Dummies Guide to organizing a BarCamp in your city…

Since DelhiBarCamp, I’ve received a wide variety of queries about the event. They are coming from all quarters– people who want to organize BarCamp in their city and wish to learn from our experience; people who have heard of BarCamp before and want to explore it further; also people who have never heard of it before and would much rather believe that BarCamp is a crash course for aspiring bartenders.

So here’s a back-to-the-basics guide about organizing a BarCamp in your city. This post is essentially a brain dump, where I’ve tried to pass on our learning’s from organizing DelhiBarCamp. The idea is to let others improve on our mistakes. It’s a bunch of random thoughts that may be useful to wannabe BarCampers…… (I was planning to do this earlier but it’s a lonnng post, so it took a few sittings to put this together)

What’s BarCamp- it’s an ‘unconference’; its open and free; it’s organized bottoms-up instead of top-down; anybody can organize it and anybody can attend it; it mostly has first time speakers rather than celebrity speakers ; more on it in this link

History of BarCamp- check out this link to learn the politics behind its inception

Who can organize BarCamp- anybody can; I can, you can and so can your/my neighbor. There is no restriction and you don’t need anybody’s permission; just create a page for your event on the BarCamp wiki and start spreading the word around. It’ll help to get a bunch of 3-4 enthusiasts who are ready to stick their necks out and give it a real push.

Announcing BarCamp- A three-four weeks lead time is ideal for organizing an event like this; just about fine to spread the word around but still not enough to let the brouhaha die out; if a bunch of people are announcing it on their blogs, its better to stagger your posts rather than everybody blogging it on the same day (this helps in perpetuating the blogospheric chatter); also if you believe in the spooky ‘Tuesday morning is best for blogs’ theory, no harm in giving that a try.

Theme for BarCamp- again this could be anything; while it’s likely that most BarCamps would be related to technology, that’s not necessarily true; you could have BarCamps about filmmaking, Formula 1, wine drinking et al; anything of interest to a community…

For DelhiBarCamp, we were unsure about the kind of response we would get, so we intentionally kept the theme broad based and inclusive; this helped to lower the entry barriers for the fence sitters; I think this was a key to the success of DelhiBarCamp…

Venue for BarCamp- I think its important to select a venue that affords flexibility in terms of scheduling; for remember, in the true spirit of BarCamp, anybody/everybody is allowed to register as a speaker (even till last minute); now this inherently means that you don’t have a fix of how many sessions are happening; is it 20 ? Or 35? What if 5 people turn up at the last moment; will you say no to them? Those kinds of issues….

A safety net against this problem is to have a venue that has multiple rooms (or conference facilities); this gives you the ability to seamlessly accommodate as many speakers as need be. Multiple rooms serve another not-so-obvious purpose; they help to lower the pressure on speakers to perform; for many speakers would be first-timers and having them face a smaller audience instead of a large conference hall packed with people helps to embolden then further.

Another thing that could help is to have a two-day event instead of one; thus the scheduling indiscretions of the first day can be adjusted on the second day; DelhiBarCamp was a one day event and so we were always against a tight schedule; it also meant that the scheduling issue had to be handled more hands-on by us that what is warranted for such an event.

Floating schedules- As mentioned above, this is probably the biggest logistical challenge in organizing a BarCamp; In DelhiBarCamp we kept on getting emails from speakers before the event, asking us why we were not putting out the schedule on the wiki. However, we didn’t do it but I am not sure that is the best way of handling that situation. Do what your instinct tells you; if you feel that the scale of the event is such that it can be loosely structured and self-organizing, then maybe you can do what we did; on the other hand, if you have lots of speakers and attendees, maybe you don’t have an option but to predetermine the schedules.

You could also explicitly split the sessions up into streams or sections (e.g. diff sessions for web 2.0, mobile etc); we did this but it was implicit and in hindsight that was a mistake.

Here’s what I would suggest - Let people sign up as speakers as and when they wish; one day ahead of the event, break up the schedule into streams and put it up on the wiki but don’t decide the presentation order ; let that happen on the spot …there’s a certain beauty to this approach that is hard to deny…a certain method in the madness, if one may say so.

Sponsors- well, ‘money is what makes the world go round’ but the true spirit of BarCamp is exemplified when the event is seen as being totally non commercial and free of sales pitches. So there’s a trade off here and you would have to do this intelligently. The good thing about sponsorship is that you don’t need large amounts of money; what you need is bits & pieces which can easily be met with small contributions from individuals/companies who believe in the cause.

Venue sponsor- the main venue should ideally be donated rather than rented; if possible select a venue sponsor, who understands the philosophy behind the event and wishes to be a part of this. For DelhiBarCamp, we were lucky to have Adobe as the venue sponsors; we could get them because we, at Uzanto have some business relations with them but even otherwise, they were fabulously magnanimous in their demeanor.

Other sponsors- you’d need money for T-shirts, food, conference equipment etc; I think rather than one individual/company bearing this cost, it should be split up amongst a bunch of people; apart from not hitting anybody’s pockets deeply, this also helps in another way- if monetary contributions are small, then people are less likely to want to get an ROI out of their contributions; this would help in dampening any commercial motives that a sponsor might be harbouring.

My (two paise worth) suggestion- just put a cap of Rs. 5000/- contribution per sponsoring entity.

Publicity- publicity is oxygen for an event like this and the blogosphere is your ‘karmabhoomi’ - blog the heck out of it; get like-minded friends, colleagues & acquaintances to blog it as well; additionally make sure to thank anybody who has blogged it by dropping in a few lines on his blog.

Its possible that you may get a few comments/emails from people who suspect your motivations in organizing a seemingly self-effacing event like this; its better to address these issues with equanimity and not get caught in a cross fire of insinuations. (we actually encountered a small misgiving like this but I think we handled it quite well)

Encourage product launches/demos- remember the adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words‘; well, that the reason why demos, live code-in sessions, product launches are likely to leave a lasting impressions on the audience; so do whatever it takes to encourage people to launch their products or display/demo off early prototypes of what they are currently building .

This may be a little tough given the fact that many Indian companies are services companies than product companies but all the same, give this one a good shot. Believe me, (other factors being equal), this by itself could be the difference between a good & a great BarCamp experience.

Logistics & facilities- needless to say, you need food, wifi, name tags, T-shirts plus other typical conference consumables; make sure you arrange for adequate parking outside/inside the venue premises; also look at security issues- will participants be allowed inside the gates without a pass (I spent a couple of hours with Adobe’s facilities manager to sort out these issues)

Networking- one negative feedback we got from DelhiBarCamp was that while the event overall was great, there was not enough time for networking since the entire day was packed with sessions. Well, we had no options, but if you are having a two day event, you have ample occasions to let people loiter around and network to their heart’s delight.

Uploading, Broadcasting, Podcasting- get people to blog live, set up an IRC channel, podcast, broadcast et al from the actual event; let the blogosphere know you organized a BarCamp in your city

Participants- since BarCamp is a self sign-up event, I feel that while you should blog extensively about it, don’t actively prospect for participants; let people sign up themselves; if you have been successful in getting the word out, people who matter, would surely know about it and take the trouble of being present at BarCamp; in case they haven’t heard of it, they probably are not worth caring about, so don’t spam them needlessly. Self & unsolicitated sign-ups will function inherently like a auto filtering mechanism to ensure that only the people with the right attitudes & expectations, turn up at your BarCamp. For DelhiBarCamp, I had access to a mailing list of Delhi based TiE members and every now and then, I was tempted to spam them, but I didn’t and in hindsight, I think that was a wise move.

Speakers- public speaking is quite intimidating for a lot of people; so do whatever it takes to get the average people to come forward and present a session. Encourage first time speakers rather than the celebrated ones, who seem to be present at every other conference. At the Delhi event, I think 50% speakers would have been first time speakers (though I did not check).

Three things that will help ‘lower the bars‘ for potential speakers

- having multiple rooms so that the audience is split up & hence reduces the pressure to perform
- having a broad based conference theme
- seeing other ‘non celebrity speakers’ signing up - ‘if he can do it, so can I’

Other random tidbits

1) encourage companies to distribute their branded mementoes (pens, cards etc); if people want to give out trial CDs of their software or guest/ beta accounts on the cool web service they are planning to launch, let them do it
2) avoiding sales pitches at BarCamp- we didn’t face this problem at DelhiBarCamp, not a little bit; though don’t ask me how or why; we didn’t do anything for it. Maybe it’s the collective social pressure at work. I think you should be alive to this possibility and take whatever steps you need, to preclude this from your event
3) avoid long winding introductions to sessions- keep it short, simple & elegant ; also, no need to worry about keynote speakers - cut that crap out
4) speakers will come with their laptops and keep fiddling with their presentations till the last minute; hence for individual sessions, budget a 5 minute changeover time to allow for hooking up of laptops/ transferring ppts
5) setup an online feedback form (use an online survey for this ) and put up the link on the wiki
6) start BarCamp with an ice-breaker session; what we did at Delhi was to get every participant to describe in three words (somewhat like technorati or flikr tags) what they expected from the event; in fact this was suggested by Jon, who saw it at the original BarCamp at PaloAlto in july’05 ; so thats almost like a baptizing ritual….