Geeks in Boston

I’m in sunny Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive. I’m also taking part in some associated BarCamp events. Right now I’m at Bourbon Rocks on 6th St, which is a bar currently serving as the venue for BarCamp Austin. The logo for the event plays this up: it’s an Armadillo drinking a bottle of one-star liquor. And next week there’ll be the BarCamp Planners Summit, where I’ll get to work on some essays and discussions with other BarCamp planners from around the world.

BarCamp Austin is unusual not only for its venue. Most of the people here are moving between BarCamp and South by Southwest, the vast commercial conference two blocks away. One person I talked to pointed out that this sabotages the intensely local nature of most BarCamps; there are lots of dabblers and listeners-in here, and the likelihood they’ll bump into each other again and start working together is low. On the other hand, there’s a different and smaller crowd here, a subset of SXSW consisting of people who have participated in BarCamps and care about them. We just had a spirited discussion about Coworking and there is a “state of wordpress” talk coming up soon. The talks have been a little more focused, and potentially more concrete, than the panels at SXSW which often cover broad topics in broad strokes.