BarCampTexas will be held in conjunction with BarCampEarth, Saturday August 26th to Monday 28th. (See the Backup Plans section if we can't pull off the state-wide event for some reason.)
What is BarCampTexas? Well, the organizers of BarCampAustin, BarCampDallas, and BarCampHouston have decided to join forces and create BarCampTexas! The goal is to get over 1000 campers to join together August 26th-28th. We will be updating this site often so sign up, check back, and participate!
Hosts
Coordination
- What's the best way to coordinate? (bi-?)Weekly IRC/IM/conf call? RFC 1149 message protocols?
- Livejournal community: barcamptexas (If you don't have an lj account, its free and simple to set up. lj account creation page)
- IRC channel: #barcamptexas2006 on EFnet (e.g. irc.nac.net), barkeep is the bot.
Proposed Sessions
what do you want to hear, what do you want to say and what could you live without? Are you an expert in something cool? Is there some trend we should know about?
- Agile Development experience reports - what has worked in your organization? What hasn't?
- Scalability. This could be either general routes to engineering for scale, or technology/platform/software stack-specific post mortems (e.g. I know how to do this with LAMP, but I'm curious how RoR would change the picture, or J2EE, or...). What happens when your site's url is in the screen crawl on CNN Headline news?
- Designing for Mobile/Portable Devices
- Workshop on Audacity
- Deploying a Commercial Web Application/Product: War Stories
- Tips for Building Community & Attracting User Contributions
- Ad Management Tools: Options other than Google?
- Calendaring (Caldev, hcalendar, tool comparisons, Outlook exports)
- Microformats: Commercial Uses
- Server Virtualization: Xen, UML, OpenVZ, VMWare, etc. Tricks, tips, experiences, battle scars, etc.? Hypervisor technology migrating into the common whitebox server space from the mainframe world is (imho) one of the most exciting things to happen in the systems management world in a while. (I don't have the material/experience to comment much on this one but I'd be fascinated to hear what others have to say.)
- Why XSLT is sweet for Ajax Widgets
- Search Engine Optimization
- Setting Your Mac Up--soup-to-nuts from the basics to Darwin Ports, subversion, and leveraging the unix underneath with the sweet, sweet Aqua goodness.
Campers
Proposed Locations
whurley and linear have taken on the site coordination task. We are focusing efforts on Austin based on discussions with Erica, and others. whurley is meeting with the city of Austin this wekk and will post location options here by Wednesday. The goal is to have a location nailed down sometime next week.
Austin
- Thistle Cafe
- Elks Lodge (checking availability)
Dallas:
Houston
Infrastructure
Drinks
Who wants to be the drinks coordinator? (If the site doesn't have a bar.)
Food
Who wants to be the food coordinator? (If the site doesn't have pre-extant food facilities.)
Internet Access
Who wants to be the internets coordinator? (If the site doesn't have something already.)
Multimedia
(projectors, etc.) Who can coordinate this?
Press / Corporate Sponsorship
Who can coordinate this?
Ride share / crash space
(Once we have a location, for people from other places.)
- (Austin) extra bedroom/bathroom in downtown apt - crothers ~ gmail
Official Tag
Use this for things like flickr, youtube, etc. barcamptexas2006, or barcampCITY2006 for austin / houston / dallas
Questions
- There's been little movement on the site location thus far, which is mildly concerning. So, who is planning on going where? Please increment the following with where you're planning on being (if we have this event spread over different cities/times as below, this opens up the option to put yourself down for more than one slot):
Austin: 2
Dallas: 1
Houston: X
and see the section below for Backup Plans
Backup Plans
If this rather ambitious undertaking doesn't come to pass, perhaps the individual cities should have contingency plans. Austin's more fun on a saturday night (imho), so BarCampAustin on Saturday and BarCampDallas / BarCampHouston on Sunday? That way people could come be rowdy in Austin on a good day for that, and have a second day in their home cities if they want to carry things foward.
crothers: BarCampTexas at the tail end of SXSW or counterprogrammed against it would be a compelling reason to come to Austin. Without it and at this late stage, are we sure we are going to get a huge crowd? In case I am wrong and in case the incredibly cool venue Whurley is working on isn't feasible for August I am checking on the availability of the Elks Lodge. It will hold 500+ (venue of SXSW 2006 EFF party, Staple). Having said that, I thought Thistle was a great venue for BarCamp and would love to see it there again as my first preference. Nice to see info on event planning on this site, btw.
