The majority of people probably do not know what a BarCamp event is. Each BarCamp is an informal conference where people share and learn in an open environment. These conferences typically are intense events with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. BarCamp rules require that all attendees must contribute; no passive attendance is allowed. Participation could include giving a presentation on a subject of interest, engaging in group discussion, or contributing logistical volunteer support. Most BarCamps do not target a specific subject category. Usually they are named for a geographic region such as a city, state, or country. There are some specialized BarCamp events that do target a specific topic such as BlogCamp. Most BarCamps cover technical topics, but there are a few that are dedicated to completely non-technical subjects such as ArtCamp and WineCamp.
BarCamp Texas was a combination of BarCamp participants and organizers from BarCamp Austin, BarCamp Dallas, BarCamp Houston, and BarCamp San Antonio; all joining forces to have a larger combined BarCamp. This year it was held in Austin, TX starting Friday evening, August 25, and ended Sunday afternoon.
The Friday evening activity was just a social get together at Epoch Coffee, which is one of Austin’s local coffee shops. This was a nice social networking opportunity. For me, I was most hoping to meet others that were involved in Ruby on Rails, SEO, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. I had no trouble finding others with those interests. Some of the people I met also had other interests that I enjoyed hearing about, such as information about some of the robot projects the Austin robot group members are working on.
The main part of the event was on Saturday from Noon until about 8:00 PM, and was at the Elysium night club. They did have a open floor, and a stage which could be used for the presentations and demos. Some of the most useful information I got out of some of the sessions included:
- Information about the Wordpress content management system. In the past I never bothered to evaluate Wordpress because I assumed it targeted blogging too much for my purposes. I discovered that it had many capabilities for building more general websites that also contain a blog. My previous favorite CMS has been Drupal. So far I have found Wordpress easier to install, configure, customize, and populate with content. It also has a much nicer set of existing themes that you can add to customize the website appearance. It appears to be easier to create custom themes, and plugins than with Drupal. I just may have a new favorite CMS. In addition to Wordpress being available as an open source CMS, it is also available as a Wordpress hosting service, including a free and premium accounts.
- There was a presentation on how much easier it is to develop software on the Macintosh with the Cocoa application framework than it was on the Macintosh before OS X. The presenter also stated that developing with Cocoa is easier than developing with Microsoft’s .net framework. So I am interested in investigating this more. The presenter has been developing in .net for a number of years, so he seemed to be in a good position to make that comparison.
- There was a demonstration on how to simplify displaying XML data in a matrix format with AJAX.
There were several topics that I very much wanted to hear about that were included in the Proposed Session list, but were not actually covered. I am not sure what happened to them. I suspect that this was one of the effects of the fact that the original venue host backed out of hosting BarCamp Texas 2006 less than 48 hours before the event. Fortunately the organizers were able to get alternate locations in such short order.
The activities on Sunday resumed at Triumph Cafemore of a wrap-up social networking function.
Anyone that is interested in technology related topics should make a point to attend a local BarCamp event. Most BarCamps will likely be held annually. I could see this type of event expanding well beyond of technology related subjects. I have attended many conferences, most of which were not free. I have found that BarCamp sessions typically have more content than many other conferences. BarCamp is definitely a worthwhile activity.
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