Great news! BarCamp Rochester 4 has confirmed the date of April 18, 2009. I registered two domain names (barcamproc.org and barcamprochester.org) and our website is up, running, and ready for attendees to sign up. So, if you or someone you know is going to be in the Rochester area, please sign up on our wiki. We’re also currently looking for sponsors. If you think your organization may be interested in helping us out, please drop me an email.
Yesterday I hosted and attended my first BarCamp ever and it was awesome! What is a BarCamp? Basically, it is an “unconference” – an ad hoc gathering of individuals to share knowledge about various topics through presentations. The key – every one is a participant, no spectators. To be honest, I was more than a bit skeptical at first, but I could not be more pleased with the event. It was great. But before I get to the details, I want to thoroughly thank all of our sponsors that helped us out this year (clearspring, IEEE Computer Society, Computer Science House, RIT CS Department, HTB Press, Microsoft, and Google). We could not have done it without them and hopefully they will all continue to support events like this.
The most import thing about a BarCamp, however, are its participants – ours were amazing! We had presentations on just about everything. Just a little sampling: political lobbying, intellectual property, jQuery, 3d user interface design, robotics, multitouch, network security, OpenID, CPU Design (me!), the future of RF technologies, shellcode exploits, telephone-controlled web applications, board game strategy, One Laptop Per Child Initiatives at RIT (me!), XSLT, Grid Computing, and all kinds of other cool stuff. I learned a lot about a bunch of cool new stuff that people are working on, but my favorite part was all of the discussion that occurred. The level of participation and interaction between the presenter and the attendees for each of the talks is what made this BarCamp such a success. You could tell that everyone was legitimately interested in what they were there to hear about (even if they had never heard of it before!). A lot of the talks turned into more of a discussion of a topic than a simple lecture with a question and answer session, which really is the ideal format for this conference.
If you have never experienced a BarCamp before, I encourage you to give it a try. How can you go wrong with a bunch of smart people with a desire to learn and share knowledge? To give you more of an idea of what it was like, check out some of the pictures from this year and last. Not everyone uses flickr, so if you have a facebook account, roam around there and you should hopefully find some more pictures.
After such a great experience, I am looking forward to planning and hosting the next BarCamp. I liked it so much, I’m going to try to put together two of them next year – one in the fall, and one in the spring. So, be on the lookout for BarCampRochester4 and 5. If you are interested in helping out, shoot me an email! Again, thanks to the sponsors and the participants for making this such a great BarCamp!