Serendipity35

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences.

Huh?

They are open, participatory workshop-events, and the content is provided by participants rather than invited guests and keynotes. The focus is on emerging web applications, and related open source technologies.

Barcamp's origin seems to come from first the hacker slang term foobar which led to Foo Camp, the invitation-only unconference hosted by O'Reilly. Barcamp is open to all - a Foo Camp for the masses!

The Barcamp.org wiki lists events all over the world (even in Second Life). That's where I came across the Barcamp USA which will be in August at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds (tents!) in Jefferson, Wisconsin, USA.  I didn't come across one in my home state of New Jersey.

BarCamps are organized on the web, so they are "open-sourcing" that process using wikis and making it all publicly available. This is all new to me and I have never attended one, so I can't say how chaotically wonderful it might turn out to be. (Comments?) The sessions are proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, using white boards and paper taped to walls. But there are rules. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Yipes! None of that hiding in the back of the room reading your email during presentations? Attendees do blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki editing and all the rest of 2.0 camping.

You can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki. It seems that in theory "registration" is free, but some have a fee to cover the space used and whatever basic services provided. (one of those basics is free network access, usually WiFi). There are actually a lot of literal campers. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California in 2005 in the offices of Socialtext and had 200 attendees. They have been held across North America, South America, Europe and Asia and to celebrate the first anniversary BarCampEarth was held in multiple locations worldwide on August 25-27, 2006.

More video from Barcamps around the world