What is Barcamp?
BarCamp is an international organization of unconferences that focus on internet technology and culture. Unconferences are known for being democratically run, planned by volunteers, free to attend, and participatory in nature. BarCamp is known for being an event where geeks of all shapes and sizes can teach, learn, and develop new ideas. BarCamp gets its name from Foo Camp. Among programmers, foo, bar, and baz are “words” commonly used to take the place of any word–these are called meta-syntactic variables. Foo Camp started in 2005 as an annual invite-only conference hosted by technology publisher Tim O’Reilly. As a reaction to the exclusionary event, interested individuals established BarCamp. Now, Foo Camp continues to happen every year in the San Francisco area, while BarCamp happens nearly every weekend in a different part of the world. For example, the first weekend of June of 2007, there were BarCamps planned in San Diego, CA, Seoul, North Korea, Sacramento, CA, Toronto, Ontario
BarCampBirmingham is a user generated conference created around an open, participatory workshop-event, with content provided by participants. Those participating choose the session topics for the day and then present to each other. It’s free. It’s fun. It’s a great way to meet the local technology community. BarCamp is meant to be a conference for the people, by the people. Anyone who attends is asked to participate in some way. That can mean helping to organize the event, presenting a session, or just participating in a session given by others. The Rules Of BarCamp 1st Rule: You do talk about BarCamp. 2nd Rule: You do blog about BarCamp. 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot. 4th Rule: Only three word intros. 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for. 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists. 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation s