Recently a kind stranger emailed the BarCamp Boston email list, confused about what BarCamp really was. After a long delay I stumbled across his message and wondered if a more personal take on the BarCamp experience might bring the cool but abstract idea of an “ad-hoc unconference” to life. He seemed to like it, so here’s my take on the BarCamp experience. If it sounds like something you’d want to do, sign up for BarCamp Boston 2, coming up on March 17-18 at MIT.

When I went to the first BarCamp Boston in June 2006, I planned ahead not only as an organizer for the conference as a whole but also for what I wanted to see. I knew a few people who were doing interesting things, so I wrote to them and said stuff like “Hope you’re coming to BarCamp. Maybe you could do an intro session about Jabber.” Or “I’d love to hear about the experience you had building your new product.” That ensured there would be at least a few people and topics that I’d want to take part in. I also came up with a discussion I would lead with a friend of mine, which was going to be about dealing with difficult personalities in your tech career. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen because she was ill during the conference. Instead, I led some workshops where we got about a dozen people together to review and critique each others’ UI designs. Those were a lot of fun and I’ll probably do those again.

These are my interests, and they’re the sorts of things that I cared about enough to spend a weekend with hundreds of random folks on the chance that a few of them would be interested too, and would lead to some valuable discussion and connections. I was not disappointed. But if I had a more limited set of pretty focused interests, or the kinds of interests that might not be represented well in a gathering of 170 geeks, I don’t know that BarCamp would’ve offered me much. It’s basically a concentrated form of geek serendipity. If you already have the relationships and knowledge you need, there’s little to gain at BarCamp; but if you (like me) feel that the most fascinating, valuable, and transformative knowledge and relationships could come from a stranger, BarCamp is teeming with potential.