Anthony Stevens did a great job liveblogging the MindCamp experience. If you’re confused about what being at an “unconference” is like, I’d highly recommend giving it a read through for the play by play. This was my first unconference myself, and I had no clue what to expect. I suspected awesomeness. I was totally right. This is what I’ve gathered: true to the bar-camp, foo-camp, word-camp, Word-Ignite-Bar-Camp-Camp-Camp-Camp-Palooza-PDX (no, really) format, all unconferences hold to the idea that a conference would probably be just as useful if the speakers were randomly selected from the group going to the conference. It’s an intriguing model: get space, get food, get interesting people together, and see what happens. These are motivated folk. A lot happens.

MindCamp is a 24 hour event (no sleep for the elite), and a good chunk of that is scheduled out by the participants suggesting session ideas and then everyone voting on which sessions we wanted. Every hour, a new 45 minute session would start, and there were generally about six to choose from. The schedule looked like this:

Schedule

It was difficult to choose, to say the least. I usually had about two or three I wanted to hit. I only skipped one hour of sessions to take a break and upload photos. Many of the sessions I did go to can only be described as fascinating brain candy, a few memorable ones were “How to be a Flickr Ninja” (lead by Stewtopia, who took the photo below), “Nerdcraft” (lead by Beth Goza), “Human Tribes and Social Media” (by the Brian Dorsey), “Portals: Making your Life an Adventure Game” (lead by Leif Hanson), a group brainstorming session on “Location Based Services” and “Political Activism and Social Media” (lead by Kathy Gill).

I also went to a session lead by Mónica Guzmán and Jason Preston in which we decided to make a “Viral Video”. Now, I realize one cannot create a viral video, you create a video and it either goes viral or not, but we tried to make a video that had aspects which might make it popular: short, funny, something people could identify with, etc. I wish we could have made the sound a little better in parts, but Jason did an amazing job with editing what we had. We brainstormed the ideas and shot all the scenes in about 45 minutes, so I’m pretty happy with what came out of it:

It was a really fun and informative use of 24 hours, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone with a geeky streak. I met a lot of kindred spirits, and got to spend some time with good friends as well. A big thank you to Synapse who hosted us in their amazing office space in downtown Seattle, and Andru Edwards for organizing.