Grant Buckler has written a story about BarCamp in ITBusiness.ca. It’s a great piece with excitement about BarCampEarth, DemoCampToronto, DrupalCampToronto, BarCampVancouver and the other usual suspects. It’s great to see that we continue to grow the community, not just in Toronto but in Vancity, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec and around the world. Chris Messina has done a great job infecting people with the vibe of BarCamp.
“With everyone – or almost everyone – giving presentations, naturally some sessions are better than others. “There's usually a lot of mediocre sessions and one or two great ones,†says Philip Smith, simplifier of technology at Community Bandwidth in Toronto, who has attended several un-conferences and helped organize DrupalCampToronto.”
I dislike the implication that is implied by Bucker here, which is that when you “when you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a conference more of the sessions are great”. This is unequivocally untrue! Big conferences have an equivalent number of mediocre sessions. Anybody else attend ETech06 which was full of advertising, poor sessions and generally overcrowded, we ran BarCampTdot imperfections and all for less than it cost me to attend ETech06 when I add in my travel costs. This is not to say that BarCamps don’t need improvements, because they do. The goal with BarCamp is to empower the audience to make the best conference and conference experience possible which ultimately is based on the people.
It looks like BarCampVancouver is going to be a wild success. There are a small group of dedicated Toronto folks (Maria from Bonasource, Ryan from RedFlagDeals.com, James Woods from DictaBrain, aDave Forde technology marketing guy around town and Ryan Coleman from Clay Tablet Technologies ) are starting to organize BarCampEarthToronto. I’m sure they’d love to help specially if you have space. Drop a note to the TorCamp mailing list if you are interested.