BarCampBerlin – a short summary

I have to admit, I first though “Oh, sponsored and held at Pixelpark in Berlin. I don’t hope this will be something like a company event”. But luckily, it was absolutely not. The location was great, a lot of space, close to public transportation (which I hate, btw. The system is so not clear to me, I almost missed my plain) and the infrastructure worked perfectly. The sessions were great (and the same problem as always: you just can’t attend all of them). And I had a lot of fun using my new pro account at Flickr.com (my photos are here). Let’s start with the beginning.

Friday
It all begun on Friday night at the “Spindler & Klatt“. For the first 20-40 minutes, we were only about 10 people and the music was not to loud. Everybody talked about what they were doing, where they were from and projects they are working on. Let’s better not talk about the prices (Beer: 2-3.5o€, Cola 2.5o€ or a big bottle of water 6.50€) or the DJ that made some noise or the slow service, right Chris?

Saturday
Here it is, the first BarCamp day in Germany. Everything started slow, the coffee was very welcome and the WiFi WAP key was to complicated :-). After a quick introduction of Sebastian, Tim and all of us (and why are the Californians late?), it was time to start organizing the chaos. All people went inside the building to save a slot for their session or for choosing a session to attend. Please note, the wiki had around 170 registrations, but only around 70 people showed up.

Session: AJAX-vs-accessibility
That was very interesting for me. I did not know that accessibility is such a big topic in Germany – not only with AJAX. And the biggest problem with AJAX and accessibility is still the back button. At the end, some said it would be good to have a possibility to alter the browser interface, like graying out the back button.

Session: Blogging for $$$
Oliver Gassner talked about the possibilities to monetize your blog. He says Google paidAdSense does not work (I can confirm that, I only get a few cents everyday and I now removed them) and banners don’t work. The best way would be to get payedBlogginggging, like journalists do. I agree, but this is very hard and I ask if that would stilBlogginggging. Or you blog for gaining customers. He says, there are no German blogs that make a living Blogginggging (with German he means blogs inGermanerman language, not blogs from Germans), but English blogs like Google Blogoscoped make some money.

Time for lunch
At BarCampBerlin you could order pizza, pasta or burgers at a sponsor and get 10% off. A lot of people did this, and that was the reason why the food came so late. The afternoon session alreadyready been re-scheduled but the pizzas arrived to late (mine was even cold). It was better on Sunday, most barcampers went out for lunch on the second day.

Session: Liquifile/Liquidbrowsing
Pretty cool concept. You no longer navigate your files on your harddrive, you have one large list and you see the meta data on one view. The bigger a bubble is, the greater is the filesize. Or the x-axis shows the date of my file. What I do not like, is that the software is currently “Mac OS X”-only and a Windows version will only be available for Windows Vista (here comes a big booooh!!! from my side :-)) I have to keep an eye on that.

Session: Web2.0 Startups – an open discussion
This session was a little big longer, because of theinterestresst (they even made a part 2.0 on Sunday). We talked about the problems you can have when you start your own company (like credit card fraud, no users and useless digg-effects). The products presented where all copies of digg.com or VoIP, no real innovation.

After that session, BarCampBerlin and BarCampWien held a simultaneous session (I am not sure what the exact topic was, but I think it was about Maps or semantic web). I was in the inner court discussing and drinking beer. Later we went out for eating dinner, Indian food. After that, there was a party or something.

Sunday
Because of rain and Formula 1, the sessions started a little bit late and we had even less people than on Saturday.

Session: GTD (aka Getting-Things-Done)
Hans Dorsch, author of “Mac profesionell” introduced us to GTD and the concept behind it. “Every item has a place and a action”. I got that. But why do I need to set up a project for every item that takes more than 2 actions? Sure, this isorganizationation and such, but does that not take a lot of your time and bore you if you follow your todo list so strictly? And I have seen a hipster PDA. It is like a real PDA, but without electricity and is only write-once.

Session: Second Life
 This is a sort of online game for people that are bored in their first life (aka Real Life). Or for marketing companies to spent money. It sure sinterestingsting and I see dozens of ideas to realize. But it costs way to much.

Session: viral marketing and future of classic advertisement
Martin talked about his 3-point concept of marketing and asked how and if a blogger in the audience would blog about a product if they get it for free. They than talked about the Opel campaign – I had no idea what that was until Sebastian explained, that Opel gave away a car to some bloggers if they blog about it. And other Germany specific marketing gags of which I never heard of. Conclusion: German companies know about blogs and have a little idea how to use blogs and bloggers. Another thing Swiss companies can learn.

After the last sessions, the organizers asked for some feedback. Sadly it was a little to late for me to listen and tell my opinion,luckilyuckly we have blogs and wikis 🙂 What I thininterestingsting, to see what people think about hosting an own wiki (which is exactly what we do with BarCamp Switzerland) or that you can sign up at the wiki but now show up (lets hope that works better for Zurich) and that to many sessionsparallelalell. This is very good and appreciated feedback for our BarCampZurich end of this month and Gabor and I have to discuss this a little.

Thanks to all BarCampers, organizers and discussion partners. It was a great weekend and we will see us again. Maybe in Zurich or at Second-Life 🙂