By Laura Cooper
During the last .com boom, ‘networking’ was one of the buzz words, being both a signifier of the newly-connected times and a popular way to ‘share’ knowledge, information and resources between companies and individuals. However, more often than not, networking events just ended up becoming a front for marketing personnel to ‘sell-in’ their services/flaunt their egos, with no real strategic partnerships being formed.
Michael Parsons, writing in The Times, sums it up nicely when he describes these events as bringing together a bunch of “badly dressed people with business cards to exchange lies about their website readership and drink a lot of nasty white wine”.
Parsons goes on to sing the praises of the Web 2.0 era, where like-minded people can exchange ideas and opinions in ‘cyberspace’ instead of conference space. This has opened the doors to the kind of networking that social events in the eighties often failed to achieve – sharing the intelligence and resources of those people who really have a passion for the businesses in which their expertise lies. It almost goes without saying that the people whose job it is to be at the cutting edge of technology trends ie. CTOs, developers, IT managers, are often heavily involved in social networking online.
The problem is, a lot of this discussion goes on in breezy online web chats left completely unsupervised, meaning that the outcome of these influential meetings of minds often remain archived away in the depths of the internet where even Google can’t reach.
As such, we’re now seeing the rise of a new form of face to face networking – the BarCamp. It’s a new wave of unconferencing - and it is every tech geek’s dream.
Basically, the BarCamp concept evolved from a Open Space Technology process in which the content of a conference is decided by the participants during the event, rather than by an outside organiser. The idea behind this is the ‘law of two feet’ – a foot in passion and a foot in responsibility – meaning that those who have the interest drive the sessions, in a spur of the moment and spontaneous manner.
BarCamps follow this principle to the letter. Held all around the world, these events are open to all, but are designed to encourage key influencers from a particular industry to attend. Instead of an entrance fee, each participant is asked to run their own seminar on a topic of their choice. Their name and the title of the seminar they are leading is then placed up on a board against a particular time and area. Held in relaxed settings, delegates are then open to attend the sessions they are interested in, which are often very laid-back presentations or informal discussion forums.
At the end of the day, the group is then brought together, with a beer and a pizza to share what they have learnt that day and discuss on a wider platform the way their industry is going and how it may evolve in the future. Quite often these discussions - driven by the passion and interest of those who are in attendance - have gone on late into the night and organisers quickly took to writing ‘can bring a sleeping bag’ on the invites – hence the name BarCamps.
The overwhelming popularity of these unconferences has often been attributed to the ‘free flow’ nature and open forum style of their approach. This type of event brings the benefits of social networking online together with the advantages of face-to-face contact with key influencers – without the expense and formality of other conferencing techniques. They are on the rise in the tech sector, and I’m sure we’ll see the BarCamp format being adapted for a variety of other industries in the future.
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