Those words don't seem like they should be together in the same phrase. Most of the comments after I say this go towards the obivous, why did you train bartenders at your church?
BarCamp, as defined from their site is, an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.
I found out about BarCamp through a post from Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog. Curious about what it was, I surfed to the BarCamp.org page, and lo and behold, there was a BarCamp organized for Birmingham! I thought it would be interesting to check out, so I watched the wiki for awhile, and noticed there were looking for a place to meet for the conference. They needed a room, and some Wifi, and I thought, we have room and Wifi at the church, why not have it here?
So I emailed Dimitri, and I met some of the wonderful people from UAB who were helping to organize this thing, they came up to the church, loved it, and it was on the books!
BarCamp happened this past Saturday, August 26, and it was a whirlwind of a day. This is not like other conferences where there's a set schedule, a set of guest speakers, this is a see who shows up, and see who wants to talk about things they are passionate about.
At 10am, there were 12 sessions slated for the rest of the day, split between our large seminar room, and a classroom. People chose where they wanted to go, and they went!
Because we only have a soundboard in the Large room, I started recording just the sessions in there on my trust little M-Audio Microtrack mp3 recorder. By the time the second session started, I realized i could record the other room's sessions with my MacBook Pro and wireless microphone. I missed the first session, and for some reason, all of the other sessions had a glitch in the recording. Either I started recording after they started, or someone muted the microphone, and I never checked if there was audio. I haven't listened to any of these, myabe my new Russian friend Dimitri will get them up on Odeo or somewhere.I also ran around with the video camera, so maybe soon I cn put some 2 or 3 minute video together on what went on.
By the end of the day, Dimitri dubbed me as "The Captain of the Cruise Ship." I wrangled the technical issues of BarCamp and somewhat helped things to run smoothly. It's funny how this happens, I wasn't really a part of organizing the event, but it's just in my nature to have things run well technically.
I guess I taught a session there, I took people on a tour of the church, showing off the building, what the auditorium looked like, what my warm and messy video control room/office looked like. Everybody on the tour was genuinely interested in what went on at the church, I really appreciated their attention!
So at the end, there was a drawing for door prizes, and I actually won the big prize, which was Adobe Flex. Some sort of $500 piece of software which I had no idea how to use, or what I would use it for. There was someone there who taught on what it could do, and my eyes glazed over very quickly, and I was lost. So I traded it with a guy named David Cain (i think) for a 2-liter bottle of coke. I hope he enjoys it! I know I'll get more use out of the 2-liter instead of flex!
It was a great time to meet some new people around Birmingham. I can't wait to see what the next one will look like!
Flickr pictures of the event are available here!
