Claudia the Panda

My first encounter with Barcamp was Barcamp SG II in May 2008. No posting found in this blog on that because that event didn’t interest me enough for me to share? Nope. I didn’t blog about it because I left within an hour after arriving. It was one that targeted at the developers and I kinda got lost in there.

Good thing we’ve Preetam onboard this time round, with his experience with many Barcamp sessions from different countries, we know this was going to be a great one. And it was!

Here’s my experience, breaking down into 1) as a planner, 2) as a speaker and 3) as a participant.

As part of the planning team for Barcamp SG

I don’t know how I got involved in the first place, got an email for a gathering of various thought leaders and community leaders in Jan. That session was rather unproductive imo. Group was too big for any proper discussion to get through, and there wasn’t much of an agenda or structure set prior to the meeting. Somehow the only thing that got through from that session was the date of the event.

Discussion was supposed to take off and be carried out online in a google group, but after a month of waiting, nothing seem to be happening. That’s when some of us got worried and decided to just take up the planning part and get Barcamp going.

After a couple of hour discussion with Preetam, Bill, Kelvin and myself at a cafe, things got started and planning finally took off. The Barcamp SG3 wiki was up, registration forms up, sponsors started to come in and Preetam spent much of his time organising and putting pieces together.

And as all Barcamp, there’s really nothing much to worry about on the camp day. Everyone just help themselves to whatever was there and get themselves engaged. IMO, the beauty of Barcamp is for learning and interaction to take place in a messy yet structured environment.

See! No one’s needed to mend registration too!

Our aim is to shift Barcamp to become a less tech/ developer centric event, and hope to bring in more people from different walks of life together. There’s no money to pay, nor money to waste. Just lots of engaging conversation, sharing, learning and fun! I can’t wait for the next camping session!

And I concluded… you don’t need a big team to get things done. Small team can work wonders too! Its the quality not the quantity that matters.

As a speaker

Barcamp is really about sharing and provoking thoughts with participants. And that’s what I hope my sharing did. Interestingly, I signed up for a pre-scheduled session via the Barcamp SG3 wiki and also put up a by-voting session. So I ended up hosting two Barcamp sessions in the same Barcamp! One was on “How i Live Blog” and the other on “How facebook communities cannot work for your brand?”.

Guess those who came for my “How i Live Blog” session mistook my title. It was really meant for a session where everyone shares how “i” (they) live blog. But only one of them in the room had done live blogging before! And I wasn’t prepared to conduct a live blogging workshop. So instead, the session became a discussion of the tools for live blogging and how twitter and various hashtags feeder help improve interactions between people in a live set-up. If you’re wondering why we use #barcampsg3 in our tweets, that’s to consolidate all tweets from Barcamp SG3 together and these can be viewed at hasttags. Users can also follow live updates during such events with #tags at http://tweetgrid.com/ and http://twitterfall.com/. Personally, I prefer http://twitterfall.com/ and will sure be using it more often!

The session was pretty interesting and I think many of us learned couple of new things during that 25mins. Love the spontaneity!

I’ve some thoughts in mind about live blogging. Will post that up in another post sometime next week. It should an interesting piece for discussion.

The other sharing which I’d spent 8.5hours preparing was on “How facebook communities cannot work for your brand?” Again, the session was meant to be a trigger for participants to see and reflect on how they have used facebook and how they can improve and better engage their audience. Perhaps I should have structured my sharing in a more direct and less thought provoking way.

For those who were at my session, mind sharing your thoughts and feedback too? I would love to hear from you. You can drop me a note in the comments or contact me directly.

I did some tweaking with the slides since it’ll probably make less sense to those who wasn’t there. So here I’ve uploaded an updated version with more slides on the thoughts and minus the introduction part about myself.

Here’s some of the reminding people at my sharing…

I will be sharing the full findings from my “How do I facebook?” survey in another post. Perhaps, I might do a Part 2 with some of the questions you all asked that day. If you have any in mind, do share them here too so we can compile and do a “How do I facebook part 2″ together.

As a participant

So how was your Barcamp Singapore 3 experience? Share them here and also help with this simple survey too.

The beauty of social media… more links to follow about Barcamp SG3…

• Speakers slides are available at Slide Share
• Photos from Barcamp SG3 on flickr
• #barcampsg3 on twitter at hashtags
• Join Barcamp Singapore in facebook

Other blog posts on BarcampSG3…

• Barcamp SG 3 – “How to produce & publish your music album online, practically free, without a music production company or distributor” by Ivan
• BarCamp Singapore 3: a truly socially constructed experience by Kevin
• Live from Barcamp: How to bluff your way through an interview on Information Architecture by Brian
• Live Blogging from BarCamp 3 afternoon session by Farinelli
• Barcamp 3 at Singapore by Chin Yong
• Barcamp Signapore 3 by Coleman
• Barcamp Singapore 3 by Minggen
• Barcamp SG 3 by Aaron
• anymore to add to the list?

That’s the end of Barcamp SG3! Next up will be BlogOUT09!!! Have you registered already?? I hope to see you there too!!