Geeks in Boston

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?

I’ve been cranking away at the BarCampBoston wiki pages this evening. Check them out and let me know if I missed anything before we’re ready to start really pushing this unconference to more attendees, sponsors, etc.

Update 2: The location is set. We’ll meet at 7pm at Barlola Tapas Lounge on Comm Ave & Dartmouth in Boston. Thanks to Ryan Sarver for setting up reservations.

Update: Rescheduled to Wednesday 4/26 from 4/19.
The BarCamp Boston group has settled on a date of June 3-4, and secured generous venue sponsorship from Monster. But there are still many important areas to work on:

• publicity
• planning / un-agenda
• getting more sponsors
• website / registration system
• t-shirts
• undoubtedly, many other things I haven’t thought of

Since it’s hard to coordinate all these efforts among people who don’t already know each other over an email list, I propose we get together over dinner, introduce ourselves, and divvy up the work. Thus:

Dinner for POTENTIAL ORGANIZERS of Boston BarCamp

When: Wednesday, April 26; 7:00pm
Where: Barlola Tapas Lounge on Comm Ave & Dartmouth in Boston
RSVP: by commenting on this post

This gathering is for people who want to help organize Boston Bar Camp. If you just want to attend and present a session, or want to be a sponsor, you do not need to come to this dinner.

My name is Shimon Rura. I’m a geek. I live in Boston. I organize the Boston Startup Meetup and the Genius Workshop, two groups designed to help geeks meet and talk with each other. I also work at Renesys, a startup that analyzes the growth and usage of the Internet, and run Voo2do, a popular web-based task management system.

In August 2007, Josh Nichols joined the site as a co-blogger. Welcome, Josh!

By “geek” I mean someone with a strong incination toward technical work, usually as a main occupation, and usually in software. To do good work, geeks don’t just need computers — we need a whole ecosystem of people and places, from power users to investors to marketers and more. And we need the company of other geeks, so that we can discuss new ideas and find partners.

The mission of this blog is to assist the growth of this ecosystem in the Boston area, and to help interested geeks orient themselves to it.