Posts in BarCamp Christchurch

May 14 01:27 UTC

On Wed, 14 May 2008, follower wrote:

> After some discussion of BarCamp scheduling ideas at TVIC this evening
> I thought this had some points worth considering:
>
>  <http://tantek.pbwiki.com/FooCampBarCampDifferences>

Hmm. I felt at the last Barcamp some of those, as Tantek elik
described them, having "strong self-confidence", pushed out several
talks which I personally would have found much more interesting.

Somehow we speak about computers, but when it comes to organising mobs
of people... we forget to use them and fall back on personalities,
Whiteboards and and pens.

I definitely would prefer a parallel sessions system, where speakers
register their topics (but not the time/slot).

I also have a strong preference for Quickie talks. Speak up and shut
up in 15 minutes by a computer clock. If you have more to say than
that, break it up into more than one 15 minutes talk. (Maybe I need
Ritalin)

One conference I went to had a very strong character as the "host".

He had a wee turbo pascal program that displayed a "Green" screen at
the start of a slot and went progressively redder... At 3 minutes to
go it beeped, at two minutes it beeped twice, at one minute long beep
& LARGE FONT "TIMES UP!", at zero it started screaming and wouldn't be
switched off until the speaker left the stage...

What a pleasure that session was!

Let the attendees register and rank their interests and let a wee
scriptie do (and perhaps redo as circumstances change) the scheduling
to maximize attendee happiness.

I bet I could write a one page ruby script that polled a Wiki page,
and if there are changes pull two CSV tables (topic,speaker) and
(topic,attendee,rank) from a Wiki page and posts a tentative
room,topic,speaker,time timetable to another wiki page.

By the way, I did manage, in principle, to get agreement from our
management to use Tait facilities over a weekend for a BarCamp. That
agreement may well be subject to the specifics... but if you want to
firm that up, propose a date and contact me.

Facilities would be two training rooms, each seating about 50 people
plus data projectors and a small breakout room seating about 5.

'net connection may be, from the security PoV, problematic, I'd have
to discuss that more with our network guys.

John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : <email obscured>
New Zealand