Geeks in Boston

The Boston Startup Meetup (email list) is an informal local gathering of people interested in startups.  We’ve been meeting since Fall 2005, mostly for dinners, and meetings tend to have about 25-35 people at all levels of startup experience — from hackers with a cool idea to serial entrepreneurs and investors.

DATE: Thursday, July 6th at 7:00pm
PLACE: Smile Thai Cafe, 16-18 Eliot St, Harvard Sq (http://www.smilethaicafe.com/)

RSVP: http://www.evite.com/schedule/view?event=QAMCXOQNUQQEYNPKNINJ

I hope to see you there!

shimon.

With all the meetups and events happening around Boston (see the sidebar at geeksinboston.com), I’m starting to feel like the tech community here is doing pretty well. But one important constituency I rarely see is students. This seems odd, since there are usually lots of recent graduates; especially at entrepreneur-focused events like the startup meetup. Still, at the technical events and even BarCamp, it’s normal to see only 1 or 2 students.

On one hand, it’s understandable that students will naturally tend to act within their existing, convenient, local university community rather than a larger, more amorphous Boston techie community. On the other hand, the presence of great universities is clearly a sustaining influence for this city’s go-read-your-books vibe, and a source of many valuable research and startup partnerships. So why can’t I think of more than 2 students who might be worth recruiting for part-time or internship work? The theory is that a competent student can, with some supervision, work passionately and productively for cheap.

One possible explanation is scarcity. The average computer science student probably expects a job at a big, stable corporation that will offer them well-packaged, skill-appropriate work for a year or two while they learn. Thirty years ago, that corporation was Digital Electronics in Maynard, MA; now it’s Intel, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Monster now occupies the former home of Digital, but probably hires far fewer college graduates than any one of these big, West coast companies. People who don’t need this sort of two-year training cycle before becoming productive hackers are naturally rare; and if we have to fetch back from California the ones who do, that’s an added challenge.

If competent students are scarce, are we doing enough to connect with them while they’re still in school around here? It’s one thing for a big company to set up a table at a job fair or schedule interviews at a school’s career placement office. It’s quite another for there to be a strong network of relationships between people in companies and universities, such that a professor will automatically refer her top students to work with startups run by her friends. Do we need more of the latter? How can we get it?

Update 11 Jun 2006: fixed links to point at edited version.

Chris Brogan has released Sounds of BarCamp Boston, a compilation of interviews and brief commentary about BarCamp Boston that I think gives a good sense of the event before diving into a bit of a monologue from Adam Green about OPML and feeds (ends around 20:00 into the MP3.)

Sounds of BarCamp Boston on Chris Brogan’s Blog

Download MP3

Lots of startup folks live in fear that Google will eat their lunch. Google, the theory goes, has at least 10 brilliant people working on every interesting problem in software and the internet, and they have a gazillion dollars too. They could release the Google “Click Here for a Fart Noise” Toolbar and a hundred thousand people would install it on the first day.

It happened with Google Calendar. It’s happening today with Google Spreadsheet. Boston-area startups Numbler (which is shockingly similar to Google’s spreadsheet, having live collaboration and instant messaging support) and GroupSharp (agruably more generic) are having a heart attack. Or are they?

The optimistic school of thought says it’s a good thing when Big Company A enters your market. It means Big Companies B and C are going to do the same, soon, and what could be easier than acquiring a nimble little startup? It might have kinda worked for HipCal, which was acquired by Plaxo shortly after Google Calendar launched. Of course, we don’t know how the numbers in that deal, leading to comments like this one by Brad Root on TechCrunch:

It’s almost like you could hear the HipCal developers frantically shopping it around to as many people as possible, spurred on by Google Calendar’s release.

HipCal Dev 1: Dude, Google Calendar.

HipCal Dev 2: Yeah, man.

HipCal Dev 1: If the highest anyone will offer us is $1,000, we’ll take it. OK?

HipCal Dev 2: I’m not a moron, man.

Plaxo: Hey guys, we have absolutely no use for your product since our own guys could make something like HipCal in a few hours (and it wouldn’t freak out come day-light savings time and duplicate everyone’s events), but we understand your plight and we’ve personally pooled together about $900.

HipCal Devs (Uninamously): We’ll take it!

What do you think? Will the BigCos be calling with acquisition offers, or developer job offers?

BarCamp Boston was this past weekend in Maynard, MA. Here are my thoughts on what worked well and what could have been improved.

What Was Good

1. At least 150 people showed up, which was at the top of the expected range.
2. Techies found technical sessions and learned things.
3. People more interested in issues like funding, marketing, and business development found business-oriented sessions.
4. There was an excellent variety of sessions on both days of the conference.
5. Food and drinks were abundant, available when wanted, and of high quality.
6. The venue had plenty of space, including a big central cafeteria which was a perfect place for the agenda wall and for hanging out.
7. People smiled, had fun, joked, worked, and played together.
8. Rod Begbie and Brian Del Vecchio started a round of personal introduction at the beginning of the conference, which was very helpful and should have been an explicit part of the schedule.

What Could Have Been Better

1. The session rooms were grouped into two separate areas, each a walk + elevator ride from the cafeteria. This discouraged walking around between sessions that weren’t in the same area, and added confusion about what was going on where because the agenda wall was usually too far away to quickly check on between sessions.
2. All the sessions ran late. This is partly just the way things go, but partly also because of the distance between rooms. We probably should have
   set explict pauses in between sessions.
3. The wifi was flaky at times.
4. The text on the badges was unnecessarily tiny; names should have been larger.
5. The venue would have been more convenient for many people had it been closer to Boston/Cambridge or accessible on the subway. (We had shuttle service to a commuter rail station, but the commuter rail schedule on weekends is about 3 trains per day.)
6. We organizers should have communicated more clearly with our sponsors, direct and indirect, to make sure their goals for the sponsorship would be met in a way that both satisfied them and honored the spirit of the gathering.
7. Evening events: a couple of weeks before BarCamp I decided to cancel the hacking contest I was supposed to be organizing because, as far as I knew, nobody had expressed any interest in it. I was also concerned that a long-running contest would pull people away from sessions and other informal activities; and I was also just overwhelmed. But the evening seemed too empty, and I think a lot of hackers, designers, and even the less technical people would have been happy to form teams and develop some cool software. It would have been a worthwhile event, especially if it had a dedicated organizer with the capacity to properly organize it.

Other participants: what would you add to these lists?

Check out the BarCampBoston group photo pool at Flickr for shots of our schedule board, venue, and of BarCamp participants.

Conferences can be emotional. Hundreds of people, egos on the line, passionately arguing for what they feel is right. Of course, I’m not like those people. I only argue for things I know to be right, like the principle that the attention of BarCamp participants is not for sale.

This isn’t a totally black and white rule; sponsors get their logos posted on the sponsor wall. If they’re really generous, maybe they get a shirt-sleeve logo or a bigger sign. But there is a line. You can’t corner the attention of 150 BarCampers and pitch them on your office complex for 10 minutes. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

You see, BarCamp is born from a broadly shared disdain for conferences where attendees experience a painful three-sided humiliation:

1. You pay (in time and money) to attend the conference.
2. You sit and listen to speeches in big halls from people who paid the conference organizers so that they could spray a sales pitch at you.
3. Despite all that, the real value of the conference is in the hallways, between sessions, with the other attendees.

BarCamp is about short-circuiting to #3. You don’t pay, you spend time only at discussions that you learn from or contribute to, and the whole schedule is generated by the people at the event, not the people who want to pay money to shout at the people at the event. So if Wellesley Management (Monster‘s landlord) says, at the last minute, that they’d like to give a 2-3 minute spiel about their space during the lunch break, you will at least want to squirm. When the speech, covering a riveting history of how four civilizational revolutions have transformed Clock Tower Place, runs to 5 or 6 minutes before the speaker segues from a Maya Angelou quote to introduce the “Leasing Czar,” you might even feel enough apprehension to stand up from your seat, approach Joe Salemi, and explain that an advertisement this long is neither expected nor appropriate. When a colleague of his subsequently asks you what the hell else you had to do — in fact, you are just sitting there, eating a sandwich made of veggie and pepperoni pizza slices while chatting with old and new friends — you might explain that yeah, this is exactly why we’re here. But if he responds with an insult about how you didn’t get the memo, you might just have to admit that someone hasn’t quite gotten the spirit of BarCamp.

I have to get this off my chest: 99% of the room found this ad speech presumptuous and painful. The speakers insisted on getting everyone’s attention, thus preempting dozens of active discussions. It went on for longer than they said it would. And it wasn’t even that great for them. Were a few people in the audience interested in learning about their office space leasing options? Yes (at least one approached them right after the spiel). But there was a much better option available: lead a session. Teach some hackers about renting office space. Answer some questions from the people who care most, without aggravating the hundreds who don’t care. The precise reason the ad speech was so bad is that it overlooked this option and simply forced everyone’s attention. At a BarCamp, that will never fly.

Luckily, although the delivery was more confrontational than I would have liked, the result seems right: Wellesley will lead a session for interested people tomorrow. Also, Mr. Salemi went out of his way to personally apologize to me for the misunderstanding. Looking back at it now, it does seem like the confrontation was due to misunderstanding rather than any intentional desire to waste our time. So let this be a lesson to BarCampers of the future: if anyone ever expects the sort of special treatment BarCamp was invented to preclude, say no clearly and right away. Explain the BarCamp process and welcome participation within it, but don’t bend the rules for anyone. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.

BarCamp Boston starts at 9am tomorrow. 150 geeks and geek-o-philes from all around Boston will arrive at Monster Worldwide in Maynard and have an unconference, all topics TBD, from 9am Saturday until 5pm Sunday. Some will stay overnight. All will actively participate.My role in BarCamp has been as an organizer. I initially suggested to some friends at Monster that they could provide a venue. I organized the wiki pages. I wrote about BarCamp to my friends and all the local tech groups I know about or coordinate. I went nearly hoarse pimping BarCamp to every living soul at the Web Innovators Group.  I ran the bank for sponsors. And I’ve been driving around for the past 2 days with about 400 servings of soda and water in my trunk.

This was a lot of work, more than I expected; but I’m just one of many people who’ve gotten BarCamp into great shape. Devon Biondi and her colleagues at Monster have gracefully handled the gazillion details that come with hosting a dynamic and overnight unconference. “The” Mike Walsh and his graphic designer, Eric Gagnon, made badges, printed sponsor logos, ordered T-shirts, structured the general schedule, and provided oodles of valuable guidance. Several others helped promote the event, answer questions, and more.  And our many sponsors made it possible to do this all at no cost to the participants.
After all that work it was really gratifying to see things come together last night. Devon, Mike, Ray Deck, and I gathered at Monster to prepare the venue, including

• setting up tables for registration,
• creating the agenda wall:
  • covering a section of wall with brown paper,
  • posting the grid of rooms and time slots for Saturday,
  • posting time slots for a “rooms TBD” draft of Sunday,
  • and printing and posting about 12 sponsor logos;
• unloading drinks from my car,
• pasting little footprint stickers on the floor to guide people throughout the vast venue,
• printing registration stuff: maps/info sheets, waivers, etc.,
• trying without success to turn on the lights in the cafeteria,
• and whatever other little things came up for immediate resolution.

Seeing this list on my screen doesn’t come close to the feeling of being in a big, empty space with 4 people but knowing that just hours later it will be teeming with crowds of people somehow making sense of their teeming crowdness to talk, learn, and have fun together.  I feel like we could be very lucky or very unlucky; maybe that’s the nature of unconferences, although I think I’d be much more stressed if people were counting on the organizers to make this event perfect.  So far we’re lucky: it looks rainy this weekend so we won’t be losing partipants to dismal, lonely activities like playing frisbee or hiking in the woods.  But will people show up?  Will the sessions be good?  Will there be painful verbal brawls?  Brilliant new inventions?  Order?  Chaos?  And how will my session go?