Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Wherein, you show us your best photos and we tell you why they’re crap. It’s like Reality TV minus the video cameras. The intent, of course, is to get beyond the usual cheerleading that follows some of the better amateur photographers, to a serious no-holds-barred critique of technique.

Takers?

We’re experimenting with the format each event and taking in feedback intuitively. We could do with being more thorough in examining what works and what doesn’t. We need help.

There are questions raised each event that tend to not be answered satisfactorily. Consider the significant changes Barcamp Bangalore has gone through with each iteration:

BCB1: (from existing conferences) No projectors for the most part, no pre-defined agenda, no introduction or conclusion, small rooms suited for 5-10 people at a time.

BCB2: Change of management, upholding the principle that anyone can put together a Barcamp.

BCB3: Rooms with well-defined themes; drive to induct non-techies and turn Barcamp into a space for cross-disciplinary interaction.

BCB4: Collectives, whereby people hooked up with each other pre-event; groups oriented around people rather than topics.

BCB5: Voting for some sessions? (Where the voting format is intended to encourage pre-event discussions.)

The questions following each event:

1. What works?
2. What doesn’t?
3. What is “worked”?
4. What was intended and achieved?
5. What was unintended but desirable and observed occurring? What caused it?
6. What was unintended and undesirable and also observed occurring? What caused it?
7. Some participants don’t speak where someone in a position to effect change will hear them. How do we hear what they’re saying?
8. Some participants don’t come back. Why not?
9. New participants come in each time. How did they hear of the event? What did they expect it to be?
10. What would participants like to achieve at Barcamp? What constitutes a suitable return on energy invested?

Some of these questions can be answered by selecting items on a check list. Others cannot. We need help with (a) reframing these questions suitably, (b) conducting the survey, and (c) making meaning from the results.

We need a statistician for Barcamp.

Siddharta Govindaraj has an excellent take on why voting in sessions may be a bad idea: it encourages homogenisation of the audience, thereby undermining our efforts at promoting diversity. Siddhi says:

Lets take a simple example to see how this works. Say we have an event and 100 people turn up. 60 of them want to attend startup sessions. 40 want to attend photography sessions. There are ten speaking slots. Common sense dictates that having 6 startup sessions and 4 photography sessions is a “fair” distribution for the given audience.

But what happens when topics are put to vote? In every slot, the startup crowd can out-vote the photography crowd. Therefore when put to vote, the most likely outcome will be 10 startup sessions and no photography sessions.

Point taken. I think the voted sessions proposal can be safely put to rest now. (Update: Or maybe not. See comments below.)

Barcamp Bangalore 4 concluded last week. It was easily my best event yet, and appears to have gone down well with the crowd too, given the level of engagement we’re seeing both before and after.

Scheduling is top priority on the agenda for improvements for BCB5. Several participants came to BCB4 with high expectations for the sessions they’d be partaking in, fueled no doubt by pre-event online discussions. At the event however, it turned out a lot of it was running in parallel, or worse, was off the charts because there was no clear place to list it.

There are several ways in which scheduling could be improved. Here is one such proposal. Because this proposal runs counter to the spontaneous order of a Barcamp, I will not call this a proposal for scheduling in Barcamp. Consider this a proposal for an entirely different event.

The proposed event will be more like a conference than an unconference, but with a significant community element. There will be a single track at this event, with all schedules pre-defined. The event will run over a regular two day weekend. If you want to speak, the audience must vote for you. Voting is done in the months/weeks preceding the event. Speakers may campaign for votes, but campaigning may only be in the form of explaining their presentation. Merchandising (giveaways, etc) will not be allowed.

In effect, to get to speak, you must first deliver the pitch online with sufficient effectiveness so as to outshine the contenders. It is expected that this process of honing the pitch will ensure high quality during the actual event, and further, because many in the audience will already be familiar with the material, will lead to the session being more discussion of material-oriented than presentation-oriented.

Why have an offline event at all then, if the important bits are online? Because the offline audience will likely be significantly different from the online audience (and also likely not having the bandwidth to engage and vote online), and because the event in real life will form an anchor around which to organise things.

An earlier draft of this idea was sent to the Barcamp community mailing list. You may want to follow up there.