BarCamp Berlin 3

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.