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.

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.

All told, the event was an enormous success, and Shimon (among others) deserves immense praise for his phenomenal level of personal commitment.

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.

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.

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.