BarCamp

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Participants in the first BarCamp simultaneously comment, listen, and follow along on their screens.
Participants in the first BarCamp simultaneously comment, listen, and follow along on their screens.
A BarCamp in progress in Chennai, India
A BarCamp in progress in Chennai, India

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The name is a playful allusion to its origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off and response to Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only unconference hosted by open source publishing luminary, Tim O'Reilly.

BarCamps are organized (and evangelized) largely through the web, harnessing what might be called a Web 2.0 communications toolkit. By "open-sourcing" the organizational process of a Foo Camp unconference, that is, codifying it in a wiki and making that publicly available, BarCamp seems to have struck a chord. It has since been implemented in 31 cities around the world and is serving as a reference for unconferences in other fields. The involvement of key figures in the web development community, such as Tantek Çelik and Ross Mayfield, no doubt has helped its adoption.

The procedural framework of BarCamp is similar to Open Space methodology for organizing meetings, but looser. It consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. While loosely structured, there are rules. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing, and IRC.

Anyone can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki. Attendance is monetarily free and generally restricted only by space constraints. Participants are asked, though, to sign up in advance. Venues typically provide basic services. Free network access, usually WiFi, is crucial. Following the model of Foo Camp, the venue also makes space for the attendees, a.k.a. BarCampers, to literally camp out overnight.

Thus, BarCamps rely on securing sponsorship, ranging from the venue and network access to beverages and food.

The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, from August 19-21, 2005, in the offices of Socialtext. It was organized in less than a week's time, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held across North America, South America, Europe and Asia -- from Boston to Bangalore. To mark the one-year anniversary of BarCamp, BarCampEarth was held in multiple locations world wide on August 25-27, 2006.

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