I’m going to get this posted now as if I don’t I’ll forget it all. These notes may be useful to anyone planning to run a barcamp (including me in the future). – Christopher Gutteridge
In advance
We had an amazing level of interest. Next time we’ll consider making it bigger and better. Maybe we could re-do it in the Summer and even add a 3rd venue!
We used eventbrite to handle signups. This seemed to work OK. Good enough, anyway.
Both me (Chris G) and Chris P had lots of unexpected stuff in our lives and we learned the importance of delegation. The way I found worked best “Can you be in charge of this? OK, here’s the brief. Please make smart decisions and don’t bother me about it too much, I’ll forgive you if it goes wrong but I need you to take some presure off me”.
Things which were easy to delegate: Making the big grid, Making posters, making name tags, and getting the venues to look after food and drink.
I should have made more of an effort to lock-down promises of car lifts. We got lucky, but I could have been stranded. I did use a few taxi’s running around the day before and that made it do-able.
I wrote a big long email via eventbrite, to the delegates for 16:30 the day before, so people would get it before leaving work. I bloody sent a test mail rather than send it out. It had advice on what to bring and parking etc. Ah well.
Setting up;
9am for 10am start
Worked fine. Lots of people showed up. We started at 10am. A 6 quid sheet from Argos made an adequate screen at the Hobbit. I’ve left it with them in case anybody needs it again. I’m lucky enough to have access to lots of resources from the university so we had a couple of old mac-mini’s with screens (they were running our foyer screens but tend to die if left on too long, but are not ready for scrap yet. This makes them a great resouce because we can risk them getting broken as they would otherwise be scrapped. The Shooting Star already has a screen and projector so that was easy. We set up a P.A. but didn’t need it. I’m glad — it would have dominated the pub and we wanted to make sure people had plenty of space to do ad-hoc huddles.
We got some static-cling A1 white boards (35 quid for a roll of 25). These were used to put up notices at the start (pub wifi WEP key) but not used in the day. Handy, but paper might have done. Also people didn’t check which pens they used so many got marker penned! Ability to make lots of signs was key.
Patrick made the name tags to my rough spec. They looked cool and quirky but next time we’ll make the font much bigger. We wanted to spend as much as possible of our limited resources on nice free food, so sod off buying lanyrds. Patrick made the ID cards by printing on card (his design had a nice background pattern he created). Then they were cut out kinda randomly so everybody had a different shape. Lastly we used a hole-punch to make a hole. For the last 10 years I’ve saved every lanyrd from every event I’ve been to — WWW Conferences, Glastonbury and everything in between. So we just used those until they ran out (the email I failed to send told people to bring their own) and after that we used string from our arts and crafts box. Tell me– would you rather a custom lanyard or an extra strip of bacon?
Arts and crafts box: I’ve got some boxes full of pens, glue, scissors etc. for this kind of event. I just top it up each time. At Dev8D in Febuary I tried making a formal craft challenge each day with prizes. This was a mistake as nobody was willing to commit their precious time to something so frivelous. This time around we just left the boxes out so people could grab paper, pens, string etc.
Opening talk:
I just made up a list of bullet points and made sure I covered most of them. I told people complaints were welcome but they would be assumed to be semantically the same as an offer of help.
Barcamp bingo:
This worked OK. No prizes made it easy to run as then it’s just for fun. People seemed to enjoy it. If you want to make your own you can generate grids at: http://data.dev8d.org/devbingo/
Food and Drink
To keep stuff simple and really good value, we agreed that all the food would be self service. This way we don’t have to pay an extra staff member just to run around getting food for people.
Breakfast was bacon rolls. They are still good cold so the pub just provided a big platter – when they were gone, they were gone.
Tea & Coffee – as part of the venue hire we got free Tea & Coffee, in the form of a hot water boiler on the end of the bar with paper cups etc.
Toast – we were going to provide toast on demand for veggies for breakfast, but an easier solution was just to have a table with a big toaster, crumpets, bread, plates, butter, knives and a variety of jams. We spent £20 on this and with the bacon sarnies as well this was massive overkill. However we just gave away the left over jars of jam, loaves etc. at the end of the event, so nothing was wasted.
Chilli – for lunch we had a lovely chilli, with buttered baggettes (filling and easy to deal with). As this was, again, self service it made it easy and the food could strech if we had lots of people.
Buffet – I gave the Hobbit £50 for a cold buffet. If anything this was overkill again, but I’m sure the leftovers got eaten by the students that evening.
Using two venues
This actually worked better than expected. The pubs were 3 minutes apart and that worked fine. @proactivepaul made himself very useful by syncing lanyrd with the paper schedule.
Holding a barcamp in pubs
Oddly bar camps are not usually held in bars. I think it worked out fine, as the tea and coffee made it very clear that drinking was allowed but not compulsary.
Health and Safety
Everyone was very good about being safe with cables etc. The only negative feedback from the manager of the Shooting Star was that there were too many boxes lying around (we used cardboard vegibox crates to get everything to the event). This was my bad, and easy to avoid next time.
Thefts & damage
Nothing major to my knowledge. I seem to have lost a metal slinky (long spring, walks down stairs), but that’s within acceptable losses.
Lanyrd.com
I thought how cool it would be if you could use this to make mobile-friendly HTML pages to show what was on in each venue. If only Lanyrd did RDF. I tweeted this. Lanyrd got back to me to express interest once they are done with their safari (the african adventure, not the web browser). It’d be great to set up screens (and phone size HTML pages) for people to monitor the schedule.
After the event Lanyrd has been excellent at pulling together the slides and video etc. I’ll be more comfortable when they’ve got a way to get all your data back as I’m still a little worried by their lack of business model.
No swag
We had no freebies, other than food & caffine. That worked fine. This ain’t business culture. I could have had lanyrds with the sponsors names on, or an extra strip of bacon in each breakfast roll. Which makes you like the sponsor more?
Cool Toys
I think that we really benefited from having more to do than just the talks. My own contribution was a useless but popular inflatable dalek and a session where I taught a few people how to make a single bit of computer memory from scratch. Other cool stuff people brought to demo/play was a working Vectrex, an AR Drone programmable quad coptor and a 3D Printer. I missed the 3D printer making a shot glass, but points for style!
Afterparty
I’d have liked more games and chatting to have gone on but by the time I’d done a round trip of taking stuff home most people seemed to have drifted away. Fair enough.
Next Time
I’m very happy with the minimal sponsorship. When we run the event again I’ll aim to keep it the same. We are thinking about the summer when the studenty pubs go into a lull — I am seriously wondering if we can make it bigger next time and have a 3rd location on the same street! Given room to expand we could allow nearly unlimited numbers. The cold weather seems to have caused lots of people not to make it with germs and travel conditions. I may advertise it to local community types more in advance, but ‘barcamp’ is not a phrase that’ll work beyond a certain crowd. I was explaining it to people as a free-music-festival meets a technical conference meets an open mic night.
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Thanks to you and Chris P for organising such a great event. Completely agree that food sponsorship trumps random swag any day- that spread in the Hobbit was awesome, and the Shooting Star tea supply was the work of genius, especially since I was driving!
Well organised, lots of fun and lots of intelligent discussion. Just goes to show that it doesn’t have to be big to be good!
All the BarCamps I’ve been to this year have been great and what makes the little ones stand out is their brutal honesty. Chris, Chris and team clearly stepped out of their comfort zone doing this one and I loved it!
Thanks guys.
I really lapped up any data I could get from other events to sanity check our plans. Hence it seemed worth doing a big event report. Also it’s useful to point the sponsors at it to give a flavor of what we did (and how much work it was!)
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