I spent my weekend at the EBay office in London at my first BarCamp.  This is an un-conference about anything and everything to do with the internet, attended by around 90 people, mostly from the UK but also from around Europe and other parts of the world.  The main idea of a BarCamp is the sharing of knowledge, with everyone presenting and many informal discussions during the course of the weekend.  While basically everyone was in a different field to me (the majority were developers), I was still able to increase my knowledge of the internet and hopefully passed on some useful ideas as well.

One of the principles of BarCamp is that presentation slots cannot be claimed until the start of BarCamp when there is a slightly mad rush for the board.  My own presentation/s didn’t go so well in terms of attendance but I am going to blame that on other factors such as being up against very popular presentations at the same time, not selling the topic with a snappy enough title and web analytics still not on the radar for a lot of people.  But while I would have liked the opportunity and to have had more feedback on my ideas, I still managed to have a number of interesting discussions with various people.

Some of the interesting presentations I attended were concerning

• how the internet can be used to switch the current demand/supply equation so that events/products are created only when they is a demand for them
• evolving social networks in order to be able to filter the quantity of news down to managable levels
• sharing of knowledge between competitors so that both parties improve their websites and where the lines are drawn on what information can be exchanged
• creating situations where consumers can directly have a portion of their spending used on socially beneficial options – the Carrotmob
• blogging principles
• mass customisation (from someone who would know – one of the founders of mymuesli)

I was very impressed by a presentation on the mistakes that the individual has made in their work on various start-ups.  It is always nice to know the success stories and decisions made that were right, however you can learn a lot more from the mistakes that others have made and try to avoid them yourself in the future.  And it is rare to find someone with the honesty to admit they have made mistakes and to share their experiences with others.

Overall a very good experience and one that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in the internet.  My biggest regret, that I was distracted chatting to others and never got involved in a game of werewolf – next time.