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.

I’m rewriting this post to note, with relief, that http://devboston.pbwiki.com/ is back to normal. See you tomorrow!

Today I’m up in Manchester, NH at BarCamp Manchester. It is quite different from BarCamp Boston, even though it’s just an hour away. The first difference I notice: I’m not an organizer. This means I don’t have to run around making sure nobody’s hair is on fire, and can focus on the presentations. But the first difference most people will notice is that it’s smaller and quieter.

Right now I’d guess there are about 50 people here, which is about a third of BCB’s Saturday attendees. A smaller camp doesn’t mean good or bad– just different. I haven’t found many common threads of interest; this may be because I ran a bit late and missed the initial milling about / introductions. Or it may be because there aren’t as many people with the same deep technical interests as me. I’m hoping to meet some of them at 1:30 when my boss Jim Cowie and I will give a presentation about BGP data mining, and how Renesys came to do what it does.

Now it’s time for lunch. More updates to come.

Do you have a backlog of cool project ideas you’re just itching to work on?

Would you enjoy meeting up with a bunch of other hackers and designers, for one intense day of design and development?

Then come to the first DevHouseBoston event on Saturday, December 9 at 11am at Permabit near Kendall Square. Food and wifi will be provided; teams and projects will be assembled on the fly.

DevHouseBoston info and registration

DevHouseBoston #1 is a production of Brian Del Vecchio, John Resig, Shimon Rura, and Patrick Haney. Can you buy us some pizza? Join our email list and become a sponsor.

Today brings news that everyone’s favorite Davis-square-based-alien-mascot-bearing startup, Reddit, has been acquired by CodneNet, the digital-internet-Wired portion of magazine giant Conde Nast.

Reddit soaks up all my slack time for reading online. The New Yorker brings dozens of physical pages worth reading every week. So I must also congratulate Conde Nast on completing their virtual monopolization of my news intake.

Unfortunately the Reddit guys will be moving to CodeNet HQ in San Francisco. We’ll miss you guys, but wish you all the best in your new digs. Congratulations!

The Boston Startup Meetup (join the email list) is an informal local gathering of people interested in startups. We’ve been meeting since Fall 2005, mostly for dinners, and meetings tend to have about 25-35 people at all levels of startup experience — from hackers with a cool idea to serial entrepreneurs and investors.

DATE: Tuesday, October 3rd at 7:00pm
PLACE: Smile Thai Cafe, 16-18 Eliot St, Harvard Sq ( http://www.smilethaicafe.com/ )

RSVP: http://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?event=IBDXHRCXXRJXKRQTIXYN

I hope to see many familiar and many new faces!

Shimon Rura

Local Y-Combinator startup Kiko is up for sale on eBay. Having made fun of calendaring apps in the past, this isn’t exactly shocking, and you have to respect the Kiko founders’ willingness to let go. For sale is the domain name, the web hosting account, and all Kiko intellectual property including the software; as well as the option to buy a week of consulting time from the founders for $1500.

Now the big question is whether it’ll sell. Most of the recent, smaller tech acquisitions seem to be thinly veiled signing bonuses. Perhaps owning upcoming.org isn’t that important to Yahoo! — they could rebuild it in a few weeks — but it is a sign of hiring a highly competent person. As alternative to recruiters that charge $7000 per hire, an acquisition that binds a small group of people to your company for 3-5 years while their stock vests could easily be worth several tens of thousands. But without the option to acquire the Kiko team, I’m not sure who would buy their domain and software.

After all, who sits around with $50k wondering “gee, I wish I could get myself a neat but young implementation of something Google is really good at?”

Update: Tucows, the buyer, explains. Pretty convincing logic, actually.

John Resig, Patrick Haney, and I are plotting to bring SuperHappyDevHouse to Boston. SHDH is an event for hackers to get together, build cool things, and just hang out. It’s informal and unstructured, and will probably have between 20 and 50 participants. We need a venue that can accomodate about that many people with space and wifi for one weekend day and/or night. Location preferably T-accessible in Cambridge/Boston. A corporate office or large house would work great. Any ideas?