After the weekend trip to BarCamp Nashville, I have started giving thought to what other kinds of technology events I would like to attend next year. I really enjoyed the social aspect of BarCamp, even though I only held a conversation of any length with my wife. Instead, I followed the live updating commentary left by other Twitter users who used the #bcn08 hash tag. Including that in the update means that other users can search for all posts related to BarCamp. It is an imperfect system (I forgot it most of the time), but it seems to be the easiest to roll out.
I did notice one thing that had to be driving the session presenters bonkers: lack of an attentive audience. I know that I personally missed large segments of the presentations because I was fixated on browsing and updating on my phone. It is rude, and I am just as guilty as anyone else in the room. My wife and I attended all of our sessions together, so maybe whatever one missed the other caught.
Welcome Session
Lots of thanks to the sponsors and organizers. There were some raffle drawings, but we came out empty handed.
Micro Blogging with Dave Delaney
An overview of Twitter and discussion of Trust Based Economies. Dave also used it to promote philanthropy and raised more than the requested $411 in one day from conference attendees.
Content Delivery and Metrics with Nicholas Young
A presentation about ArtistOneAnalytics.com. The presenters (I cannot remember the other guy's name) were making a pretty compelling sales pitch for harnessing the marketing power of P2P. He is fairly convinced piracy is not what is killing the music industry -- confusion is.
PR 2.0 The Deer Have Guns with Steve Horton and Bill Seaver
A longer form of the presentation that Bill gave a few of my coworkers and me this past July. It was a great refresher course and was a bit of a reminder that we really, really should research it further.
Designers Developers Unite! with Jared Scheel
This is one I wish I had my co-workers in on, if nothing else for the humor factor. Jared went through a few common struggles between developers and designers in a web shop and offered a few strategies from getting through them. My wife thinks he was biased against designers.
Went to Lunch
A pretty good session at Panera Bread and Starbucks. That counts, right? Both had Wi-Fi.
New Ecosystem with Alex Lavidge
This one was about a co-working environment set up in Knoxville to help self-employed entrepreneurs get their start-up off the ground and built for longevity. I was really intrigued by the idea of an open office space where you share resources (break room, conference room, etc.) with others in a collaborative environment without sharing an employer. I have to wonder if something like that could come to the mid-state.
New Media for Change
We bailed on this one. Not at all what we were hoping for.
Rails Rumble with Mark Wise
One of the project members for a Ruby on Rails competition shared a status report on FeedMatch.com. While none of it talked about the Ruby code itself, I did like the peek under the hood of a development team trying to finish a project on a tight deadline. Learned a bit about wireframes and version control.
Hockey Game with the Nashville Predators
Not really a session, but we were able to get discounted tickets for yesterday evening's game. We ducked out early from the conference to go get ready and change clothes. I was able to pick up two extra registration bags and t-shirts for my co-workers.
Final thoughts ...
The conference exceeded all of my expectations for a technology event in Nashville. The only thing I would have liked would be more distance between the sessions and the "trade show" floor (hallway). It became really cramped out there with people pouring in and out of sessions. I really look forward to next year!