As I am writing this, BarCampBlock is starting in Palo Alto. I will be attending remotely from the East Coast and dearly miss my friends and colleagues who will be there.
BarCamp started two years ago as an ad-hoc gathering of technologists mainly interested in the web. BarCamp is free and open to everyone. It is also a un-conference and very loosely structured. Over the last two years, with the explosion of bubble 2.0 and the rise in popularity, stature, and influence of BarCamp’s two main promoters, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, BarCamp has become a focal point of the Web2.0 community. Fortunately or unfortunately, human nature, particularly in the Western European practice of human nature, requires one to always out do oneself. So Tara and Chris came up with the brilliant idea of holding BarCamp’s second anniversary event as a block party. For a block party to be successful, you need lots of people. For an un-conference to be successful, you need at the very most 250 people (see here). However, the human need to out do yourself and to celebrate success in the grandest way possible is always tugging at you as you make your decisions. So Tara and Chris went on doing what they do very well, promoting and promoting BarCampBlock. With blog posts from TechCrunch and Robert Scoble, it was obvious that BarCampBlock will be huge. And it is, over 900 people are coming to BarCampBlock! The question that will be answered over the next two days is how effective an un-conference will this be? No doubt it will be lots of fun. But will the connections, relations, and collaborations that come out of smaller un-conferences happen at BarCampBlock? While I am sitting some 3,000 miles away, I am eager to find out how this new direction for BarCamp will play out.