BarCampChennai raises the ‘bar’ even higher !!

BarCampChennai is over and it was a SMASHING success. In term of the participants’ energy levels at the event as well as the quality of presentations showcased there, I think, BarCampChennai has succeeded in ‘raising the bar‘ for performance even higher than the Delhi event. It also shows that the small tech community in India has unleashed its firepower and you can ignore it, only at the risk of flowing against this (technological) tide.

A big thanks to Kiruba, Vijay, Adel, Ganesh, Narain and other facilitators for making this happen.

Here’s a few of my takes about the event :

- Best OneLiner heard at the event - Kiruba to Sujatha Jagannathan of PodBazaar who was talking her session from California through a Skype voice over - ‘I think…………….you may………have to………… live with the disturbance…” (the sentence was said very, very slowly and with the utmost of respectful regards, punctuated with pauses at the right places; wish I had recorded this)

Kiruba, I loved the way you put it; you might consider becoming a diplomat for this.

- Best PhotoShot :

Shyam was the timekeeper and was probably the most disliked guy at the event for doing this….

- Best Unconference photoshot

This is a shot of a session in progress ; God, is this a conference?..off course not…this is a unconference…

- Best Session : The ‘Cash-Rich‘ Quiz at the end of Day2; the kids from the Microsoft Student Partner program added a fabulously comic end to the days proceedings.

- Most ‘Unconference’ kind of a session- Vinu’s session on the first day; it was sudden, abrupt and totally in the ‘unconference’ mould and took place amidst a din of noise and clutter. But thats exactly the way all sessions should be. Thanks Vinu for showing us the correct way…

- Real v/s Pseudo BarCamp- the real Barcamp happened over beer at a Beach resort on the Chennai-Pondicherry highway on the first evening. What happened at Anna University was obviously the illusionary one (that was just the maya at work ) .

- The most compassionate BarCampers around - My heart goes out to the kids from the Microsoft Student Partner Programme who demoed Office 12; poor kids - they had to bear the brunt of anti-Microsoftism from 75 die-hard MS haters for two whole days !! And they are not even MS employees !!!

- the LifeHacker Award for BarCampChennai- I think it should go toAswin Anand for hacking the BarCamp session scheduler in a jiffy. Great work !!!

- the Top-Secret session of BarCampChennai- Muthu’s session on UX Design where it seems, he was showing us classified SUN MicroSystem stuff (thats his claim, although I don’t recall seeing anything which might remotely be so). He was begging everybody around not to blog his session contents.

- Joke of the day- Prathul Prabhakar, another Microsoft Student Partner was giving a demo of the 2007 Office System Suite; he happened to be standing in front of the projected screen which was displaying a Microsoft logo. Somebody asked him to move from in front of the screen since the view was getting blocked. Prathul casually said- ‘Oh ! Theres nothing important on the screen now’. This was greeted with a big chorus ‘We totally agree with you, MS isn’t imp.‘ from the crowd. The poor guy was embarassed to the hilt.

A couple of interesting tidbits about my own insignificant self (which also kind of added to the ‘unconference’ nature of my trip to Chennai)

- first day, I took an auto from my hotel to the venue; midway through the route (and thanks to a smart autowallah) I realised that we were actually going towards Madras University instead of Anna Unniversity. I needed to confirm this and didn’t have anybody’s cell number readily. So I had to make the auto stand on the side of a busy street, while I took out my laptop, switched it on, opened my Thunderbird email client, got Ganesh’s number from one of Kiruba’s earlier emails and called him up to confirm the location. (The autowallah, incidentally was a sporting guy and he waited patiently during this 10 minute delay, trying to peer into my laptop to see what it is)

- I got an IPOD as the prize for a blog review of TaaZZa’s upcoming news website. It saved my day as I had planned to take out time and buy something for my wife from Chennai but couldn’t find the time. So the IPOD came as a handy gift to placate my dear wife.