Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > August > 06 > Entry
There are ‘Camps coming!
On Monday, a column I wrote ran in the paper about the dearth of BarCamp-style events in Austin this year.
Sure, ProductCamp Austin Summer 2010 is Saturday and it turns out there’s also a VideoCamp Austin the same day. (I guess ProductCamp and VideoCamp didn’t figure there’s be much audience overlap in their scheduling.) If that’s not campy enough for you, there’s also a Austin Non Profit Camp on the way. Jon Lebkowsky tells me it’ll be either Oct. 15 or 16, at the ACC Eastview Campus. There’s also a TXGov2.0 conference Jon’s helping organize, probably for January.
Dustin Haisler from the City of Manor tells me that the town will be host to a Gov. 2.0 unconference Sept. 20-21.
It turns out there is stuff going on, it just hadn’t happened in 2010 yet.
Lastly, William Hurley, whom I quoted in the story, tells me that there’s an iOS development camp soon to be announced (I’ll update this post with details when they’re available). He answered questions over e-mail for my column and I wasn’t able to fit nearly enough of what he said into the piece. Here’s some of the answers he gave me last week:
William “Whurley” Hurley: BarCampAustin3 was supposed to be my last camp before handing the reigns over; that’s part of the reason we made it such a blow out event. That was my “thank you, goodnight” moment. When BarCampAustin4 rolled around in 2009 I received a call from the new crew in which they asked “how do you cancel a BarCamp?”. Fortunately we worked with SxSW on a venue and a number of great volunteers stepped up to make BarCampAustin4 happen. When 2010 rolled around I was in the middle of launching Chaotic Moon Studios and though we looked for volunteers, there were none to be found. Personally I wasn’t in any position to give the event the time and attention I requires, and I’d rather not do an event than do it poorly.
There seem to be fewer BarCamp-style events in Austin this year, or at least fewer that are calling themselves “Camps.” Is it a kind of event designation whose time has come and gone? Has it gone out of vogue?
I don’t think it’s gone out of vogue. I think people don’t realize exactly how much work it is. Once they do, very few people stick around. I always advise people trying to do these types of community events to ask themselves one question “do you want to be a community leader, or do you want to do what community leaders do?”. There’s a huge difference between those two. One sounds, and can be glamorous. The other side of that however equates to having more hours than most people work in a full time job stacked on top of your current responsibilities. Most of the time those hours go unnoticed and unappreciated and most people can’t handle that because they’re doing the camp for the wrong reasons to being with. Me, I just love
community. It’s all about the “we” and not the “me” so I’ve never needed that type of acknowledgment or had any issue with putting in the time. It’s a labour of love.
You say the camp scene is changing. How so? What is it evolving into?
I think you’re starting to see a mashup between meetups and camps. i.e. meetups where you have sessions. This is far simpler for most people to plan. It also has the additional benefit of being easier to find a sponsor for; not to mention needing fewer sponsors. I think in the future you’ll see a mashup of traditional events and unconferences as well. Many traditional conferences already include some sort of “birds of a feather” or “barcamp” like event these days anyway. In other words, the unconference movement has been very successful. So much so that it’s inevitable that it will be integrated into more traditional events.
After what happened with the Palm dev camp is it harder to get developers interested in these kinds of events for specific platform development or was that an aberration?
Not at all. As a community leaders, we understood the difference between control and influence. When it came to preDevCamp we set things up so that each community was both a symbiotic part of a larger whole and an autonomous entity able to make its own decisions and function independent of our leadership. The event was designed that way for a number of reasons, the most important that we wanted you not to just participate in an event of this magnitude, but be the architects of its future. Because of this the majority of events still took place and most developers never noticed a difference.
Have more structured, pay-to-attend tech events had to restructure and rethink the way they do things based on last year’s rise of BarCamp-style events?
I think so. Simply put people are tired of the historical model for events. The unconference style event almost always cost less to participate in and delivers more value to the attendees.
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