Declan's Blog

Two Marches ago, I met Chris Messina at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies (ETech) conference. He told me and Gabe about barcamp, an unconference and social networking experience that sounded pretty cool. We hopped on the barcamp.org site, added a SanDiego section and started drumming up interest.

We mainly needed a venue, and it looked like the Price Center at UCSD would be great, once the students left for summer. We talked to the people in charge, and it all looked good until we wanted to stay overnight and have booze. Funny how these little things put the kibosh on so many good ideas… 🙂

We lost momentum after that and the idea languished and rose again a few more times as various people tried to get it moving along. Check the revision history of the wiki if you’re really bored. Someone should use that as a basis for a doctoral thesis in social interaction.

Anyhow, ETech rolled around again this year and I got an odd IM from a buddy who stayed late one night and told me he’d been talking to a guy with my name tag. I rushed out to the car and saw that my tag was still there. Turns out a very clever young man had found a dupe of my card and hacked his way into the conference. I hopped onto the #barcampsd irc channel and we chatted for a while.

His name was Dan and he also wanted to see BarCampSD happen. We batted some ideas around, included some more people, and finally started a dialogue on the group mailing list. A few ups and downs later, a meeting was convened in a loud restaurant in Hotel Circle, then moved to a quieter venue across the parking lot. I think all of the key players were there, and people started grabbing tasks – fund raising, food, recording, venue, etc. It was loud, disorganized, uncoordinated, and perfect.

I didn’t really see anything I could do directly, and honestly I was kind of tired and put off by a lot of what had happened in the last year. There was a lot of energy and enthusiasm around the table, so I just listened and enjoyed the atmosphere, and maybe a margarita, I can’t remember…

The group had subsequent meetings that conflicted with my schedule, but they were great about mailing the list and chatting on the irc channel. After a few weeks, it all got put together and they pulled of an excellent event.

Some impressions of the event itself:

The people were warm and open. I was struck by how many social activist organizations were there. Aid for Africa, StuckInBed, empowerthyself, all kinds of interesting folks.

Geeks who wanted to use their talents to help. This was the whole feel of the team that put it together, and the people who showed up.

I saw very little pushiness. No one was really proselytizing that their tech was better than others’. People were genuinely interested in what other were doing. I’ve seen this before at a session called “Desktop of the Alpha Geeks” at ETech – a look at what tools, processes, and widgets that other smart people use to run their lives. I think this is why GTD has taken off so much.

There was a great mix of people. Many sizes, shapes, genders, backgrounds.

Schedules do not need to be agonized over:

It’s ok not to know exactly how it’s all going to work. Post-its are cheap.

A lot of cool tech doesn’t have a keyboard:

Something about chickens. And beer. Lots of beer:

I look forward to being involved with the next BarCampSD in November.

If you want to get involved, go to barcamp.org/BarCampSanDiego

For more of my pictures, click here.

For a lot more pictures of the event, click here.

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