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Barcamp Madison 2007

March 4, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin

I made it to the Barcamp on Saturday and it was great.  I really wish that I would have been able to stay longer, but I was only able to attend on Saturday afternoon.

From the beginning, the Barcamp embraced the Wiki concept.  All planning information was kept updated on the Barcamp Madison Wiki page and it continued to be used throughout the event.  When checking in, one of the people manning the registration desk was entering attendees names into the Wiki along with sessions to let everyone know that the person had arrived.  As everyone chose when and where they wanted to hold their sessions, someone was putting an electronic version on the Wikis.  During the event, people updated the Wiki with new information.

The Barcamp was well attended.  Though the goal was to get 400 people to the Barcamp, at last count 128 people were added to the “Present” portion of the Wiki.  I have to say, it really seemed like more than that were there.

I did manage to lead two sessions right away in the afternoon.  The first session I gave a presentation about Gentoo Linux.  There weren’t too many people there, maybe 15 – 20, but they all seemed to be pretty interested.  Hopefully they enjoyed the presentation.  The presentation is available on my website for download [tech.fradkin.com].  The second session I threw out there because there were no Ruby on Rails sessions listed.  I ended up just facilitating a nice discussion about Ruby and Rails.  There was enough interest that a bunch of us holed up in the Hack Room for an extra 2.5 hours and discussed Rails 101.  I let others take over to demonstrate Rails for those who had never seen it.

There were a  bunch of people with cameras taking all kinds of pictures and video.  If you head over to flickr and check out all the images tagged with barcampmadison, you’ll see some of the action.  I even found some pictures of myself.

Just before I left the Barcamp, one of the organizers, Ken Rheingans, asked me if I’d consider being one of the Ruby on Rails Community organizers for Barcamp USA.  I accepted.  Now, I’m considering helping out with the Linux Community also.

So, put August 23 – 26, 2007 on your calendars now.  Barcamp USA is at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, just a hop, skip, and jump away from Madison.  They’re expecting around 5000 people to attend from all over the US and even from overseas.  As fun as Barcamp Madison was, I expect that Barcamp USA will be even more fun.

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Comments

#1 - Pete Prodoehl said on Mar 4, 2007:
Thanks for coming and participating, glad to see you had a good time.
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