Re-imagining BarCamp as a multi-threaded skill exchange
This weekend will be my seventh London BarCamp. As well as those, I’ve also been to four in Brighton, as well as BarCamps in Newcastle, Cork and Cambridge. I’ve also been to PodCamp (Boston), TweetCamp (London), both UK RailsCamps and I organised SemanticCamp.
I’m firmly convinced that BarCamp absolutely pwns most conferences hard. Conferences are broken in many ways that BarCamps are not. They are frequently too commercial. Everyone has a real kind of business head firmly attached, with all the serious-sounding self-importance that brings with it. Limitations at BarCamp are there by necessity rather than by design. But there is plenty that’s been going wrong. BarCamp has scaled to the point where it’s become like a professional conference - we’ve chosen waterfall over the wiki. This has it’s benefits: sponsorship is easier to get, the whole thing tends to be more of a conference-like experience for attendees. You can turn up and know you’ll get good food, working wifi, drinks, snacks, goodie bags and so on. Weeks of organisation go into that: hundreds of mailing list posts, hundreds of hours of hard work, organisation, answering e-mails, dealing with tweets and so on.
There is a downside to this: if we could figure out how to organise a BarCamp without all this planning, we might be able to have them more often.
I think we need to have a significant rethink about the purpose of BarCamp. In the early days it was pretty easy: BarCamps were about technology. Not exclusively. Not to the point where if you talk about anything non-technical, you get thrown out of the building. But they were pretty technical. That’s ebbed away quite a bit. The technical talks barely seem particularly challenging. At BarCampBrighton4, two talks stick out for me - Gareth Rushgrove’s talk about using automatic deployment scripts (he demoed Fabric, but the talk kicked me up the arse enough to start using Capistrano) and Reinier Zwitserloot’s talk about Project Lombok (a very sneaky Java annotations hack library).
But for every great talk, there’s an unsatisfying talk sitting right next-door - something that’s a barely upgraded bit of pub chatter, something with way too many incompatible religious/cultural assumptions (“Top Ten ASP.NET Hacks!” is fine, but I’m not an ASP.NET programmer or a Microsoft user in general - the opposite may obviously be true), self-promotional social media claptrap, Yet Another Obvious Twitter Session or whatever. There are perfectly good talks but they are often at far too low a level. That’s not a fault of the speaker, but it’s not satisfying for anyone other than the absolute beginner. Here’s an example: at BarCamp Brighton 4, there was a really good session about regular expressions. It taught newbies to download RegExhibit on the Mac (or an equivalent tool on Windows) and to start writing regular expressions. But when you’ve only got half an hour, you only get a tiny way down the path. I didn’t learn anything new - I do think I may have helped share some knowledge, and that’s good. And it’s fun to see other people learn and to maybe encourage people by being present.
It feels like we could do so much more, and it feels like we might be slightly stifled by tradition.
Here’s an alternative vision of BarCamp: no session grid, few big corporate sponsors, instead truly wiki style organisation where people put up a list of what is needed, and various people just list what they can provide. Instead of sessions, we’d do it this way: on the website, people would put down their objectives - what they want to learn from BarCamp, who they want to hang out with in terms of shared interests. Someone would then try and cluster those people together into some kind of sane hierarchy - maybe software could do it. Instead of 20-45 minute presentations, you’d just have attendees, and you’d aggregate their intentions. You’d then try and find people who could run a session that can be as long as it needs to be and which would focus on practical, hands-on application of ideas if that is relevant. Instead of having a half hour talk about, say, using Rails, with someone standing up and giving slides, you’d have as long as you need for people to actually work together and hack on something. It’s lots of people sharing their skills in a workshop environment rather than lots of people giving presentations. I’m interested in learning new things that can increase my overall happiness and contentedness, I’m not interested in seeing goofy LOLCATs and Flickr pics you’ve downloaded to stretch five minutes of content into half an hour of talk.
BarCamp is currently about enabling space, but really it needs to be about cultivating richer connections between people so they can share their skills and expertise. To get to the sweet spot, we need to dial the professionalism, corporate sponsorship and the waterfall model back down, rather than trying to ramp it up. (Hint: it’s a recession.)
And, yes, I know people will disagree with me. That’s fine. We’re human beings. Disagreement is allowed. I put up my opinions about BarCamp a while back with the title Cut the bullshit: BarCamps are about technology, and that’s why they are awesome.
Margate, Kent, England
