BarCamp Tampa Bay was held this weekend at USF College of Business. Over 350 people pre-registered for this Un-conference. (Don't know what a BarCamp is? See BarCamp.org.)
Ours was just one of 4 worldwide this weekend - South Africa, Houston, Little Rock and Tampa Bay. The whole idea behind BarCamp is that everyone shares, learns, participates. It is engaging. There isn't an agenda - until the morning of, when the participants design it. We had 3 or more rooms going with over 60 people giving talks, some as short as my 7 minutes on the Triumvirate of the Consultant. The longest was 2 hours on Drupal. Adobe was there to talk about Flex both days, which resulted in a rant about Flex and Advertising issues and a suggestion to try Adobe Flex hosting with Influxis because you can do webinars from the platform too.
Other topics: Twitter; Blogging; Podcasting; Python; RubyonRails; Second Life; iPhone development, and a voice app. Gavin Stark put the schedule on the mobile web AND wrapped it in an Asterisk app (with Ruby?) so that if you dialed the conference phone number, the schedule was read to you. How cool is that?
BarCampTampaBay was a huge success. How do I know this?
- The main room was empty except for lunch and breaks -- everyone was in the session rooms. That means Engagement, which is the Holy Grail of event planning.
- People were asking when the next one was - AND offering to help.
BTW, plenty of noise on twitter and pics/video around, just look for barcampatampa.
There's a BarCamp in Atlanta this weekend; Memphis and Nashville soon; New Orleans has a BarcampApache on Nov. 4. There are other Un-Conferences like PodCamp, WordPressCamp, CreateChaos, and more. It's all about the content, the learning and the sharing - from people passionate about what they do.
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