Barcamps are (probably) easy

I experienced a couple of related things today at SXSW.

At 1.30pm I connected back home using Skype to WXWM where 30 Brummies were running their own mini SouthBy in the upstairs room of the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath. Fighting dodgy wifi and 3G connections we managed something and it was good but it was they who ended the hookup because they had to move on with their stuff. Checking it through the day on Twitter I got the distinct impression that it was really good, chock full of interesting talks and chats and exactly the sort of thing I and others had been talking about doing for ages now. The beautiful thing is it was organised primarily by Shona who put forward the idea a week or so ago after too much cider one night. Shona is an artist who blogs. She is not a social media guru. That, I think, is relevant. I may know about all this stuff and connect with people who do this stuff on a regular basis but it’s not necessarily my job to put it into practice. If anything it’s my job to inspire (with a small bit of enabling where necessary) interesting people to do interesting things. And in the process be inspired and enabled myself to do interesting things.

After WXWM told SXSW they were done with us I popped over to Barcamp Austin which is being held around the corner from the main SouthBy convention centre in a nightclub. Having checked out Barcamp last year I was keeping tabs on it in the run up to SXSW-proper and, if I’m not mistaken, they only sorted the date and venue a few days ago. Everyone knew it would happen but the things you’d think would be the important parts were left to the last minute. Because they weren’t really that important. The main thing was people would be there doing stuff and that had been building up over many months through the local Austin community and the wiki.

A Barcamp is a conference where the delegates themselves decide what’s going to happen. Anyone can put on a talk or seminar (the standard proceedure is everyone has to do at least one presentation) about anything they want to. It was illustrated nicely by Matthew when he told me about a Barcamp he went to in London where he gave two talks. One about some work he was doing for MySociety which needed some assistance from the community. (worthy, serious, possibly techy, definitely interesting) and the other about the mathematics inherent to the chord progressions in the songs of Girls Aloud (frivolous, funny, still interesting). In a nutshell, you put a bunch of interesting and interested people in a room, give them a very loose structure that enables them to be interesting and see what happens.

Barcamps are, or at least the Austin Barcamp is, organised using a large sheet of paper divided up into slots. If you want to run a panel you take a post-it note, write the name of the panel and what it’s about, and stick it in a slot. Here’s a photo of the Austin board:

I also shot 4 minutes of video walking around the venue. You might get a sense of what it’s like, you might not, but I’ll try and also shoot some video of the SXSW convention centre for comparison. Neither is better – they’re just different and they overlap a hell of a lot.

We need to do a Barcamp in Birmingham, I’ve been saying. And now someone who, I suspect, has never heard of a Barcamp let alone been to one has done one. Yes, it’s just 30 people and only lasted a few hours but it pretty much ticked all the boxes on the Barcamp to-do list.

That pleases me.