Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Rajiv Poddar thinks so. I’m not quite convinced that is the case. Consider this:

To my mind, BCB3 was the peak and the decline has started. One of the most attractive aspects of Barcamp was its simplicity. It was easy to find who was attending and who was talking about what. With each Barcamp it got progressively difficult to do so. With BCB4 it was impossible to get a quick snapshot and I dont expect BCB5 to be any different.

To think of it, the significance of Barcamp has also diminished over the past year with more events and unconferences cropping up. Barcamp itself has played an important role in germinating these events. These spinoffs have taken over the role of bringing together people around a narrower common interest.

That focused events are reducing Barcamp’s significance is indeed true. What Rajiv appears to have missed, though, is that as these communities gain traction and find their focus, they will want to move on and manage themselves, leaving Barcamp to newer communities seeking similar exposure. The collective format is designed around encouraging this.

This will mean each Barcamp has its own flavour in terms of what sort of participant it attracts, and this may not appeal to everyone, but Barcamp was never about dictating who’s allowed in and who’s not — or what they’re allowed to discuss.

The compliant about it becoming harder to understand what’s happening in the event, however, has merit and deserves consideration.

Registration of collectives for BCB5 is now open. Here’s the explanation on what’s new.

Based on discussions over the last few weeks, we're now using web forums instead of the wiki for collective registration. This means you’ll need an account at the forum in addition to your existing wiki account. This is inconvenient, but the forum hopefully provides a better interface than the mailing list and its online archives.

I’ve posted to the forum explaining how collectives may register.

(I’m on vacation through next week. Will be missing out on much of the action, but the break’s badly needed.)

Shourya Sarcar interprets Gandhian thought for folks interested in BCB5:

But, lately, one of Gandhi’s quotes have been striking me hard inside. It’s forcing me to get out of my comfort zones, realign my biases and admonish myself more effectively.

Be the change that you want to see in the world

And that’s my only request to people who want to see changes happening in Barcamp Bangalore 5, coming up somewhere around November this year.

Let’s not just say, “This did not work”, “The auditorium was not effective”, “The sessions were boring”. My challenge to you (and myself) is “What are you going to do to effect a change ?”

Positive emails are one way to make a great start. I have observed that there are two primary types of emails that come in

1. This went wrong
2. This went wrong and I wish this would be the way it was

We need to create the third category: This went wrong and I wish it was this way and THIS IS WHAT I AM GOING TO DO ABOUT IT.

The rest of the post deals with common gripes and possible constructive responses. Link.

(Originally posted to the Barcamp Bangalore mailing list.)

We’re now two months from the next Barcamp. This is the time to start plotting: what do you want to see in BCB5? What did you not like about BCB4 that you want to see fixed? What do you think will help improve the event?

Here are my ideas:

Given that most people seem to agree the collectives format worked fairly well, we should do it again for BCB5, but with some changes.

1. Get collectives more focused, by defining them around shared purpose rather than topic. This works at two levels: the long term purpose for a group that exists outside Barcamp (like BangPyers, BOJUG, et al), and the specific purpose within Barcamp. We’re more interested in the latter.
2. Give collectives more autonomy over how they organise their resources. It’s really their event anyway. “Resources” includes the collective’s identity: how they exist as an entity independent of Barcamp, how they advertise themselves, how they tie in their other activities with what they’re doing at Barcamp.
3. Since the participation just keeps going up and we have no interest in turning away people, we’ve got to scale the event such that it retains its small group atmosphere while accommodating everyone. I can’t imagine how we’d do this other than by treating Barcamp no longer as a single event, but as an event of events. Kind of like a carnival, with something different going on in each room and corridor. If you stay with the same collective or three, it’ll be exactly like the smaller Barcamps we had previously. If you want to explore and learn something new, just wander around.
4. Better scheduling. Spontaneity is great and all, but it really would help to know what’s going on where. In the last three Barcamps, we tried IRC and found few takers; we tried live wiki updates and found it worked great, except for the folks not toting laptops; we tried SMS and found it brilliant, except for those who mysteriously couldn’t get updates, or got too many. There’s no apparent correct solution to this, but we ought to try anyway. Two things: refine these communication channels and ensure somebody is in charge of keeping them going, and make an advance outline schedule — not enforce particular timings on anyone, but make a schedule — and then push for compliance with that schedule. A schedule could be something like a particular room being available for half an hour max, without exception, or a collective meeting for a particular time period without any specific schedule within that period.
5. As a corollary to the previous, it’s becoming clear that the best Barcamp experience is when you don’t try to attend everything that’s interesting. We’ve got to tweak the atmosphere so that the value of going narrower but deeper advertises itself.

We’re seeing two clear trends in Barcamp: entrepreneurship and inter-disciplinary interaction. The latter is a fancy way of saying that this a place for people who do completely different things to meet and discover shared interests. I see the second as fundamental to the first — to be an entrepreneur, you need to know what people who are wholly unlike you see of your target market — so perhaps it’s not two trends as much as two focus areas from a wider spectrum. The question for us, then, is whether Barcamp should move towards encouraging these further, remain neutral, or push them out into their own events.

We’re approached by startups during each Barcamp that hope to partner with the event. This is great, we’re happy to see anyone consider Barcamp a valuable forum, but having that discussion during the event is a bit too late. The correct time to do it is now, when we’re sufficiently in advance to make a plan that works for all without going nuts managing the logistics. (Like I’ve mentioned elsewhere, some parts of running an event this size are so dreary, they make us want to stop bothering, or to do it as a career plan, out of a company put together to manage such events.)

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.

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.

Only three days to go for Barcamp Bangalore 4. Regular programming should resume soon.

In which, we interrupt our unplanned hiatus to announce that Barcamp Bangalore 4 will be on July 28 and 29, 2007 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. The same venue as last time. Mark your calendars.

Planning for Barcamp Bangalore 4 has been slow, but may have gotten into gear over the weekend. I have previously reflected on BCB3. This time we discussed how we could tweak the format to make it better.

BCB3 was an event of individuals organised into spaces. One registered as an individual, listed a session individually, and decided for oneself where one wanted to spend their time. We had four rooms available, designated Internet, Mobile, Society and Demo, for the broad categories of sessions held within. The designation of these rooms was admittedly not the emergent community definition we’d have liked it to have been, but on that we’ll excuse ourselves for a mix of excitement, impatience, and nervousness at whether the concept would work.

Of the four, I think it was pretty clear the Mobile crowd was the most cohesive. They had a full house both days and the same people sat through most sessions. Rajan observed that several were regulars from Mobile Monday. Their presence at Barcamp effectively turned that room into an extended MoMo meet.

There’s something to be noted here. Barcamp’s participant base has been growing with each event. We’re getting to a stage where it is no longer possible to have an intimate space like we did for BCB1 and BCB2, and yet, each event brings back familiar faces, people who’ve met each other at previous events and have conversed since. Coming to Barcamp, then, is not an isolated event, but just another milestone in an ongoing conversation, a regular interval at which to gather and share what’s new. We’re proposing tweaking the format to encourage this. You no longer register to participate in Barcamp; you instead register to participate in a collective that decides on its agenda before coming to the event.

If you’re not satisfied with the existing collectives, you propose a new one and gather the interested. We’ll assign the available spaces based on their relative strengths.

With this move, we recognise that we’re no longer following a format that encourages participants to move from session to session depending on what interests them. We’re instead asking that participants collaborate in advance with fellow participants, decide in advance what they’d like to achieve at Barcamp, and focus on it when at the event. The initial investment is higher, but so is the return. Activities like CodeJam and hands-on workshops were discouraged by the earlier format. The new one makes them possible.

But what of the serendipitous experience of encountering something pleasant and unexpected? What’s the point of coming to Barcamp at all if you’re only going to associate with your group, apart from having someone else taking care of your logistics? What of inter-group mixing?

That deserves attention. I propose we request (but not require) collectives to make exclusive use of their spaces only within limited hours, say 10 AM to 1 PM and 3 to 6 PM. The remaining time should be undefined, allowing individual participants to associate as they see fit.

At BCB3, Kiruba and Amogh expressed interest in a photography workshop. This could be one our collectives. It could propose to conduct a three hour workshop the first morning, disperse for the rest of the event, and reassemble for an hour before closing to discuss outcomes. It’ll no longer be bound by the tyranny of limited time slots. Its participants will know in advance what outcomes to expect and what they’re skipping to be a part of this.

And it’ll still be nothing like getting lectured by a fellow on a podium who may turn up an hour late or not at all.

The Barcamp Bangalore 3 planners had a five hour meeting last evening to discuss the outcomes of the last event and plan for the next. We have decided we’re going to aim for three events a year instead of the previously discussed four. The main concern is with logistics: it takes up to a month after the event to settle with sponsors (BCB2 took three), and organising the next needs a month and a half to prepare for venue, suppliers, theme, publicity, and again, sponsors. Our five hour meet yesterday is typical: each meeting runs five to six hours and we need one at least once a week to stay on track.

That leaves us with practically no time to focus on the actual content of the event. Going from four to three events a year gives us that breather, reduces our financial load while buffering for sponsors (lest it was not emphasised enough, the hardest part of organising the event), and most important, from the participants’ perspective, allows us to publish a calendar in advance so everyone can plan their schedules.

BCB4 and BCB5 will be in July and November 2007. The exact dates are subject to venue availability, to be settled soon.

But what about the content? How can organisers be worried about the content when it’s a Barcamp, a supposedly open event where participants decide what the content is?

Reality is somewhat more subtle.

First, as organisers, we have to justify to ourselves why we put in the effort. All of us agree we’re doing this because there is a certain type of outcome we’d like to achieve, the specifics varying from person to person. We’re clear we want to keep the space egalitarian, fair to all participants, with no organiser raising their agenda above the collective’s. And yet, to deny any individual’s motives for facilitating is to remove meaning from the event.

Second, while actual content is defined by participants, there is the greater question of how one decides to become a participant. We recognise that rank strangers will find it difficult to step into a strange new community, so we take the effort to invite them in. Our goal with this is to encourage people from different domains — the kind of people unlikely to visit a Barcamp by themselves — to come in and engage in the discussions. We trust most will appreciate the results.

Third, there is much about the venue that shapes the content. Our venue at IIMB was four classrooms across two floors, with a canteen some distance away. Despite the great ambience and facilities, we had recurring complaints. The classroom environment focused too much attention on the speaker, making it difficult to have interactive discussions. It only worked for presentations. The canteen was a rather drab place; nobody wanted to hang out there. The four rooms had no common meeting point for everyone to mix. We made the rooms available in half hour slots with fifteen minute margins, but several sessions ran over time and then couldn’t continue because someone else had already taken the room for the next slot. We had complaints about no slots being available. It didn’t occur to anyone to take their audience out into the hallway, or to propose a session there.

Somehow the classrooms became the only acceptable place to hold a session. Lawrence’s session was interrupted when the slot time ran out. We announced it would continue over lunch. Some of us pulled two tables together and had a great discussion on intellectual property and piracy. Others milled around wondering when the session was going to happen.

This is a state of expectations we’d rather not have next time. The classrooms were clearly a bad influence. We’ll no doubt have endless debates about how to tweak the environment, but this is what I like most about the current organising team: we’ve learnt to be outspoken for our beliefs and yet arrive at a consensus with everyone agreeing it was best.

I’ll throw in my two paisa here on this blog: I’m unhappy with the slot system. While it’s great for short presentations, it breaks down for longer, focused sessions that run into several hours.

Take Lawrence Liang again. He could have easily presented for three hours, reinforced the point he was making, and then put another two hours into a group discussion so everyone else could clarify their thoughts. Such a session was not possible in BCB3 — despite clear participant interest — because it would run afoul of the organiser’s ethic of not favouring any one participant.

One of my other interest areas is open locative technologies. I’d really like to see a repeat of January’s Freemap Workshop, where Schuyler Erle and Shekhar Krishnan presented for half an hour on what the workshop was about, divided participants into teams, and assigned each team an aspect of the mapping process. The teams then operated independently until the next evening, when they put their efforts together.

I’d like to see a Freemap workshop within Barcamp. It’ll help them get their minds off the logistics and to focus on the content. Having parallel sessions will convince the fence-sitters to dive in on either side. And it’ll help Barcamp improve its overall level of participation and establish it as an event to plan calendars around.

But it does introduce a fundamental question: as organisers with limited venue resources, how do we dedicate a part for the entire period to one group while parcelling out half hour slots to others? If we judge that said group is deserving, does it not violate the sacred line separating organising from content?

Here’s a idea: let groups that want such long term resources propose in advance, on the wiki. Participants vote for the sessions they want to be part of. Based on how many such proposals we get and what is available at the venue, we accommodate as many as possible. We’ll continue to have some rooms dedicated to ad hoc sessions were the schedules are drawn up only each morning.

Makes sense?

Where technology meets society at large.

At this event, we intend to share stories of technology implementations that affected society around us, and social norms that affected the course of technology.

We have stories of e-governance, electronic record keeping, and what it means for those without access; Indian copyright law and innovation in music; and celluloid, movies and the resultant shaping of society and culture. We’d love to hear more, perhaps on the application of technology to understand the human condition, or perhaps on the growing spread of personal communication technologies and the unexpected but undeniable shift in the landscape of mass media and governance.

Surely you’ve got a tale to narrate? A tale that escaped popular attention and deserves to be brought out and shared? A cautionary tale of how things may not always get better? Bring it to Barcamp. Help your fellow campers understand what it really means, beneath the surface of the narrative, and of how it affects our lives and what we should be prepared for.

For the regular Barcampers: this event may be somewhat different from what you may have come to expect. This time we’re not as interested in the tech itself as in what it means to the society that receives it. You’re welcome to continue to use the space for what you’re comfortable with, but requested to participate in expanding the presence and social impact of Barcamp, while retaining its technology flavour.

March 31st and April 1st, at the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Please tag your posts with “barcampbangalore3”.

At Barcamp Bangalore yesterday, Siva Prasad presented on applying the Web 2.0 model to microfinance. The discussion rambled a fair bit as everyone who knew anything about microfinance tried to get their voice heard, with topics ranging from how microfinance is overrun by scam funds to how mainstream finance institutions are elbowing their way into the scene (I did my bit of hollering too).

To Siva’s credit, he managed to stay on track, describing the parallels in social structures in microfinance and Web 2.0 and how they may be potentially merged. This didn’t go down well with the crowd, who couldn’t accept that a borrower so poor as to be satiated with a Rs 3000 loan would get onto a website and “network” with potential lenders. Siva presented examples, but I came away feeling this was yet another frothy idea that wouldn’t survive reality.

So much for dismissal.

This morning my randomised podcast queue turned up an interview with Kiva cofounder Premal Shah on Venture Voice. Kiva was one of Siva’s examples.

Turns out Kiva is a front-end to several microfinance intiatives (MFIs) around the world. You can go to the site, look up profiles of borrowers along with the MFI representing them, and loan money. Lenders do not earn interest and return of the loaned money is not guaranteed, though Kiva has had 100% returns so far. There are no transaction charges. Kiva has a special deal with PayPal to this effect, and itself takes no cut, instead surviving on the interest earned and on explicit donations by lenders. (US taxpaying donors get a deduction as Kiva is a 501(c)(3) status charity.)

Does this work? Kiva keeps lenders updated on progress made by borrowers, but is this a sufficiently strong incentive to bring lenders to the site, given they earn no interest? I’m curious. I registered on the site and loaned $25 to a farmer in Uganda, thereby upping his request fulfillment to 90%. I’m going to follow up with a similar amount for the next few months and see how it works out.

In the interview, Premal Shah says that they’d like to offer a floating interest rate in future. If this happens, it’ll be very cool.

FoU Camp, Foss.in and Barcamp Bangalore in a row.

Tomorrow is FoU Camp, the sorta-annual gathering of members of Silk-list. Silk is now nine years old and easily among the more interesting lists I’m on. With attendees coming in from across the country, and some from around the world, this will be one event well worth attending.

Last year, six of us went to Coonoor for an extended weekend, discussed topics ranging from burnout to what it means to be a hacker, and took lots of pictures of the camp, and tea estates. This time the location is Bangalore, and a lot more people are attending. If you’re interested, join the list.

Barcamp Bangalore 2 is next weekend. You may recall the previous iteration in April, when we gathered 150 people into Yahoo!’s reception area for a day of unstructured discussions. Jess and I made plans then for what the next iteration would be like, partly resulting in FoU. Having not the bandwidth to organise another Barcamp however, we announced the list’s closing, when a new team sprang into action. They’ve done a great job putting it together.

The focus this time is on startups. Over 90 have been invited to participate. The list of registered attendees is already longer than April’s. This Barcamp will be on Dec 2 & 3 in the conference rooms of Thoughtworks, on Airport road. Register if you haven’t already.

The unacknowledged elephant in the room is, of course, Foss.in (I wish they had an appropriately sized image that I could use here). Now in its sixth year, this event has grown to be a significant gravity centre. It’s largely responsible for the date and attendee list of FoU Camp. I’ve been off the FOSS circuit lately, having wandered into open standards and other realms of intellectual property, but it’s hard to miss this event given its far-reaching impact.

FoU Camp has no event charges. Everyone covers their own. Barcamp is free thanks to sponsor support. Foss.in has a minimal cover charge, intended to ensure entry is limited to those who really want to be there. Pre-registrations close today. Hurry up!