Barcamp Berlin 3 is over and with the closing of Berlin Web Week I´m finding time to write down a little conclusion from organizer side.
Overall I see this Barcamp as a success and thank all participants who took part. A special thanks to everybody who helped out during / before and after the two days, your offering to help was very much appreciated. We had around 800 unique visitors, some Saturday, some Sunday and most of you came both days. At the end we had 102 sessions and only one spot in Sunday morning’s sessions was left empty. That is really impressive. Also the visitors from Kirgistan and Australia did make my day. It was great to see you guys.
I am very happy with the atmosphere throughout the whole Barcamp and I heard that a lot of networking took place. Also, with the exception of the Ad-hoc network, internet connectivity was always good. ;-)
Ok, we were a little bit too optimistic with the acoustic in our “Open Space”, trying to have the speaker speak in different directions wasn´t enough to divide the talks. That was a learning for us although I personally still find this concept very promising. Mea culpa.
I hope our little modification on Sunday did help a little.
There is only one thing that leaves me wondering. A lot of Blog-Posts cover the topic of low session quality and annoying sales pitches. The conclusion, that the basic rules of Barcamp are not used anymore is near with hearing this.
First of all: YOU ARE BARCAMP! That means that all of you take part in making Barcamps a success. And hearing about bad session quality gives me the burning question, why no one else is holding better sessions or helping the respective speaker if possible. If there is a sesssion you do not like, do walk out of it, but make sure to give constructive feedback to the person holding it - how else are they suppose to understand and improve? I also know some experts in certain topics not holding a session this time, but lament on poor session quality. YOU ARE BARCAMP!
Another thing I hear very often lately is “Quality Sunday”. This means that some campers see the sessions on Saturday as superficial and do only want to hold sessions on Sunday. Great thing! Just leave Saturday to all the “others”, not so high quality sessions… what a nice move.
I´m not able to follow. For me you are just wasting one complete day! A day made possible by a lot of people and sponsors. You also have an emphasis on different classes of campers, putting a block on the equal sharing, which is the base of this unconference form. THIS IS NOT BARCAMP!
Last thing I´d like to feature is the sales pitches. I heard some complains this year and I´m still wondering, why nobody addresses this within the respective sessions. If you´re not able to give feedback or use your feet to leave the session room than you will be ignored. It´s a pity to see this unfiltered consumption taking place.
You need to remember that you all are Barcamp. The organizers just provide the necessary framework, organize a location, drinks and food if there are enough sponsors. But even with that covered, at the end of the day it is still just the framework to allow every participant to make this his or her own event, contribute and be active. Meaning each and every one of us is responsible for success or failure. This means active participation, which I missed at some Barcamps lately…
Please don´t see this post as an affront to anyone. It´s just that these question keep wandering in my mind and I think that they need to be addressed. For the good of future Barcamp I´d like to see this topics discussed a lot and I´m looking forward to your comments.
Hi,
I was able to be at Barcamp only on Sunday, but I have to say it was a great event! I’ve met many interesting people doing interesting projects!
About sales pitches. I was warned: “do not make a sales pitch” and I didn’t. I tried to present a quite complex topic (semantic tags). Trying to get some advanced discussion going. There was actually large audience. But considering the audience response I’d say that was a wrong decision. I felt that level at which audience was interested in things would far more call for a sales pitch. Sorry to say that…
I felt the same when participating at one other presentation that tried to cover quite advanced topic.
Also at both sessions there was no feedback from audience as to regard to commenting the quality of presentation.
For next time, maybe leave sales pitches there, but require them to label themselves as such at the scheduling session. Then audience can decide if they want to hear it or not.
A feedback system would also come handy.
bye
Andraz Tori
Tobi, just to let you know. The idea about the ‘quality Sunday’ came out of the observation that a lot of people only attend barcamp Saturdays. I have seen barcamps where the numbers dropped 50% from Saturday to Sunday.
On the other hand I think that each barcamp day has its own spirit. Saturday is a lot about catching up, doing the basic sessions (like what is twitter etc.) etc. On Sundays as I said there are only the truly involved people there most of the time. So you got a bunch of really motivated people and can do more focused and forward thinking sessions. On the other hand by Sunday all the newbies got the concept of how a barcamp works and may do their own session. The sad thing is that a lot of people miss out by only attending Saturdays and this is why I’m promoting the Sunday. Not to say that Saturday sucks but to show people that a barcamp is really about BOTH days and that both days together make up the perfect mix.
But I also have another question: Can a barcamp be too big?
Hi Johannes, I see your point, but the reception I have noticed is a little different. The dangerous thing is in my opinion the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect. And this could absolutely be observed in Berlin. A lot of good people ONLY held a session on Sunday. I´d like to see a lot more activity on Saturdays again, maybe in the afernoon….
Regarding your question: I don´t know! I got the personal feeling that Barcamp Berlin 3 was still within the limits. A lot of networking took place and a lot of sessions too. On the other hand we did some more organisational stuff in the background, scratching a little bit on the un-conference idea. In the end it depends on the view of each camper.
I know what you mean. But in Berlin it felt like everybody was rushing to the front to introduce a session on Saturday morning. So I personally thought it might be good to hold back so that Sunday won’t turn up empty at all ;-)
Btw. I’ve been to the social media camp in London which was only one day and I can definitely tell you that there is whole different dynamic when you have one day or two. I don’t see the problem with doing more basic sessions on the first day and then get into the meat on the second. People have to get their head into the game first before they can progress.
I think that this barcamp was within the limits, too. But it nevertheless was really though to do discussion based sessions which I like the most at barcamps. If I would have known that about 50 people would show up in my session I would have prepared it much more as a talk then a discussion. But as we never had a barcamp that big it was not a mistake but a learning. And there is nothing wrong with a big barcamp you just have to adjust to it.
Great (un)conference! I finally managed to blog about “BarCamp Berlin 3 revisited”
http://communitysense.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/barcamp-berlin-3-revisited/