Mon 5 Jun 2006
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
- At least 150 people showed up, which was at the top of the expected range.
- Techies found technical sessions and learned things.
- People more interested in issues like funding, marketing, and business development found business-oriented sessions.
- There was an excellent variety of sessions on both days of the conference.
- Food and drinks were abundant, available when wanted, and of high quality.
- The venue had plenty of space, including a big central cafeteria which was a perfect place for the agenda wall and for hanging out.
- People smiled, had fun, joked, worked, and played together.
- 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
- 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.
- 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. - The wifi was flaky at times.
- The text on the badges was unnecessarily tiny; names should have been larger.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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?
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June 5th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Handful more little nitpicks:
1) The schedule grid was hard to navigate, because the Time post-it-notes were smaller than the Meeting post-its, so things didn’t line up right.. This led to a load of confusion.
2) The schedule on the wiki said that there would be “Three word introductions” and “Session negotiation lightning style”. Who put those there, and why didn’t they happen?
3) The “You MUST participate” stuff on the wiki probably scared a lot of people off who would gladly have taken part in interesting discussions, but who weren’t wanting to stand up and give a presentation.
June 5th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
I would add in there that not allowing the post-lunch sessions to be populated until lunch time would’ve helped in getting more specific relevant discussion. Having the entire board pre-populated in the morning hurt having more specific sessions that built off of previous ones to appear.
June 5th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
+1 on the issue about the rooms being separated by such a distance - it was unfortunate in that it also reduced the amount of hallway interaction - hard to come all the way back down to the cafeteria between two sessions in one “half” or the other.
Once the schedule was up on the wiki, everything did get easier.
All in all, an excellent event. Thanks to you (and others invovled) for pulling it together.
June 6th, 2006 at 9:54 am
I agree that the requirement to present probably scared some people off. Maybe change it to “you must say something during at least one session”? Same emphasis on participation but less pressure. Also, I think once people see a few presentations that are by ordinary people rather than pro presenters it gets less scary. At bigger companies there are sometimes explicit rules around who can speak on any vaguely work related topic so loosening the presentation requirement would open the audience up a bit.
Along with that, I’d tighten up the presentation rules to something like “you must present your work, not someone else’s work, the great things your company is doing, etc”. In other words, no evangelists. That will keep the presentations real, which was the best thing about them. Every single session I went to by someone presenting what he or she worked on or was passionate about was good, even where giving presentations was clearly not in the presenter’s core skill set.
June 6th, 2006 at 10:04 am
PS: Organizing hacking contests is something I would get sponsors to do. The sponsor gets the priviledge of providing the prize, inventing the contest, and judging the entries. Piles of work, some cash, and the reward of having everyone at the conference know exactly who you are. That would make sponsoring the contest nearly as good or better than providing the venue in terms of visibility. I’m willing to bet that you could auction off hacking contest sponsorship for more than the value of the prize, although there is a control tradeoff there. If you keep it cheap relative to the value you’ll have lots of control - you can pick your contest sponsor based on how you feel about the proposed contest - but if you go for the high bidder you’ll lose control.
June 6th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
The “personal introductions” were prompted by Rod Begbie, and I think this is common at other (albeit smaller) BarCamps.
All told, the event was an enormous success, and Shimon (among others) deserves immense praise for his phenomenal level of personal commitment.
June 6th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
I thought Saturday (the only day I could attend) went very well, though I agree that the distance between the sessions was troublesome.
Quick thoughts:
The introductions section at the beginning was very useful. It helped me find a few people I knew I wanted to talk to, and I know it let some campers find me. It may also be useful to have the audience members identify themselves when participating in the sessions.
I agree with folks’ squeamishness on the “everyone *must* participate” piece. It almost scared me off. Those of us who work for public companies have to be especially careful about any statements that could be construed as forward-looking.
Most sessions I attended had the presenter/panel speaking for the first 90% of the time — like a normal conference. I think it would be better to follow the BloggerCon model, having the presenter do a ten-minute mini-presentation, then have the rest be driven by the audience. A good moderator or two could help this process (I can volunteer for this…)
This may have happened already, but was there “official” video/audio of the sessions? That would be a great thing to arrange beforehand and let people know that they’d be able to catch all the other sessions later.
I look forward to the next one.
June 7th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
[...] So Shimon posted his observations, and I would like to trackback my lessons learned from my perspective as a dogface: [...]
June 8th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
I had a blast. I thought it worked well.
I liked the idea of not populating the post-lunch sessions until lunch time. That’s kind of neat. Is it still “un-conferency” to post some “seed” ideas for presentations? Some folks didn’t know they were interesting until it was pulled out of them (that sysop guy who did oldschool BBS stuff was SO COOL- what was his name?).
Monster and other sponsors did a great job. Sure, the history lesson “ad” at lunch was annoying in ways, but hey: they paid.
You know the last thing I wished we could do? Follow-on. It’d be neat to spin a meeting like this into some more targeted activities. Not just the presentations, but throw those forward into real-life projects. Not always for profit, mind you, but something where people would just push towards the next continuation of BarCamp in spirit.
Shimon- your hard work rocked. Contact me for something related to this, please.