You wanna lead a session at BarCampRDU? Add it here. We'll need your sessions name, your name, a brief description, and if you're looking for people to co-lead your session or whatever.

• Social Networks - FredStutzman. We'll spend a session talking about Social Networking Websites, such as Myspace, Facebook and Linked In. We'll look at them, figure out why people use them, and share ideas about how businesses can leverage social networks.

• Information Archeology - Kevin Webb We can talk about the tools and methods for the regular Joe to do cool stuff with large amounts of data (I'm particularly into old pre-internet stuff that no one's made available yet in digital form but we can talk about any kind of data). Search doesn't just have to be left for Google to take care of and even then there are more ways to slice stuff than just full text queries (mashups and custom visualization). Some tools we can setup and play with include Xapian text search and Postgres/PostGIS for doing geographic queries/analysis. As some quick practicals I can also talk about my work with the All Patents Initiative and the Internet Archive's Open Library Project. Let me know if you're interested in collaborating or bring your favorite dataset.

• Open Source VOIP - Scott Morningstar We will take a stock Linksys WRT54GL and install OpenWRT Linux Firmware and Milkfish Open SER implementation. We will set up an account with Junction Networks for inbound and outbound PSTN calls. I will bring several SIP phones ranging from the budgetone 101 to the Cisco 7970G as well as several 802.11 wireless SIP phones. This is everything you need to replace your land line phone using hardware you probably already have. If people bring routers we can flash them up as we go.

• Atom Publishing Protocol - Joe Gregorio The Atom Publishing Protocol, a product of the IETF, is a new weblog publishing protocol that is implemented in some form or another by Google, Blogger, SixApart, even Microsoft is putting APP support into Word 2007. We can talk about the basic operation, differences between the APP and other publishing protocols, different implementations, non-weblog uses for the APP and even hook up some code to show how easy the APP is to use.

• The Future of Publishing? - Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers will talk about the Pragmatic Bookshelf, the future of publishing, PDFS & DRM, and that sort of thing.

• Refactoring Your Wetware - Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers likes to talk about how your brain works. Pole-bridging, pragmatic learning, the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and even a little of Getting Things Done are all fair game.

• Google Web Toolkit - Ryan Cox We will walk through construction of a GWT web app in real time; deploy it to a live server; debate the merits of JavaScript as a compilation target; look at one or two alternatives; explore some legal issues; and poke around under the hood.

• Continuous Integration - Jared Richardson . Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice that seems to be popping up all over the place. I've worked with CI at startups and large companies as well. Let's talk about why you'd want to use CI, then look at how to set up Cruise Control, a very popular CI package. I'd welcome any collaborators. Bring your questions about how to get things rolling at your day job. :) Let's make this interactive.

• Sex & The Death Of Advertising: Identifying what’s next.

  My name is Martin Smith martinsellingzoe@aol.com and I learned to sell soap for P&G and candy for M&M/Mars. Selling soap was harder by the way. Sex & The Death of Advertising will discuss what we, as marketers, do when tried and true market creating strategies cease to work. What are the implications of the death of the Advertising Industrial Complex? Will new tools such as search engine marketing (SEM) eventually end up in the same tangled mess due to pressure from advertisers fleeing now unsuccessful channels such as TV, Radio and Infomercials? Is there something fundamentally different in new “pull” ad models that will prevent SEM from losing reach like television and print? We will discuss selections from The Attention Economy by Davenport and Beck, Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke and All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. If you have a favorite marketing author or new marketing theory, please bring it to our discussion. Our session’s draft goal will be to brainstorm key elements of our new marketing paradigm and identify what’s next.

• Creating mobile web applications with Ruby on Rails. One of the challenges with creating web-based applications for mobile devices is the tremendous client diversity. Mobile clients vary greatly in screen size, available bandwidth, and browser capabilities. Some devices support traditional HTML, some WML only, some XHTML, and some JavaScript. It would be an engineering nightmare to try to code a separate view for each type of potential client. Recently I have been building a site that handles this problem gracefully using the Rails framework. I will walk through the architecture, source code, and unit testing techniques. And, of course I will leave time for discussion. -- Chris Garrett