Barcamp 5 Bangalore and the controversies

This weekend(Read today and tomorrow) will see another edition of BarCamp being organized at IIM, Bangalore. This is the 5th in Bangalore and if I am not mistaken the 3rd this year in the city.

As mentioned here, I attended the last one but was not particularly thrilled with the experience. The collectives format seemed like a logical step forward in that it was supposed to reduce some degree of chaos but in the end, the effect was the opposite. Nonetheless, I met a lot of folks(in the unconference and friends in the campus) and had a reasonably good time. But somehow that wasn’t enough for me to really look forward to the next edition.

After discussing with a colleague at work, we decided to volunteer for the next one. Unfortunately, all I could do in this direction was joining the mailing list and all my dear colleague did was join the mailing list and send a couple of mails. My contribution to this event has been zilch. There are reasons for the same but I would have loved to contribute. I am not the one relying on excuses to defend my case, so none are coming forth.

Anyways, the last 2 weeks or so (since the registration for this camp opened) have seen a lot of activity on w3 regarding the event. Apart from the numerous run-of-the-mill posts, there have been a few where authors have critically analyzed what is going wrong (if I may say so) as far as BCB is concerned and how it might be improved upon. Of these, folks who are currently involved with the organization of the camp have defended their case whereas other veterans firmly stand by the observation of BCB losing its ground.

Ashish from pluggd.in has done the balancing act (according to me) and I agree to most of what is said here.

Whatever said and done, any sort of event is an attempt by the organizers to try and make the attendees/participants have a good time. If it is a college fest, more emphasis is on the fun part. In a corporate/business setting, networking is where the focus is. And as far as barcamps go, it is a mix of the two. And frankly speaking, scaling up is not an easy task … what with the footfall skyrocketing in the last edition. I hope things get better this time.

Generally, ‘vote of thanks’ is reserved as the last item in any MoC’s agenda but I would rather thank the organizers now than later, for their continued enthusiasm and efforts.

In spite of my calendar teeming with activities today, I surely will be there, albeit for a small duration.

See you all then 🙂