Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

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!

Global Voices is having their annual summit in Delhi this December. Having been curious about GV for a while, I’m attending.

If I am, say, based in Bangalore and tasked with blogging to bridge my neighbourhood with the rest of the world, then I would find it far easier to comment on the world in a manner accessible to folks around me, than to comment on my immediate surroundings in a manner accessible to the world. The first reflects my curiosity. It comes naturally. The second, however, requires some engagement with the perceived audience. It requires me to imagine who the reader is and what level of explanation is needed to convey the message.

That GV not only manages this, but does it with such gusto, suggests then that GV isn’t merely an index of conversations, but also the perceived audience for everyone who contributes to GV. The folks on GV talk to each other, and the world benefits in the process. It is a machine that generates the energy to keep itself going.

I expect the annual summit will have the atmosphere of an old friends gathering. If some of that energy rubs off on me, that alone will make it worthwhile. I’m taking my camera along.

Blogcamp is tomorrow. I’ve been on the planning list the last few weeks (mostly lurking) and now have a better sense of what’s going on.

As noted before, the core planning team has been far more concerned with staging a grand event than with figuring out what is going to make it so grand. To this end, they’ve done a remarkable job. They’ve also turned out to take criticism very well — Kiruba Shankar in particular deserves mention — and have graciously allowed “outsiders” to take over content planning, which Dina Mehta, Neha Viswanathan and Peter Griffin have done.

The event still lacks focus. It’s not clear exactly what aspect of blogging is to be discussed, as “all of it” is too generic to mean much. I’m going to speak about the public nature of conversation on the web, but in the absence of anyone else covering a related topic, I’ll have to cover a large breadth and sacrifice depth, as will several others. Thankfully, it appears that sufficiently large numbers of thoughtful and articulate people are planning to attend, so that alone should make up for it.

If you are attending, see you in Chennai tomorrow.