Barcamp Bangalore thoughts

Attended barcamp at bangalore today morning, Missed the first set of sessions as I had reached bangalore a little late. But the whole day went fantastic.

I wanted to live blog but could not because I could not connect to the internet at the premises. Once I could but the connection was extremely slow. Don't know whether it was a problem exclusive to me coz I found others blogging. Man It sucks I could not live blog at hyd and now here at bangalore as well :(. But atleast now I am home I could write post portem posts on barcamp bangalore which I never could get around to write for the hyderabad barcamp which I said I will write.

Some of my generic thoughts about barcamp :

I got to meet a lot of new & interesting people. Also got to meet many folks in person whom so far I had been in touch with through digital id's only. This barcamp was as unstructured as it could get which I absolutely loved. The unstructuredness was both good and bad in a way it was not unstructured in a way true to the spirit of barcamp but then as Amit had put it this made things very unorganized, I did 'nt even know about many sessions that happened and missed out on many interesting ones 😦 Had it been more organized I would have not missed them.
The number of people who turned out was not even to half those that registered in the wiki. I would say that about only about less than 100 people turned up.I was expecting a lot more to turn up come on man after all this bangalore. I guess hyderabad had about double the number that turned up. I think in the process of worrying about the  space/resource a lot of people got discouraged from coming at all.
One of the most striking feature of barcamp bangalore is varied set of people who had turned up here which is one reason that I did not want miss this barcamp. There was a a lawyer and a doctor in the audience and couple of other people who were not techies.

All the sessions that I attended were pretty good & none of them sucked well atleast according to me :). One thing that was lesser though were the demos, Again a lot of talk which was a big feedback that was obtained for the barcamp hyd.

One thing that I find odd in general is about feedback. In general many announced that they are here to take the feedback from the community ( atleast thats the terminology that was used 🙂 ) but it sadly did not happen much. IMO barcamp is about sharing & learning, learning from the community and learning happens when you listen to others. Most of us get into the defense mode. For those who are taking a feedback the golden rule is there is no feedback on feedback. Otherwise why bother take the fedback at all.

One of the really fantastic idea was that of lightning talk. Talk about anything for about 5 mins continously and at the end of it you stop and if stop speaking before it then questions will be fired at you. Lot of interesting topics came across. This was part was a lot of fun. Topics included

A lightning talk on ligtning talk
An interesting protocol used by funding.org about coordinating among many actors to get a a said target set of resources.

Dicussion on Open distro just for bioinformatics group.

Gyaan on BLAST & human genome.

     Then late in the evening many of us hung out at Geoffrey for very long. All in all it was a great day.