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.)

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.

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.