Comments on: Same old faces – BarCamp Galway – Please change this

By: Been a busy B… at Cloudlands

Been a busy B… at Cloudlands — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:05:36 +0000

[...] We’re getting closer to BarCamp Galway, and Damien has put out a call for new faces. [...]

By: aphrodite

aphrodite — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 18:51:25 +0000

honest to god Ellie, I do think the Barcamps are too techie – note, techie, not geeky – for the likes of me (I am the living proof that blog software is user friendly), but I was away for Barcamp Dublin, otherwise I would have loved to support you.

By: Justin Mason

Justin Mason — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:28:33 +0000

yep, I’m with Conor and John.

â€œWarning warning warning. Immediate technical discussions of a social problem will lead to a perfect solution to the wrong problem.â€

spot on.

By: Conor O'Neill

Conor O'Neill — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:02:34 +0000

I have to agree with John on this. Hence my Tweet of the other day regarding the race to build a new BarCamp Galway site in Drupal. I said "Warning warning warning. Immediate technical discussions of a social problem will lead to a perfect solution to the wrong problem." At BarCamp Cork we had to work hard to get non-geeks to attend but also to get geeks outside of software/web who thought BarCamp was purely about those areas. So much of software and the web is about people and media and that needs to be reflected more in these conferences/unconferences.

By: John McCormac

John McCormac — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 03:14:11 +0000

It is a bit strange that people are more worried about the technology and organisation than the reasons why people are not attending the barcamp events.

Why should people attend? For the entrepreneur (tech or otherwise) – what’s the attraction and why should they spend some of their most valuable asset (time) attending?

Despite all the talk about marketing and PR, these events seem to be very poorly marketed outside the geek/blogger/social network sphere. Perhaps there is an interesting element at work here in that the people in the geek/blogger/social network sphere don’t have enough in common in the real world to attract them to a barcamp type of event? Could this poor marketing be the reason that the barcamps degenerate into cliques events?

By: James

James — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:19:10 +0000

Is their goatse logo intentional? I’ve never been to a BarCamp before, so I would consider going to this, but there’s not a lot that catches my eye. The stuff under the ‘Hear’ section looks interesting. In my opinion, this could do with a lot more geekiness. Is there any upcoming BarCamp Cork being planned?

By: Conor O'Neill

Conor O'Neill — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:54:17 +0000

@Justin – to reiterate what Damien said, I had multiple people tell me that they hadn’t a clue what to do on the wiki for BarCamp Cork and given how obtuse it was, they figured they were not the target audience and so skipped the day.

In fact I had the CEO of a local software company recently tell me that they had no idea what a wiki was.

We need to remember we live in a technology echo chamber and that “they should know” doesn’t cut it.

They might be able to run BarCampBlock in SF but see how far you’d get trying to run that in The Liberties.

By: Michele

Michele — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:52:30 +0000

@Justin – a lot of people who are doing cool things with technology aren’t perl hackers We have a lot of clients with amazing ideas to make use of the online space that get confused by things like wikis. Personally I view wikis as being useful in certain circumstances – such as internal documentation or collaborative public docs. As “hubs” they fail miserably.
The way I see it BarCamps can be a fantastic way to introduce new ideas, talk about old ones in new ways and demystify technology. More women would be great!

@Damien – I’m more than happy for us to provide the infrastructure for Elly’s ideas but we’re hosting, domains etc., We’re not programmers or developers

By: Damien

Damien — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:50:17 +0000

People have directly said to me they didn’t bother going to previous BarCamps because the sign-up was so confusing/off-putting and it must be pure tech if that’s the process for signing-up. Seriously!

By: Justin Mason

Justin Mason — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:45:16 +0000

so you really think the problem of a lack of attendance is caused by a *wiki*?