BarCamp Cork IV » Vision

The Call For Volunteers

James Whelton — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:14:02 +0000

If you wish to really be a massive help to Barcamp Cork, find myself, James Whelton, on the morning to find out how you can give a hand or email me: me(@)jameswhelton(.)com

We are looking for people to be ready to pounce on matters such as presentation difficulties, etc, and just to float around willing to give a hand. I’m sure there will be enough of you fellow geeks there willing to give a hand with the technical stuff

What’s the purpose of this bar camp?

haydn — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:25:00 +0000

I really hope I make it on the 1st but even if I don’t I wanted to make a point that the informal dialogue we are supposed to have as people interested in Web 2.0 is one we should extend to brands and organisations.

I don’t mean we should set up Bar Camp to sell services to them but I mean it’s be really valuable to engage with the corporate sector and the public sector so we can learn more about where they perceive their problems to be.

I’ve sent a message or two out to companies I know – not IT companies of course. Would anyone else see a value in a Dialogue With The Brands strand? Maybe EI can help with this?

BarCamp Cork Manifesto

conor — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:29:23 +0000

We’ve had a lot of great *Camps in Ireland since the first BarCamp Cork back in 2006. We’ve learned lots, become friends with many people we’ve met there and hopefully shared what knowledge we have.

However one discussion topic that has bubbled up regularly in between the Irish BarCamps has been the very structured format of them. Many feel that we’ve perhaps not fully embraced the “Un” aspect of Unconference. The fear of the unknown and fear of failure would have been my reason for trying to make sure everything was “organised” in advance of the first BarCamp. We’d like to redouble our efforts to avoid this with BarCamp Cork II and really push to make it as surprising, impromptu and two-way as we possibly can.

To this end, there are two phrases we want to concentrate on in Webworks: “talking with, not talking at” and “doing more, talking less“. There are a bunch of ways of achieving this and some of them are as follows (please give your own suggestions in the comments):

Insisting that slideware sessions to be kept to a minimum and limited to 20 mins
Running an Ignite session for pure slideware (5 minutes, 20 slides)
Focussing relentlessly on facilitiating discussions with active participants rather that talking at passive listeners. No more talk + Q&A. It should be all Q&A with “presenters” as moderators.
Asking questions, not making statements
Running a “build a webapp in a day” session for the entire day (details to follow)
Offering your problems/challenges to your audience to solve (”How do I…?”)
Setting up hands-on technical tutorial sessions (e.g. how to use Sketchup to model buildings and cities, under the hood of Wordpress etc)
Insisting on absolutely no branding or commercial pitching during sessions
Highlighting technology as a tool to achieve useful ends, not as an end in itself
Looking at ways of using technology to enable creativity
Pulling in as many non-tech people as possible – media, art, education, finance, energy, entertainment, charity