Category — Events

The Sunday edition of the Economic Times carried this report on the BarCamp juggernaut in the Indian tech community. It talks about how the philosophy behind the ‘unconference’ is proving to be a big hit with Indian techies across the country.

Check out this link for a snapshot of the report.

A big thanks to ET’s Priya Saini for reporting this ..

With the blogosphere on fire in India with regard to BarCamps, can the electronic/print media be far behind. DNA, the stylish Mumbai based paper, has a report on the BarCamp phenomenon in India titled ‘Revenge of the geeks, now showing near you’; I think the report captures the essense of the event quite correctly.

A big thanks to DNA’s Jayalakshmi Menon for covering this.

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)

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The Delhi Geek dinner, organised by Rakesh Agarwal of Snapstreams was held at the DT Mega Mall in Gurgaon last night. This was a follow up event to BarCampDelhi and was meant to cement the relationships that sprouted during that event.

A ‘Mad-Monday’ evening is probably not best suited for an event like this and that probably explained the small gathering, with 12 people turning up for the event. The atmosphere was calm and relaxed. The event began with each attendee introducing himself (I can afford to be gender insensitive since no women were present) to the group in a few words . The discussions that followed ranged from Microsoft’s mobile windows platform to the rising cost of commercial real estate in Delhi/NCR ; from BarCamp to Rakesh’s killer(new) mobile phone.

To see the original high resolution images on flikr, clich this link.

The event bore testimony to the fact that one of our motivations behind organising BarCampDelhi seems to be bearing fruit; we can see a tech-startup microcosm beginning to take shape in Delhi/NCR. Somebody remarked that the next time BarCamp happens in Delhi , the number of attendees would be four times what it was this time; I’d agree with that view.

Look forward to more of such events in future.

Inspired by the success of BarCampDelhi, other Indian cities are not willing to be left behind. Within a week of the Delhi event, come the announcements of two more BarCamps - one at Chennai & the other one at Hyderabad.

Wake up - Mumbai, Bangalore & Pune !!! Surely you don’t wish to be the laggards in this race .

BTW , it seems , both the Chennai & Hyd events are slated for the 8th of April; thats perfectly avoidable, since a few enthusiasts might want to be present at both events. The organisers should probably have a chat and work out mutually exclusive dates .

We (as the initiators of the BarCamp Movement in India & Asia) are thrilled to see the enthusiasm that such an event has generated amongst the country’s tech community. Look forward to many such BarCamps in the coming days.