If you attended BarCamp Cork and thought you’d like to run an unconference yourself, below is just a quick idea of what is involved.
- Try to have 2 and preferably 3 organisers. It’s possible as a solo run but can add to your stress level.
- The venue is the number 1 priority. If you can get it for free then you’ve done 75% of the work already. EI, Howard Holdings, Integris and Damien came up trumps with Webworks for BarCamp Cork.
- A blog. Get it up there day 1 and start telling people what you are doing.
- Sponsors. You only need a small few to cover the basics. How much do you think BarCamp cost to arrange? What would you say if I told you that BarCamp Cork 2 with 110+ plus people at a day long free conference cost less than €800 in total?
- Why so little?
- You don’t need t-shirts
- You don’t need banners
- You don’t need printed badges
- All poster printing should be done on your 8 year old inkjet at home
- Beg, borrow or steal a Musgraves card and pay pennies for
-
- plates
- cups
- plastic cutlery
- fizzy/flat water
- markers/whitetack/name-stickers/post-its
- etc
- Pizza and donuts will feed most people (unless it’s a FoodCamp
). Bulk ordering from a local place should get you up to 20% discount
- Mics are expensive but often necessary (€120 per setup)
- Borrow projectors. We had offers of 5 but you may have to order screens for them.
- Most venues won’t have enough chairs (Webworks did luckily). They cost approx €1.80 each
- If the event is even remotely geeky, you will need wifi.
That’s it. Just make sure as many people as possible know about your event and are motivated to talk at it and turn up. Get that buzz going by whatever means you can. We’re lucky with BarCamps in general here that so many people are into them and like to blog about them.
The no-show rate at BarCamp Cork 1 was over 20%. It was closer to 5% at last weekend’s event. No-shows are a pain in the arse but a fact of life and you can never accurately predict how much stuff to order.
As far as venues are concerned, we were discusing it last Saturday at post-BarCamp dinner. Some ideas that came up include racetracks, dogtracks, GAA clubs. Any other ones that might work?
After Julian’s wine-tasting session, I have to think that a WineCamp/BeerCamp or FoodCamp would be a roaring success (particularly in West Cork).
What *Camps would you like to see next?
Every BarCamp is different and I hope we can learn each time from what went well and what didn’t. I’m going to kick off with a few of my thoughts about last weekend but I’m much more interested in hearing all of your thoughts.
So in no particular order:
- The venue - still amazing and just ideal for an event like this
- Rooms - two is not enough. Even the addition of the small third room was insufficient. Three decent sized spaces with a few break-out areas appears to be ideal
- The 20 minute experiment was interesting. It was perfect in some cases but it looks like 30 minutes is the sweet spot for most talks.
- I have no opinion on the 40 minutes for tutorials as I missed them all. Thoughts?
- BarCamps need self-appointed timekeepers. The overruns were not disasterous but still annoying for some. People were far too polite about stopping the overruns.
- The no-schedule approach of BarCamp worked well. It’s something that seems to scare a lot of people but I’m 100% in favour of it. An empty grid where anyone could grab any slot. We just needed to make the system more clear in advance. I still had people asking if there “was a slot available” right up to the morning of the event. Earlybirds always do well at BarCamp!
- The session streams were setup badly (by me). Instead of long talks outside and short talks inside, it should have been non-tech talks outside and tech talks inside. We had several instances where both rooms had tech talks on at the same time which was less than ideal for many attendees
- The mix of talks was fantastic. Still quite tech-heavy but lots of other too. The biz ones seemed to be particularly popular. Time for a BizCamp?
- The mix of people was a real pleasure to see. From secondary school students to grandparents, I think we had it all.
- A constant supply of tea/coffee/water is necessary. Why can’t pay-for conferences get this right? We were very lucky that Webworks could facilitate this. Thanks again to Kay.
- How did people feel about the mics? The reason we got them was that at BarCamp Cork 1, we couldn’t hear speakers in the open area properly due to the amount of chatter. Were all the sessions ok from an audio perspective?
- To make BarCamp more accessible for more people, a talk like Emma Persky’s “A Geek’s Guide to BarCamping” should be the opening one at every BarCamp. It just tells newbies what it is all about and sets the tone for the day.
- Pre and Post events make it an even more social occasion
- The webapp was a very worthwhile experiment and there’ll be a separate follow-up post about how that went
- There were no complaints about wifi. A conference first?
- The lack of a large amount of video and pics from the day is a reflection of how busy everyone was doing face2face social networking.
But more importantly, what did YOU think?
This post should have been written last weekend so apologies for the slowness.
There are a bunch of people to thank for the success of BarCamp. It genuinely couldn’t have happened without them.
- YOU! BarCamp is about everyone contributing in some way. The speakers did an awesome job and everyone else asked, discussed, argued and queried brilliantly. Thank you all (110+ of you) for coming and making it the best BarCamp yet.
- Damien Mulley, Dan Barry, Kay Wright. This trio made the venue and much more happen. Kay went far far beyond the call of duty all day. Every BarCamp needs a Kay.
- Damien. Again. He makes things happen. Nuff said.
- All of the sponsors. In these tough times, it is impressive to see local companies supporting events like BarCamp. Behind companies/organisations are people. Those people include Pat Phelan, Michele Neylon, Donncha O’Caoimh, Matt Mullenweg, Dan Barry, Kay Wright, John Henry Donovan and Jack Donaghy
- Pat Phelan. Again. With good reason. Pat not only sponsored lunch, he also gave over his offices for two talks, gave a talk, provided equipment and most of all, provided enormous moral support all day.
- John Henry Donovan. Again. Still the best BarCamp logo ever. And for doing the sign-up system too
- Every person who got the word out and there are lots of you. At least 50% of the faces at BarCamp were new and that was down to you
- Phoebe Bright and Bartosz Ptaszynski for doing all the heavy lifting on the webapp. There are still more lessons to be learned there and hopefully one of them will do a follow-up post here.
- Donogh and Odette did a super job interviewing people. We’ll see the videos in the coming days.
Bart has made the code-drop from Saturday available. He’ll do another drop later this week with a better landing page etc.
It requires:
- Python 2.5
- Django 1.0
- sqlite3
- pysqlite3
Right now you can either access the http://localhost:8000/events/ or the http://localhost:8000/admin/ pages to play around.
login: admin
pass: barcamp
Code archive file: green.zip
Several members of an obscure Californian cult with a svengali known only as Black Turtleneck left some of their magic charms behind at BarCamp yesterday. If they are yours, just email me directly on conor AT loudervoice DOT com.
Clodagh Kelly is going surfing on Sunday morning. Chat to her at BarCamp if you are interested in taking part. It looks like it’ll be at Garrettstown.
There is no parking in the Webworks building. However the City Hall Cark Park is facing the front door right across Eglinton Street. It’s a bit pricey but no worse than any of the others from what I can see. Cheapest option is to park in the Railway Station carpark for €6 per day. It’s maybe a 10-15 min walk.
Push-pin B below is at entrance to both Webworks and the City Hall Car Park. Push-pin A is where the big railway carpark is located.
Cork based TV and Video production company StormVids will be scooting and shooting throughout the day.
Look out for their vids a few days later, all set to embed in your blogs and put on Facebook. I had a great chat with them last week and it’ll be fantastic to see some high-quality footage of BarCamp.
At the more grainy end of things, I’m sure the usual suspects (like me) will also be QIkking, Ustreaming and Flixwagoning on their phones. If you record anything or take any pics, let us know about them so we can link over afterwards.
Recent Comments