Geeks in Boston

I didn’t get to post here during BarCamp Boston 2 due to an extremely badly timed server crash. But for those curious about our finances, here’s a Google spreadsheet with the full BarCamp Boston account ledger:

BarCamp Boston Ledger (published on Google Spreadsheets)

About 200 people came to BarCamp over the course of the weekend. (Peak attendance was about 170 on Saturday and 90 on Sunday.) I still need expense info from some of the organizers, but here’s the executive summary
(including some estimated expenses):

• Sponsor income: $3950
  • 15 sponsors at $200
  • 1 sponsor at $250
  • 2 sponsors at $350
• Donation income: $701.24
  • About half in cash at the event and half by credit card.
  • 15 credit card donors; we didn’t track cash donors.
• Cost of T-shirts, supplies, contest prizes, etc: $1812.78
• Cost of food: $1906.51
  • Saturday Breakfast: $154.56 (some costs may be missing, but
    breakfast was very lightly attended due to weather)
  • Saturday Lunch: $548.30
  • Sunday Breakfast: $343.82
  • Sunday Lunch: $402.29
  • Snacks both days: $163.33
  • Drinks both days: $294.21
• Total Revenue: $4651.24
• Total Costs: $3719.29
• Final “Profit”: $931.35

Some observations:

• We initially expected to raise about $6000. The main reason we didn’t meet this expectation is that we didn’t get any mega-sponsors: nobody gave $1000 or more. I’m actually really happy that we were able to finance the event using a large number of small sponsors, because these sponsors are usually individuals or small companies that want to support and participate in BarCamp. This bodes well for the viability of future BarCamps. However, things would have felt a lot more comfortable if some rich companies had written us a bigger check or two. Perhaps some of the sponsors will become richer and/or more generous by next time.
• The $931.35 could probably have paid for a frugal dinner on Saturday. But we made the call to skip dinner for two reasons. First, we didn’t have anything organized, and the straightforward option — pizza — was already chosen for both lunches. Second, a large chunk of sponsorships and donations — about $600 — wasn’t received until after the conference. Perhaps if we had better forecasted this income, we could have done a simple dinner or maybe even a crowd-organization incentive, like a $7 rebate to anyone eating dinner at BarCamp.
• Even though I was tired and stressed from a server crash and air travel delays that kept me away from BarCamp until Saturday afternoon, BarCamp totally rocked!

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.

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.

Update 11 Jun 2006: fixed links to point at edited version.

Chris Brogan has released Sounds of BarCamp Boston, a compilation of interviews and brief commentary about BarCamp Boston that I think gives a good sense of the event before diving into a bit of a monologue from Adam Green about OPML and feeds (ends around 20:00 into the MP3.)

Sounds of BarCamp Boston on Chris Brogan’s Blog

Download MP3

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?

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.