Saturday was BarCampDC 3, the third iteration of the free BarCamp-style unconference in DC, where there are no spectators (only participants); attendees set the agenda; everybody contributes and has a chance to lead a session; and during sessions, attendees are encouraged to vote with their feet if they’re not getting what they want from the discussion.
Apparently, another characteristic of weekend unconferences is that I’m unable to get to them on time. I also forgot my camera (brought the accessories, though) and had a hard time finding parking, so I was a little frazzled — I missed the agenda-setting and first session, so it took me a while to get settled in.
The event was held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library (aka the DC Public Library), spread between the basement meeting rooms and some of the upstairs lobby rooms. I don’t think I’d ever actually been inside the library before. Access to power and wifi was good (except for one room); outside of some early temperature shifts and the occasional random passerby wandering through the upstairs lobby rooms, the space was fine.
The first session I attended (second of the day) was about developing gadgets for Google Wave, though also covered the essential question, “What the heck is Google Wave and what’s it good for?” (I got my invite and have used it, but admit I still have no good answer to the question.) A lot of attention has been focused on the real-time chat aspect (where you can others’ typing as it happens), though we were encouraged to not get distracted by that and look at Wave more as interconnected, embeddable, commentable document collaboration (with gadgets), without having to worry about servers and protocols, and that it will iterate and evolve according to how users actually use it.
The lunch session I sat in on sought to form organizing committee for a TEDx event in DC; TEDx essentially licenses the TED concept, bringing thought leaders across disciplines to speak (there had been a TEDx Mid Atlantic just this month that’d I’d managed to miss completely). TEDx is the kind of prestige event that I most likely wouldn’t be able to attend unless I was helping to organize it, and there’s no shortage of star power in DC, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
Post-lunch was a neat session looking at free, location-based mashup technologies (that broadened to look at other mashup technologies); I’ll just throw out a bunch of links mentioned including GeoNames, MaxMind, ip2location, GeoHash, OpenCalais, ProgrammableWeb, and my favorite, StupidFilter.
The next session I split between a discussion of computer-generated audio and video (I would characterize it as trying to build Anthem, the everything-to-music converter from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency), and a wide-ranging discussion of generalist vs. specialist (which covered everything from the elevation of manual labor, work-life balance, networking and personal growth).
The final session was a pretty useful discussion on how to be a good freelancer; there was a lot of good, though sometimes contradictory info about how to talk to your employer about side gigs, corporate structure, the role of lawyers, accounting tips, managing clients, managing projects and scope creep, and billing.
Because of scheduling, the last session was abandoned (or rather, continued at the bar) — the happy hour included BarCamp participants, as well as the woman-oriented DC She’s Geeky (scheduled at the same time as BarCamp, it may account for the particularly male-heavy attendance there).
For more information, check out posts, photos, and tweets tagged “barcampdc3″ and “barcamp.”
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