This your official invitation to join us at West Palm Beach’s very first BarCamp which will be held on Monday, November 18th in Downtown West Palm Beach!
BarCamp West Palm will be held along-side Startup Weekend which will run from Friday the 15th of November till Sunday the 18th. BarCamp will be the first event in West Palm Beach’s Entrepreneur Week event.
What is a BarCamp?
To put it simply BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an open and self-organized event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.
A Brief History of BarCamp?
To understand the BarCamp concept, we will need to go back a couple of years to the early 2000’s. It all started with another event called “Foocamp”.
FooCamp is an annual event that stands for Friends Of O’Reilly. It is the ultimate in exclusive conferences & each year technology book publisher and conference producer Tim O’Reilly hand-picks 400 of the people who he considers the smartest and most influential people in technology that year. Part of the attraction of Foocamp is that bringing technology into the event is frowned upon. Often a remote location is chosen & for a week out of the year, the most influential people in technology “go dark” and instead of using technology they spend their time interacting with influential people on a personal level.
This list of who has gone to FooCamp is a Who’s Who of the technology, entrepreneurial world.
After the first couple years, a couple people who were not invited got together and decided to run a conference which along-side FooCamp which instead of being exclusive was completely open. Since the nonsense and unexplainable term “foobar” has a solid spot in technology lore, when deciding what to name a camp which was the opposite of FooCamp, the answer was obvious: BarCamp.
Since the first BarCamp in 2005, every major technical conference has had a user-organized Barcamp which is open for anyone to join, present and discuss whatever they desire.
No Spectators, only Participants: how a BarCamp works
At a BarCamp attendees come to participate. Everyone who comes is encouraged to put together a 10-15 minute presentation on any topic they want.
The organizers will provide several different rooms where discussions will be held on different topics. All the topics are organized on a “Big Board” at the beginning of the event, and through out the event attendees are encouraged to move from room to room if they want so that they can take in & learn as much as possible from the event.
Rules of BarCamp
I found a page where they discuss the “Rules of BarCamp”, I didn’t like them, so I made up my own.
1st Rule: You do talk about BarCamp.
2nd Rule: You do blog/tweet/facebook/pinterest about BarCamp.
3rd Rule: You bring friends to BarCamp, everyone (even non-technical friends) can learn!
4th Rule: No Tourists, only Participants!
5th Rule: Everyone has something to say: If you want to present, write your name & topic in a presentation slot.
6th Rule: We will have as many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
We NEED Sponsors!
While this event will be fairly cheap to run, we will need sponsors to help out with some of the underlying costs. Please email me (awormus@gmail.com) if you are interested in helping out, I will send out a list of opportunities later in the week.
More information is coming soon!
Please LIKE BarCamp Palm Beach on Facebook we will push out more information as soon as it becomes available!
There will be more information including an RSVP page. If you want to get involved in the organisation of BarCamp, please join us at Roxy’s Pub on 11/4/2013 (that’s today) at 6:30 for WebMonday!