Ah, beautiful Sunday! This is the first day this week we've had a little peace around the house. It'll all go crazy on Monday, of course, but it's nice to have something like a day off.
BarCampMontreal2
I had a great time yesterday at BarCampMontreal2. It was pretty fortunate that my parents are visiting this week, because it meant that both Maj and I could go to the event together. We also had our friend and fellow Wikitraveller Jani Patokallio visiting from Singapore, so we brought him along with us. Jani's a community and technology hacker and he's a lot of fun, too.
This was our first event in the new BarCamp venue at the SAT, and it turned out to be a good one. The space is really big, with about 3 huge spaces. We used the back room, which is wide enough for a lot of video displays, to good advantage. The front area became an informal café and it was really great for personal talks -- isolated from the main presentation area.
Damian DiFede gave a great talk about his Ajax-based MUD, Mujax. I think it looks really cool -- I hope he can get the kind of participation and content to make it a more immersive space.
I gave the second talk. I'd really wanted to do a talk about The Keiki Project, our upcoming venture, but it was too soon for a real hands-on demo. So I'd planned to do a presentation about RDF and our use of Wikitravel:Turtle RDF on Wikitravel, but I kind of got too busy by the end of the week. So I ended up recycling my talk about Commercialization of Wikis (see Talks/SXSW07), which got a lot of positive feedback.
I liked seeing Sylvain Carle's presentation on what he'd learned in Silicon Valley. Sylvain is one of the best presenters at BarCampMontreal -- he's a big goofball who loves his work and communicates that passion with intelligence and sincerity. For example, he themed his talk with songs by Quebec rocker Robert Charlebois. Candid and ingenious.
Also great was Hugh McGuire's talk about lessons learned in development of the cool podcasting platform Collectik. His talk came down to one great point: that you have to be able to communicate the purpose of your Web site (or other project) in one sentence. He didn't do that for Collectik, and now he's trying to figure out how to. It's great hearing people talk about their mistakes.
Maj gave a great talk about Wikitravel Extra, the new personal-opinion and -experience platform that we've built to complement the objective, consensus information in Wikitravel. I keep forgetting what a good public speaker she is. She did a good job talking about the needs we were trying to fill, and she demo'd the platform (flawlessly). I think she's got a good presentation to take to other conferences now (lucky dog).
Another talk I found fascinating was Chris Car's discussion of his past project, MeshCube. The MeshCube is a tiny mesh networking tool that Chris and a partner developed in Hamburg. Chris talked about what worked and what didn't work with that project, showed off some cool hacks (mesh network robots!) and was (like Hugh) open about mistakes. Sitting in the middle of about 8 WiFi networks (in my home office) as I type this, I'm really interested in mesh networking and I was glad to hear from Chris why it doesn't currently work and what can be done to make it work.
Probably the most important talk, for me, was Martine Pagé's discussion of what we need to do to bring more women to technology conferences. She did a great, fair overview of the topic, and then opened the floor to discussion. We had a really great, frank talk about -- both men and women -- and a lot of diverse points of view were expressed. I'm really appreciative of Martine opening up this discussion, and I'm glad we're going to be more proactive in the Montreal technical community about being inclusive of the really great women working in technology in this city.
There were some other good talks, of course: apenwarr gave a good talk about the new, new way to have a startup; the mysterious and elusive Madame Woo talked about traveling alone; and Australian visitor Moomlyn gave a great description of lucid dreaming. There were good demos of Cake Mail and My Carpool Station. All in all a great set of presentations.
I also liked meeting up with some of the people there. Patrick Tanguay gave a great lunchtime standup symposium about the state of Montreal's coworking space and where we're going from here. I also liked talking with Tamu Townsend, who I hadn't met before.
Probably my best talk was with Sylvain and Martine about what the boundaries of BarCamp are. Why do we have talks about solo travel, digital photography, and lucid dreaming? Sylvain had a great answer: BarCamp comes out of the hacker ethic: that spirit of curiosity, humor, passion and playfulness that makes working on computers so enjoyable for so many. If someone can communicate that same passion and intellectual captivation with another subject, it's going to go over well at BarCamp, no problem. Well said!
Pros and cons
Here are some things I liked and didn't like about BarCampMontreal2. First, things I liked:
- The people. Yet again, meeting up with my favourite technologists in Montreal. Many people I first met at BarCampMontreal1, and it was nice to see how our friendships have developed in the 6 months since then.
- Diversity. I was really glad that there were many more women at this vent than at previous ones. My guess is somewhere around 20-25%, which isn't anywhere near where it should be but a big improvement over the 5-10% we had at BarCampMontreal1. Special props to Hugh, whose invite to women was, I think, pretty helpful. And of course to all the women who took the extra step to show up at a majority-male event.
- The presentations. Almost uniformly really, really good. Some were just excellent.
- Lunch. Simple and easy, didn't get in the way of socializing.
- The Bar. I liked having the bar open at lunch. Having a beer with friends really changes the dynamic of the event; and SAT has a decent selection of brews and friendly barstaff.
- The screens. A-V was great this time around -- good job by SAT on this.
- The space. It was cool having the back room at SAT. It's a really nice place for this kind of event.
- Powerpoint Karaoke. A great idea (people have to give 5-minute presentations based on off-topic slidesets they've never seen before), but I think the scheduling was off. It would have been great to spread these out between other sessions during the day for comic relief, rather than clumped all together at once.
Second, things I wasn't happy about:
- Registration. It was really great being welcomed at BarCampMontreal1, and this was distinctly missing at our second event. We had a pile of nametags on the table by the door, and no other form of greeting. For a space like SAT, this just didn't work. I'm going to volunteer to help out with this step at future events, since it's so important.
- Coffee. I realize I'm a coffeeholic, but it would have been nice to have a coffee table out. It's nice to have on a rainy Saturday, and it gives shy people something to do.
- T-shirts. I think every BarCamp should be an event worthy of a t-shirt. Fred gave out some shirts left over from BarCampMontreal1, but it would have been nice to have new ones for this event, too.
- Tables. I realize they're expensive to rent, but dang, they're really great to have if you've got your laptop and other techno doodads. It changes the event from being a show to being a symposium.
- Schedule timing. The (very important) talk by Martine about women in tech conferences ran far over schedule and wiped a few talks off the board. I think that was a mistake. After it was done, the joke segment of Powerpoint Karaoke started. By the time it was finished, 60% of the audience was gone, even though there were 4 serious talks still to go. We need to do a better job with timing this kind of thing so we keep the energy going through the entire day.
- Too much noise from the café area. As people drifted off from the main presentation area, the café filled up, making for lots of loud chatter that drowned out the presentations. We should probably figure out how to fix this problem; it would be nice to stimulate this casual conversation while still being respectful to the speakers. Maybe more breaks (one in the morning and one in the afternoon)?
- <100% participation. It seemed like there were a lot of spectators this time around, which drags down the participative nature of the event. I think that asking registrants how they're going to participate when they come to the door is a great way to gently remind people that they're expected to be involved (we do this for Burning Man events sometimes). I think Powerpoint Karaoke and other exercises would be a great way to get better hands-on participation by people who didn't prepare talks. (I hope that MadameWoo does a talk in the future about how to do an ad-hoc talk at BarCamp.)
My net feeling about the event was extremely positive, and I'm making these notes not to criticize anyone but to remind myself to do something about them for the next BarCampMontreal. I think that we can continuously improve this event to be inclusive, stimulating, fun and exciting, and I hope we keep this great barcamp spirit going in this city for a long time.