The next stop on the BarCamp Tour is New Orleans for BarCamp NOLA, which takes place this weekend! And it’s not me going solo — I’m being joined by my coworker Edward Ocampo-Gooding, where we’ll participate in both the main BarCamp on Saturday and the Hack Day on Sunday.
Some quick info about BarCamp NOLA:
- When: Saturday, July 16th for BarCamp, Sunday, July 17th for the Hack Day, 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on both days.
- Where: LaunchPad/4.0 Schools, 643 Magazine Street, New Orleans LA.
- How to register: Register at BarCamp NOLA’s EventBrite page. Hurry — as of this writing, only 25 slots remain!
BarCamp is an unconference. The idea behind unconferences is to turn the concept of a conference upside-down. You still have sessions at an unconference, but rather than being planned by the organizers, they’re created by the attendees. At the start of BarCamp, any attendee with an idea for a session can propose one and get it on the schedule grid, which gives that session a time slot and a room in which to hold it. Some people have sessions ready, others extemporize them on the spot, but in either case, sessions are meant to be more like dialogues rather than lectures. At BarCamp, there are no spectators, only participants!
BarCamp Tour is an “unsponsorship”. It’s made up of a number of startups: BatchBlue, Grasshopper Group, MailChimp, Shopify and Wufoo. While we do one traditional sponsor thing — namely, providing money to help BarCamps — we go beyond traditional sponsorship. If a BarCamp needs a session and no one’s proposing one, we’ll do one. We’ve done all sorts of sessions on all sorts of topics, from HTML5 and CSS to escaping from the corporate world to running your startup like Genghis Khan. We also help put together the after-party. We also help the organizers out any way we can, even if it’s just moving chairs and cleaning up.
On Sunday, they’re holding a Hack Day. Here’s how the BarCamp NOLA folks describe it:
The New Orleans twist on BarCamp is our second day “Hack Day.” With all the diversified talent in one room, let’s giving something back to the community! Developers, designers, educators, content writers, and videographers collaborate to build and launch a project in a single day.
I’m looking forward to this one. Watch this blog for reports from BarCamp NOLA!