What is a BarCamp?

Wikipedia’s definition of a BarCamp is:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences -open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants -often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Got your head around that one? Yeah, it’s a bit dry. This post should demystify a little what happens at a BarCamp event, and what you can get out of spending your weekend with geeks rather than chilling out at home.

Rule 1: NO SPECTATORS, ONLY PARTICIPANTS

Totally different from regular conferences, BarCamps are more open and less structured. This means, when you arrive, you’re likely to see a grid, where you can jot down what you’d like to talk about. It’s an opportunity for people from all backgrounds and all skill levels to have a go at sharing some knowledge.

Sounds scary? It’s not essential that you present in front of a group using a Powerpoint presentation and a laser pointer while wearing a suit. In fact, suits are definitely not recommended.

How can I prepare?

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.

When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

• Have a think about the general theme of the event & associated topics that interest you: Could you talk about any experiences you’ve had, questions you’ve answered by either successfully completing a project or, if you’re brave, through a failure you’ve gone through.
• Look at the list of attendees, which should be public… Anyone you’re burning to meet and get to know? The day will fly by so be sure to go say hi at the first opportunity!
• Have an open mind: Join a session on a topic you know nothing about, or start a conversation with the next stranger you meet.
• Arrive on time: Come early if you want/can help with registration and setup, but don’t show up too late or you might miss on some of the social activity and goodies.

Tackling your first presentation

Presentation slots are generally 30 minutes, so you don’t need to do a doctorate thesis. It’s definitely not all about monologuing in front of the group for the full half-hour, it’s about sharing your experiences, asking others to pitch in with ideas or just leading a useful conversation.

• Present something simple that people with less experience, who are new to the industry might be interested in.
• Not sure what level of knowledge others will have? Present something completely unique and out of the norm.
• Nervous about being in front of people? Do a shared presentation with someone who complements your skills well. You’ll have someone to lean on when you’re not sure what to say next, and it’s more fun together.

But I’m not a spotlight kind of guy/gal…

Still getting cold feet? You can still help in a number of ways. The organisers are volunteers and (generally) have only two hands each. So if you’re not too keen on doing a presentation, why not lend a hand with registration, coffee breaks, cleaning up or setting up the A/V system?

One of the best bits of a BarCamp is the memories you take home with you. But if you’re like me and you have the memory of a goldfish, the key is to capture the event in some way. So why not offer to blog or record the event on video or in photos? If you’re a podcaster, create a VoxPop clip with the participants.

What do I need to pack?

BarCamp are full day events with lots of simultaneous conversations and tons of interesting people. To make the most of this, you’ll need some of the following:

• Laptop if you want to blog or take notes during the event. Don’t forget your charger (and adaptor if the event is abroad!) and your screen adaptor if you need to plug into a projector.
• Business cards: Moo cards come highly recommended. Make sure you have somewhere safe to store the cards you’re given.
• Scribble notebook & pen: You might not want to have your laptop out at all times, so pen and paper is essential.
• Power strip: If you can, bring a power bar to plug into the much-coveted few outlets. It’ll allow more people to benefit from power during the day.
• Video/photo camera: Immortalize the day in video and photos. Be sure to upload your content and tag it with the event’s hashtags (eg. #barcampafrica) and put a Creative Commons friendly copyright.
• Materials: Bring your presentation? If you have slides to share, be sure to put them up on Slideshare.net. A great example is Erik's presentation on Mobile Phones in Africa.

What some BarCamp veterans say…

Tara ‘missrogue’ Hunt, Citizen Agency co-founder, public speaker & blogger, says:

“Personally? BarCamp was an exciting idea for me, but at first I was afraid to stand up and talk… just wanted to observe and have one on one conversations… maybe ask a few questions from the audience. After a while, though, I decided to take the leap and put myself on the speaking schedule.

I’m glad I did, because it started my career! I went from speaking at BarCamps… Really getting my chops wet and practicing my skills. I got stronger and stronger as a speaker. One day I was approached by a conference organizer who asked me to give a workshop on my ideas. Next thing I know, I’m speaking all over the world and have WAY more professional confidence than I’ve ever had. That all started with BarCamp. It gave me the opportunity to really push myself into the next level.

Mel Kirk, social media gal extraordinaire says:

My first experience of a barcamp was during SXSW and was BarCamp Austin… Totally awesome! We heard some people chatting about it and decided to drop in… I still have my pass and lanyard as it was one of my highlights. They had this awesome T-shirt station where you could buy a t-shirt and then have a number of different designs printed onto it. I didn’t have enough cash to buy one but I really wish that I had, they were gorgeous.

There was a whole buzz about the place - it was in a really cool bar - totally laid back and relaxed and I met some amazing people that I would never have otherwise have met. Because it was a lot more laid back than a normal conference-type set up, people feel more relaxed to ask the presenters questions which leads to much more of a conversation type feel rather than content being pushed to the audience.

I’d recommend a BarCamp to anyone - it’s filled with amazing talented people willing to share and discuss their knowledge… where else can you get something like that?

Nik Butler aka Loudmouthman says

“don’t let anyone convince you they are not the werewolf”

Got some BarCamp stories to share? Maybe Suggestions for new attendees? Please leave a comment below!

About the Author:Vero is a French-Canadian gal living in the UK. She is a social media consultant, marketer and geekette. For more about Vero, check out her blog, that Canadian Girl.

While the term "beta" has been massively overused in the whole Web 2.0 shebang, it still has it's purposes. For instance, the version up to this point was Alpha. It was rough and there were a lot of things still unknown about it. With this Beta release, people who might have checked it out before should check it out again. The site looks and interacts on a completely different level now. It is much more complete and now we are working to refine elements to it.

The focus of the site has been honed as well. In what we're deeming, Stage 1, we're focusing on creating a blogging, communication, and media platform for Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people might be asking, "Why? There's already Wordpress, Blogspot, and a slew of others." This is true and when it comes to large blogging systems, many of these do an excellent job. The main issue with them is that they're for the web at large as viewed from developed nations. The web in developing nations is a much different beast.

To that end, we're really focusing on a few key points:

- Number One is localization. We're really working like crazy to get Maneno translated and functional in six languages. And by localized, we mean every part. Someone will eventually be able to only speak Swahili or French and be able to use the entire site without anything popping up in English. It's not as easy as it sounds because the internet by definition is English-centric (due to the parts that make it being developed in the US in English), but we're working to make this possible.

- Number Two is download speed. Web 2.0 came up with the brilliant plan that any website can have pages that are up to one meg to download. While this can work for those in the US, the further away from the server you get, the longer the website takes to load. And of course, if you factor in that most people in the world are not on broadband internet, then you run in to real problems. With Maneno, we're working to keep the pages as small as possible in order to keep up accessibility for everyone. Right now, the home page is about 60kb and we're striving to shave even a little bit more off that if possible. Compare that to a normal Wordpress blog home page, at about 225kb (if there aren't any images to the articles) and you understand why we're trying to make this difference.

- Number Three is an eventual plan to allow alternative updating to the site. In other words, users won't have to use the web to write articles. This is also a very key point as internet connectivity is paltry over the vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are a few options out there which we're exploring now, but this will be an eventual feature that we'll add to the site, so more on it later.

- Number Four is article translation and refers back in part to the localization aspect, but is its own entity. We're working to create a better blogging translation system. We know that people in Sub-Saharan Africa usually speak at least two languages and usually a great many more. We want to be able to have the Maneno community be able tin interact and help share articles to as wide a public as possible.

There are all kinds of smaller details but these four points are the main ones. We're working to have all of this come together in to a system that will work to inform better than any before it and have the ability and elasticity to not only last for awhile, but be able to change and incorporate other good things that come along on the web. After all, this isn't just an installation of Wordpress, Typepad, or Drupal; this is an application for Africa.

[Previous Afrilinks: here]

1

Rwanda just became in to the first country in the world to have more women than men in their parliament. In the parliamentary elections they had this past Sunday, 44 seats were won by women, this represents 55% of the total. In the exiting parliament, 48.8% of the seats were in women's hands which constituted the highest percentage globally, followed by Sweden with 47%, proving that not everything is bad in Africa.

2

According to this article from Reuters, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country with the potential to feed the world but a misuse of arable land and lack of investment to maintain it leaves many of its own people hungry. And it is a country that has more of less 800 million hectares of cultivable land, the seventh largest amount in the world. What more, the Congo River and its enormous network of tributaries abundant water for irrigation. Their various climates, from tropical rain forests to Savannah, offer ideal conditions for distinct types of cultivations.

3

And speaking of agriculture, a few days ago the newspaper, Público published an interesting interview with Jacques Diouf, the director of FAO (UN Organization for Agriculture and Food) in that he spoke about the actual crisis of food. Very lucid.

4

The television channel TV3 of Catalonia has an outreach program for cultural and gastronomy called Karaki that travels the world through the culinary customs of others' countries. The truth is that I did not know the program, but the indefatigable Aurora recently sent me the episode last year devoted to Central Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda and the two Congos), pipa and I spent time watching the recipes of dishes such as fufu. The video of the program in question can be seen here, and although the recipes are in Catalan, they are very visual and I think it is good to learn recipes that are completely different from ours.

5

And speaking of African food, a few days ago the author of the blog Congogirl posted a photo of a dinner attended by some friends at a Congolese home in Kinshasa, where one can see several typical dishes.

6

And to close, some pictures of the book Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa from the photographer Hans Silvester which are dedicated to the personal ornamentation of the tribes of the Surma and Mursi, in the border area between Ethiopia Kenya, and Sudan. Similar to what is seen in the photo below, in this article you will find a few more. Simply amazing.

One of the time waster sites that I read published, 6 Real-Life Vigilantes Crazier Than Batman and 5 Real World Criminals Who Were Certified Super-Villains. They're pretty wild lists, but maybe a bit incomplete, because if they're going to mention Papa Doc as a Super-Villian, then they should probably list Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo who is the current president-for-life of Equatorial Guinea. If you're not familiar with this country, that's not surprising. While it's on the west coast of Africa, it's rather small and it happens to be the only country in Africa with Spanish as its official language. Not a lot of information comes out of the country and this is mostly due to Obiang who seems quite happy to run the place for nearly 30 years and amass $600 million in ill-gotten money from plundering the state in a small homage to Mobutu.

But beyond being corrupt, the man is a bit nuts and drunk with power. For instance he believes that he is "in permanent contact with the Almighty" and "can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell." Of course this only natural given that he declared himself to be a god, although he still swears he's Catholic. I suppose it's in case the whole self-deification thing doesn't pan out. Then of course there are the rumors circulating that he's a cannibal as well, although that's most likely just to keep the masses in line. It's rather surprising how Robert Mugabe gets all the press these days, when Obiang is far, far worse.

Maybe it's because of this or maybe it was just because Spain, South Africa, and maybe the US and UK thought that they wanted to have more of a hand in governing the third largest oil producing country in Sub-Saharan Africa that they decided to set in motion and assassination attempt. And if it wasn't enough to have several large countries backing this, why not toss in Mark Thatcher (yeah, the son of former British Prime Minister, Marget Thatcher) in to the mix as well. But wait, that's not really enough. Let's hire one of the most impressive mercenaries I've ever heard of in the form of Simon Mann. Take a look at that guy's Wikipedia page. While he's more mercenary than vigilante, he still should have been on one of the lists I mentioned earlier. He's like a real life manifestation of any lead character in Michael Bay film.

I'm not going to get in to intricacies of how the whole assassination plot when down, but needless to say, it failed and failed hard when the mercenaries involved were in Zimbabwe of all places and got captured by Mugabe's forces. If you want to read all the gritty details, take a look at CNN and Reuters . Then read up on Executive Outcomes. Due to the fact that Mann was extradited to Equatorial Guinea and is now serving time in Black Beach Prison (where he'll probably die), I see a good chance of a movie being made of this beyond the British production of Coup! in 2006. Something big. Something with a lot of money. Something with Michael Bay as the director perhaps? I like the odds.

We're pleased to share our first Guest Post, from Mark Grimes, BarCamp Africa Silicon Valley sponsor and founder of Ned.com: a member-governed network taking action locally, nationally & globally, in order to make the world a better place. We believe every individual has the power to make a difference. We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen. Mark also describes himself as "a serial entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur and an technology angel investor with a somewhat iffy track record."

To whet your appetite, read these impressive stats:

2007 Ned Accomplishments & Milestones

78,850 youtube neddotcom channel video views

59 microloans: http://www.kiva.org/lender/neddotcom

64 better world videos: http://www.youtube.com/neddotcom

345 members: http://www.ned.com

2008 Ned Goals & Deliverables

1,000,000 web site page views monthly

500,000 youtube neddotcom channel video views

1,000 registered ned.com members

500 Better World Island monthly project revenue

150 microloans

25 good quality inbound web site links

10 ongoing monthly ned.com sponsors

7 new videos at neddotcom YouTube channel

6 Ned projects anywhere in the world

3 microfinance workshop sessions in Portland

2 events where five or more Ned members meet FTF

2 Ned thriving real world locations

2 or more totally unexpected spectacular things

And now...some great thoughts from Mark:

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ~ Margaret Mead

Mainstream media usually sells the doom and gloom side for the entire continent of Africa. From corruption to AIDS, from poverty to war, from starvation to genocide, many of the images and challenges within Africa are used to "sell" and raise money for nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations who in turn send over extremely highly paid white consultants in air-conditioned white trucks living in the finest homes and hotels and working in international teams of five or six to "teach" locals how to improve their lot in life. 30 years and billions of dollars in development "aid", and yet little has changed.

Balderdash, baloney and bullshit. It truly is time for a change. Change, coming from the people. From the grassroots. From the "bottom" up. People coming together in a way to make the world a better place.

During an open space event in Gulu, Uganda in early 2007 over 135 Africans (from Kenya, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Chad, Tanzania and others) all participated in a large session called "Better Microfinance". This was not a gathering of bankers or politicians or educators or development staff, but simply people who knew one another in an online community and wanted to get together face to face, meet one another, and share ideas about making the world a better place. Many of these participating community members would be considered "bottom of the pyramid" by those that define things in those terms.

The majority had been on the borrower side of microloans, and as a group had some great ideas how to make microfinance work better, and they also shared stories of village savings clubs and merry-go-round circles that worked, yet outside the "traditional" workings of microcredit.

This isn't about aid, or philanthropy, or old fashion colonialism. This isn't about "us" and "them", this is about "we". This is about connecting within an entire continent of incredibly hardworking, intelligent and talented people and figuring out together how we can all best collaborate and build local and global innovative goods and services together.

So now there is an event or a gathering really. People interested in change, people feeling some form of connection to Africa. People without "the answer" but willing to explore, discuss, connect and possibly collaborate. Plugging Silicon Valley into the entire continent of Africa, and who knows what might happen?

October 11th on the Google campus in Mountain View is BarCamp Africa Silicon Valley

- bringing people, institutions and enterprises interested in Africa together as a topic, an opportunity, or a place of action. Hope to see you there.

N: Mark Grimes

P: 503-502-0185

W: http://www.ned.com

T: http://twitter.com/neddotcom

C: Ned - a better world, every day

M: 4888 NW Bethany Blvd, K5-222 Portland, OR 97229

O: 107 SE Washington St, Suite 520 Portland, OR 97214