Damien Mulley

Game on. Going back to the roots yeah? 🙂 I’m meant to be involved in this but I’ve been very very lax about it. Sorry everyone!

So what’s a Barcamp? It’s an informal and free conference where the topics and talks are chosen on the day by the people there. Have an idea about a talk? Ask for one to be run or run it yourself. Barcamps are meant to be unconferences where it isn’t one person at a podium talking but the whole audience participating. A bit like Questions and Answers without the panelists and John Bowman guiding the conversation. Different and we’re going to try this time to do that!

Here’s who are going so far. This is also the manifesto:

• Insisting that slideware sessions to be kept to a minimum and limited to 20 mins
• Running an Ignite session for pure slideware (5 minutes, 20 slides)
• Focussing relentlessly on facilitiating discussions with active participants rather that talking at passive listeners. No more talk + Q&A. It should be all Q&A with “presenters” as moderators.
• Asking questions, not making statements
• Running a “build a webapp in a day” session for the entire day (details to follow)
• Offering your problems/challenges to your audience to solve (”How do I…?”)
• Setting up hands-on technical tutorial sessions (e.g. how to use Sketchup to model buildings and cities, under the hood of WordPress etc)
• Insisting on absolutely no branding or commercial pitching during sessions
• Highlighting technology as a tool to achieve useful ends, not as an end in itself
• Looking at ways of using technology to enable creativity
• Pulling in as many non-tech people as possible – media, art, education, finance, energy, entertainment, charity

I’m going to give a few talks, though, I think more I’ll kick off a few interactive sessions with people. There should deffo be one on funding for companies and where to get it with someone taking notes and putting them online.

There’s also a meal the night before in Cork too. Come along!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under irishblogs, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.