Nick's thoughts 

Amit's How to Start Throw Your Own BarCamp

_

David Czarnecki BarCamp NYC impressions

Pete's thoughts

I feel barcamp was a success. I only have a few suggestions for the next time around (some of these have been said, so the below is more of verbal vote):

1. Shorten the presentation blocks to 25-30 minutes by default. If someone feels their presentation is worth an hour of time, let them take up two sequential time blocks. At times I felt people felt obligated to make their presentations an hour long event. I would say DON'T segment rooms by topic, results in too rigid of a structure.

4. A couple time blocks should be allocated for discussion forums. The topic could be voted on during the start of every barcamp day.

2. Keep lunch lunch. Don't allow for any presentations. Just for announcements, updates, eating and socializing. Presentations can run during this time, but not in the main eating area. Pizza on saturday seemed more manageable than the buffet on sunday.

3. Much like the five words on Sunday, have some sort of introduction game on day 1 of barcamp. I felt it really loosens everyone up.

Of course, part of barcamp’s strengths is its lack of structure…

Byron's Thoughts

my 2 cents.

Likes:

Food - excellent Food. Sunday's was a bit different but still enjoyable. SuShi is always a hit.. should have had a bit more for those of us still finishing our bar tab :)

Location - easy in/out. Wasn't hard to find for someone coming from PA and not knowing terribly much about the city.

Facilities - I appreciated the shower and multiple restrooms - kudos for finding that. Didn't have to wait to pee and lord knows with all that coffee i was frequenting the restroom.

"Eh's:"

Lunch - shouldn't have had speakers through lunch on sunday. I needed to rest my brain, enjoy my food and mingle with the people there. Networking is as much important as listening to presentations and lunch's should be left for such.

I agree that there should have been some room for distractions and smaller demos. I didn't have 30 mins yet 1 hr of stuff i would talk about without loosing track of my focus. Perhaps 2 main tracts and then a sessions room. Some of what i sat through for an hour could have been a quick run through session and still given me what i wanted to hear.

Perhaps divide rooms into common purpose - /dev focused on dev /market focused on web marketing/vision/web 2.0 and /

Saska seo buy viagra root for business/infrastructure and related tracts.

• Invest in Mimo Router
• Support a charity. Free was great and my wife was impressed i went to NYC on less than 100 bucks but i think contributing 10 bucks at the door for a charity would be a good way to build reputation for the BarCamp idea as an exchange of information but solidarity for the problems we can afford to try and solve as well :)

thats my well... 38 cents i guess.

Neil Squillante's 38 Cents

A round of applause for the organizers and hosts! For an unconference, I found it surprisingly organized. Also, the attendees were far more polite and interested in the presentations than attendees I've encountered at conferences costing thousands of dollars. Smarter too.

I have just one suggestion for the future -- provide more of a framework for presentations. For example, I'm a big fan of 5-10 minute presentations, but I'm sure others prefer longer presentations. Most of the presentations I saw (I could attend only on Saturday) were of the longer variety. How about creating tracks based on length rather than subject matter? I think it would be fun to sit through an eclectic mix of 10 minute presentations.

One last thought -- I agree with Byron about the need to have breaks -- not just to rest our brains, but to meet people and network. You can't really chat during the presentations.

Same time next year?

Arthur's 17 cents plus subway fare

I have to say that over all, despite not being able to be there for both days (only saturday), I really appreciated the effort that the organizers and attendees put into the the project. I found the day well balanced between shorter and longer discussions in and out of the "official" presentations.

I had the most productive conversations that I've had in a long time in terms of finding people who were interested in similar things and are working on complementary projects. I found myself excited and grateful to get a chance to "talk shop" with people who talk the same kinds of shop. I was really impressed by the kind of people who were there, the kinds of projects people are working on, and the quality of conversation. It was actually the best chance to network and scheme with people who are working on similar things that I've had in a long time.

For me, if there was an "improvement", I would have liked to see a bit more "threading" between similar topics- I think this is just the kind of person I am, but I like having one longer conversation rather than a zillion shorter conversations, but I very much appreciate the diversity of topics (I liked jumping from taking about the organizational models of web shops to getting into the nitty gritty on server virtualization).

Much applause to the organizers and attendees. I wish I could have been there for both days. Bravo.

Jordan Sissel's afterthoughts

Huge thanks to the organizers and sponsors, nothing would've been possible without them.

Presentations are always easier if you have a whiteboard to scribble on. So for future BarCamp events, you might consider trying to find a few whiteboards for the presentation rooms aswell as to float around for geeks to hash on ideas. It was somewhat painful to watch people failing to explain ideas through words and body movements when a simple doodle on a whiteboard would have sufficed.

Especially with all of the food and elevator shenanigans, I think the event was handled brilliantly.

A track for short (5-10 minute) sessions would be great aswell. Perl conferences often have Lightning Talks which last about 5 minutes per talk and always seem to go over extremely well.

Geoff's thoughts:

1) Do the 5 words introductions each morning - some people were there at day 2 that weren't at day 1

2) have an 'editor' that moves presentations around and keeps an eye out for who is presenting where - there were a few times when a lesser popular topic ended up in a big room and the small rooms were too crowded. it would have been easy to look at the board and say 'that's gonna be a big session, lets swap it into this room'. this could also be accomplished by having someone you submit your presentation idea to, and they fill up the time slots. this way you can establish 'tracks' better and not have so many empty big rooms.

3) set a timer and make people stick to their presentation times - a few times the presentations ran over their allotted times, and this made people late to get out, which means they disrupt the other sessions. have someone track the time and kick people out. there should also be some time added between each session to give people a chance to figure out where to go next and also for the next presenter to set up (5-10 minutes would be fine i think)

Chris Paulse's reaction:

It was remarkably well organized and even more remarkably unpretentious.

I like Geoff's idea of doing something to make sure that there is some load balancing of attendee interest for talks. Why doesn't someone write a rails app that gathers data about interest in talks prior to drafting the final schedule? Since there were so many laptops floating around, data acquisition could continue until right before the talk. Other on-line/off-line combinations of ideas for presentation and discussion might be worth thinking about. Having paid scribes for post presentation discussion might be helpful.