Bar Camp started

I write this post from my first http://www.barcamp.org. Microsoft, San Francisco are our hosts for the weekend. I've got the layout of the office sussed and the food has arrived, obviously, the beer was there from the start. There is word in the room that a Scottish Barcamp could be on the cards. More later.

2am and the first session of barcamp is just about at a close. Time to find a place to rollout the sleeping bag. One of the walls has been used to segment time over Saturday and Sunday and the neat thing is the agenda is just made up as those who want to present sign up to a session. That will then attract or otherwise an audience. The intellectual chat tonight has been a great release and the idea flow is endless. 9am start tomorrow.

First looked at the time at 7.30am. I must of got some sleep. The floor was real hard. Already, some of the campers are up and preparing for the start of the day. The wall of presentations is filling up.

Now, 5.30 the day has past quickly. We self formed a health/medical/blogging group that met at the Bloggercon venue. This was a insightful and valuable session from a small group that has real experience of where we are at as this industry takes shape.

Then back to bar camp to participate in micro identity session and to provide feedback to Microsoft.

Ideas and self forming conversation on a breadth of topics is all about. I decided not to camp out on the floor Saturday, opting to head back to Mountain View.

Arrived back in barcamp at Sunday lunch time. I had put together a couple of slides on the topic of Website Independent Comparison Shopping, tool bar demo, and by good chance there was still an opening on the schedule to present. Before that Tara and Chris lead a session on the concept of their Citizen Agency. At the heart of this vision is to enable individuals to work on things that they want to and a mechanism to remunerate. Self organizing peer to peer, shared values to practical skill set, trusted network.

Then I got my turn to present the ecoTorch toolbar we developed to an alpha stage in 2001. Turns out www.flock.com has a project heading in this direction and I need to follow that up. Thank you to all those that participated.

Then is was time for Barcamp to quite literally clean and tidy up. All chipped in and Microsoft offices were back ready for their employees on Monday morning.

Barcamp was great, thank you to all for making it what it is. I'll need to find the time to get a barcamp in Aberdeen up and running. Open source from code to ideas is going to change the world.