A discussion is going on over twitter for the next technology event. Should we have a “core technology camp”? Should we have a “Tech Weekend”? What about the “regular” Barcamp Pune that is expected to be announced soon? There’s also a session on REST by Dhananjay Nene that is being planned – but that is for an advanced audience – those more into architectural issues and long-term thinking. Obviously there is room and need for all of the above, but what about the timing?
Look at recent tweets of @irohan, @IamSB, @d7y, @thecancerus, @ngkabra for the discussion. Twitter was getting unweildy for the discussion, so we’re hoping to move the discussion to the comments on this article.
Here is our attempt to summarize:
(Note: the names attached to each event below does not imply that they support only that event and nothing else. In fact, I would guess most of these people would like to see all these events happen in Pune. Names are being attached just to indicate who first proposed this concept.)
Barcamp Pune: a big event, targeted towards all techies. Anything goes. Talks and demos from various different technology areas. Most will be “introductory” or “overview” type of talks. Proposed by: @tarunchandel, @rohit11, @whereispriyank and @thecancerus
Core Tech Barcamp: More advanced than barcamp. Will most likely have a specific theme (like Advanced MySQL, or J2EE). Not targeted towards beginners. This would be a place for people with some experience already to exchange advanced thoughts. Proposed by: @IamSB, @_ketan
Techweekend: A full weekend (or at least a full day) of technology talks. Not sure how different this is from Core Tech Barcamp (except for the length). Proposed by: @irohan, @IamSB
Individual / Advanced technology Talks: Like @dnene’s talk on REST. This is one talk, on a very focused topic. Expected to be very advanced stuff. Expected to draw an audience of just about 10 or 20.
The issue of dates. Blogcamp Pune is on 27th June. Proto will be on 26th July. The other events above have to be scheduled so that we don’t have too many big events close to each other, and a small event is not happening on the same day as a big one.
Please leave your thoughts below.
My humble suggestion is roll it all up in a full weekend schedule with multiple tracks, so advanced stuff can also be accomodated. With just one weekend to schedule, logistics can be easier for the event as well as for personal planning.
Separately: I’d like to see events where techies are also talking on experiences about commercial value created by the new technologies that they are implementing. Are there rigorous analyses being done about commercial value creation of all the new technology. One would hope this is all not just technology for the sake of technology.
General experience of unconference organizers is that multi-track events leave the users feeling very unsatisfied because they wanted to attend all the tracks. So in general, the experienced guys (e.g. barcamp Mumbai people) suggest having just one track. (I’m just relaying what I heard. I have no personal experience/opinion either way)
My personal thoughts:
1. Each of the above are different types of events targeting different audiences. So all of them should happen, but shouldn’t step on each other’s toes.
2. BlogCampPune is going to be so big (great job organizers!!), and then proto.in another big event in a month, I think that to prevent Pune-fatigue, we should not have another big event until August. So, in my mind, Barcamp Pune 6 (#bcp6) should happen then.
3. TechWeekend, CoreTech camp, are slightly smaller, more focused events, and can happen in the interstitial gaps between the big events. So let’s have those in July.
4. Individual presentations (like the one on REST), because they involve the least people, should take the lowest priority as far as scheduling is concerned. So they should grab a weekend when nothing else is happening. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are still some such weekends left.
It is OK to have events like these on weekdays. See for example this one. It is also OK to have some of these smaller events clashing with bigger events. See for example some of the other events clashing with blogcamppune. But generally, it would be nice if they happened on an empty Saturday, to maximize participation.
(I’m on a deadline for the next few days, so wont be very regular with responses, but will get around to it eventually.)
Hey, thanks for putting this up for discussion.
My views –
Techweekend – Should happen. Always good to have a discussion on tech concepts. But can be very informal, like 5-10 guys coming together and discussing. Just announce it 3-4 days earlier and we are good to go.
Barcamp – Recent experience shows that barcamp generally becomes too basic to discuss something advanced. I have started becoming irregular there for the same reason.
Core tech camp – It brings together diverse community. We have parallel tracks so basics can also be there, but I wont recommend it as we again lose focus. But one think that comes to mind is performancecamp with focus on various levels of performance engineering like caching, cluster management, db performance etc. Though becomes a bit overwhelming as too many advanced concepts to understand in a day and I was never able to do that in college. But worth a try. Another way of organizing this is like PHPCamp, we can have JEE camp, MobileCamp, CloudCamp etc.
Bottomline is, we need a forum of some sorts to discuss very deep subjects and build a community where experts can interchange ideas, share their experiences in building highly scalable systems.
One great aspect about this is that we can all celebrate is that we are dealing with the problem of the too much. Thats always far superior to dealing with the problem of the too little.
But having gotten there, I think we all need to somewhere collectively work out a tentative schedule through shared understanding. Such a schedule could be (this is just a suggestion for starting off a discussion)
Big events (eg. barcamp / blogcamp / techcamp /phpcamp / joomlacamp et. al.) 5th saturday (since they are fewer than #months)
POCC : 1st Saturday
PuneTech : 2nd Saturday
Tech Weekend : 3rd Saturday
Note that some exceptions have to be allowed – eg. Even bigger events like proto.in, or dealing with a very topical matter or a presentation by an out of town person etc.
This should be again guidelines in nature – and people can still choose to run events independently on other days. But some agreed upon guidelines are better than having no guidelines. Secondly this guidelines should be revisable from time to time.
oh well, confusions confusions…
I would like to go straight to the point but before that a point to consider.
* we get the same audience over and over again, let it be barcamps, blogcamps, tweetups..
BlogCamp – 27th June for bloggers/twitteratis, etc.
My Objective of techweeknds.
A few days back i felt the need of information exchange (technically, we had scalability issues and i did not know whom to talk to), the idea is to form a closed group of technically sound people who could help others with tech issues. (consider it similar to pocc for technology or something similar to PLUG but for technology in general not just linux)
This would be like a core tech group, people from startups, various technology groups etc. A small meetup of 8-10 people very focused is good enough.
Every alternate saturday, everything from issues about browser compatibility to mysql optimizations. Also, i was thinking about code showcase, like if someone has written a kickass code and wants to show around or someone has achieved something like master-slave db configurations or likewise.
BarCamp Pune 6 – scheduled at 4th july,
i seriously think it does not make sense, there has not been sufficient advertising for the event that has happened. i think following traditions just for the sake of it is no use and unorganizers thinking of it as a responsibility to get over with barcamp6 is not done.
Barcamp Technology – i don’t think this would work out, there are not a lot of people who are techgurus. If barcamp is to be scheduled have it general. Also, 1 day filled with technology is like a total overdose.
@dnene’s talk, this can be on any saturday in any case it’s limited number of people. Well, the people who will attend this event are the people who will drive #techweekend. So +1 if @dnene’s talk’s is under #techweekend, it will infact give a boost to it.
July – proto.in
August – DesignCamp
Sept – phpcamp
dec – developergarage.
Here is what I would like to see.
– Single track
– 3-4 talks. Each of 30-45 minutes including Q&A.
– 1 hour after talks for networking.
– As and when we have 3-4 speakers ready we can have this event.
– I am OK with audience of 15 who are genuinely interested in this.
The POCC meet where Anuj Khurana, Alok Kejariwal and Abhishek Goyal spoke was one of the best. I look forward to similar format.
about Barcamps: I have attended couple of them in Mumbai and that’s it. Networking is good; some pseudo-techie talks are welcome too but then there is a need beyond that. Especially the same thread repeats again in next barcamp.
Some might argue people can learn what they need to learn on their own. But there is distinct urge to show/see the code and then go back and do something about it. we also have problems which can be collectively solved or get guided by someone else in the group. Developing things is bread and butter for most of us so why not give preference to it.
about technology tracks: Yes people are focused on single track lamp/jee/ruby-rails/.net but I don’t mind attending session where I get to learn and get initiated on something cool if the presenter takes effort to showcase something worthy. I might not work on C# next day but I would learn something. And there are myriad topics which are well beyond implementation you choose.
link to zed shaw article: http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/the_freehackers_union.html bit loud but isn’t it true what matters most is the code you write.
Its always better to be informed about things from right people
and don’t we want more nominations to proto as a result of this interactions
guys guys guys… relax.. after organizing bunch of events last year i can say with confident that except for very few people — maybe 30 out of 100-200 people that attend these event this problem just does not exist.
as far as techweekends are concerned I agree with suggestion from Dhanajay
POCC : 1st Saturday
PuneTech : 2nd Saturday
Tech Weekend : 3rd Saturday
My only suggestion for techweekends would be make it core/advance.
I like the idea of Tech Weekends and also individual talks like the one by Dhananjay.
I second Dhananjay’s suggestion on the possible schedule. If we have any major event happening on a weekend which already has one of our events scheduled, then we can roll off our event to the next month.
I also feel that having some coding oriented event will be helpful and fun. Something like a codecamp. Maybe it can happen as part of the Tech Weekend.
Does anyone like the idea of having one day a month where we have an event online, maybe on Second Life. It does not have to be a separate event. It could be one of the ones already identified (maybe Tech Weekend???).
Well,
POCC : 1st Saturday
PuneTech : 2nd Saturday
Tech Weekend : 3rd Saturday
is a good solution +1
is PuneTech thinking of holding an event every month?? If yes then i think Dhananjay’s talk should be a part of punetech since you started it.
I will put up a website for the 1st tech weekend, the event will start on 18th july, 4:30 – 7:30 PM. The first topic to be “Performance tuning your website with memcache” by @irohan and anyone who has worked on it.
The only problem that remains in bcp6 on 4th of july. I still think we should reschedule it in October.
Guys,
I guess I’m a bit late in the discussion, but I agree with D’s rough outline / guideline. It makes sense.
Having said that, I think we’ll find it hard to do events every month. Nevertheless, it would be great to see such regular activity.
With regards to TechWeekends and other more small scale or specific events – wouldn’t it be simpler to just ‘announce’ on POCC and PuneTech that ‘I would like to hold a brief Jam about X’ or ‘Would like to organise an informal Tech Event on Y’ be sufficient?
After all, schedules only make sense if we can realistically stick to them.
But I think regardless, we’ve come up with a good structure, and there seems to be consensus, so let’s see what will happen!