After the session pitches, the session leaders claimed spots on the schedule, which was a 10-foot by 15-foot sheet of paper taped to the wall. Next attendees voted for sessions by putting tick marks on the schedule using magic markers. Based on the votes and conversations between session leaders, some sessions were combined and some were moved to smaller or larger meeting rooms -- all right on the spot. It was amazing how well that worked and how quickly we were able to arrive at a schedule and by 10AM we were all attending sessions.
The sessions themselves were not so unconventional. They were definitely more interactive than the usual tech-conference format, but generally followed the normal speaker/audience model. I'm not complaining. I enjoyed the sessions, learned a lot and heard a lot of interesting stories. I attended sessions on open source business and it's ability to innovate (Tarus Balog and ), RESTful Notification Architecture (Seairth Jacobs), social networks (Fred Stutzman) and the Atom publishing protocol (Joe Gregorio).
That's all I have time for tonight. If you want more info, Fred Stutzman has a great
round-up of the blog and news coverage (and check it out -- I was mentioned in the
News & Observer article) plus some guidelines for
running your own BarCamp. I hope we'll do another one this year -- I'd like to help out next time around.
Tags: topic:[BarCampRDU]