Hey, you’re invited! It’s free, it’s fun, it’s nerdy nirvana! Join us. I helped organize this year, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for an epic turnout so invite your friends. ;-)
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. It is an international network of user generated non-traditional social conferences— open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. Oh and super fun!!
Here’s a plan @brucephenry, @geekgiant, and I hatched on Twitter. We noticed there’s quite a few Seattle Geeks who love to go shooting, and thusly determined we should all go shooting together. So here’s the plan:
WHERE: Wades Eastside Guns and Outdoor Range
13570 Bel-Red Road, Bellevue, WA 98005 WHEN: Tuesday, March 10th at 7pm, until we abandon ship for beer (Wades closes at 10pm) COST: Lane rental is $15 for the first person, $10 for each additional on the lane up to three people. Gun rental is as little as $8, or bring your own. Targets are $.25 – $1 each, depending on size. WHY: Who doesn’t like to blow stuff up? All geeks are welcome, whether Republicans, Democrats, marksmen, n00bs, or anything in between.
So before you leave for Austin, come get your cowboy on with us. Please RSVP with a comment so I know how many people to plan for. Also, please use the #SGS1 hashtag on Twitter to pass the word along, and feel free to bring a friend!
UPDATE: SGS1 has come and gone, and it was a lot of fun! 13 people showed up, and we had a blast.
If you’ve be interested in giving Seattle Geek Shootout another go, please leave a comment. I’ve be happy to organize another one, perhaps on a Monday, when the range is a little less crowded.
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:
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 theBrian 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.
