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Last Saturday marked the day for the first BarCamp at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil. In a few words, the BarCamp was much smaller than camps are usually but the quality of presentations and the participants was very high.


And the feedback I got so far is very positive. People already are asking about the next one and a date. If anybody is willing to organize another BarCamp, please feel free to do so.

All in all I am happy how the event turned out. At the same time I have to say I am disappointed by the lack of HSR-students not attending such an event. It would have been a great change to enhance their presentation skills or to connect with some tech-companies or startups in Switzerland.

You can find pictures from the event on Flickr and the slides are on the BarCampSwitzerland Wiki.

Thanks to all the participants. Was a great Saturday! Also a big thank you to all the BarCampRapperswil sponsors

• citytrip.ch
• cloudcontacts.com
• nektoon
• parx
• HSR

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BarCamp Rapperswil auf einer größeren Karte anzeigen

All the details can be found on the BarCampRapperswil wiki or by contacting me.

I hope to see and meet you there!

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In the past few days I have played around with Microformats and wanted to built something useful with it. So I decided to create a BarCamp Timeline, just like Eric Skiff asked for a few weeks back on the BarCamp Mailinglist.

The base system for the timeline is the SIMILE | Timeline, which was created at the MIT and offers a simple and quick way to create those nice timelines. The actual event-data are from the BarCamp.org frontpage and PreviousBarCamp page. But before it worked I had to fix many of the entries, add the real dtstart data and fix many more errors. Trust me, this is no fun. And many of the PreviousBarCamps are still missing. Feel free to update the events. Of course I am caching the output. Else it would take way to much load on the PBWiki server (which is terrible and slow, btw).

Have fun with the timeline (I actually like it very much, way better to see when the next *Camp is). And any feedback or requests are welcome!

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And this time it was another premiere: Our first BarCamp event at a big exhibition. I can see many advantages but many disadvantages as well and can not decide if this is something I like or not. Here is a list of some points I have noted:

Pro

• Sponsors are more likely to give money if you are part of something bigger.
• You can benefit from the infrastructure. No need to organize own food delivers and clean up crew.
• Media are present at the exhibition.
• eTourCamp was feature on information materials and the homepage.

Contra

• You are stuck inside the exhibition halls all day.
• The exhibition opened at 11:00, not a minute before and you had to line up. That was no fun!
• Exhibition visitors thought the eTourCamp was just another booth. They walked in and around and left again.
• Organizers stood by the entrance and told visitors this was a conference. No chance for them to participate.
• Marco Faré had to be at the entrance and give out coupons for a free ticket.

Another thing that was surprising: The introduction was schedule for 30 minutes, but took less than 5 minutes. No word was lost about how it works, how the schedule was setup. And some slots have already been filled before the first participants arrived.

Anyhow, I enjoyed my trip to Lugano and had even some time in the morning to walk around the Città and take some photos. Some sessions were pretty cool – I like the eTreasure idea a lot – but because I am not working in tourism anymore other topics were less interesting and the basics of blogging I’ve heard often enough
You can find some impressions on Flickr or search for blog posts. Not much for now…

Update 18:24 I forgot to mention: The percentage of female participants was very, very high. I would say close to 50% if not over that. That something I really like and hope to see more often at other *Camps.
And a little note on the numbers of no-shows: 102 people have signed up, from those 35 didn’t show (around 34% no-shows) but there were around 20 people dropping in and attending without pre-registering. So the number of no-shows was at around 28% or 14%, depends how you calculate). That is in the usual and expected range. But we have to work on that.

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TV Next
The last session for Saturday was more of a sales pitch than a real session. The product itself has some cool ideas (basically it is a Flash interface that streams videos and has a lot of ads on it). In general it is a skinable interface for companies that want to present videos (like music clips, shows or so) and earn money with it by displaying advertisement. That ads are on your screen al the time and there are other ways – like split screens: the videos plays on a lower corner and a big advertisement runs for some time (in the demo it was for 40 seconds). During this you can barely hear the video itself. Myself I do not see any use for that. I agree we need ads or sponsors to keep online videos alive but please don’t bomb me with it. That sucks!

Sorry for the bad angle and the shaking. I didn’t take my tripod with me this time and the videos was made with my digital camera.

The Sunday started with a great breakfast in the cafeteria of Cisco Systems. Yam! Cheese, bread, fruit juices and of course coffee or tea.

6 Thesis of modern Web-Layout
Just this little comic strip:

Link by /pd on the BarCamp.org mailinglist, image by Joshua Porter of bokardo.com

Maybe it is not a good idea to attend such a session if you are a developer and like clean designs (I like the del.icio.us more than digg.com) and that every user can do with his MySpace page what he wants is that what people want, show how they feel and post their inside.

Gerrit von Aaken wants the Web2.0 design dead. If he starts a new business tomorrow he does not want pink design, rounded corners. That is true, if your products does not target on Web2.0 users. But we have currently such a big hype on it, you can not just ignore it. Maybe (and hopefully) this will change again and we are telling our grandchildren how the Internet was, colored, flashed and AJAXed.

Behind the scenes – Wiki(m|p)edia
I admit, I use Wikipedia very often (maybe even more often, you never know where the content is used) and I have edited pages as well. To keep the service running and alive the Wikimedia Foundation was founded in 2003. Arne Klempert talked about the history and structure of the Wikimedia Foundation and their chapters, how the network structure is build and the budget they have.

I really liked this session and I now want to join the Swiss Chapter - I am reading the mailinglist since they started, but haven’t participated in any way. If you want to join the Swiss Wikimedia you can find a PDF on the wikimedia.ch site.

Blogging and Law
In Germany every online publication needs a so called “Impressum” – something like a contact page with a disclaimer. On this site every visitor can see who is behind this publication and how to contact him/her. We don’t need that in Switzerland but I think it would be a great idea to have something like that. Maybe not forced but as a voluntarily solution. I often am whoising (is that a verb?) some domain name and research the person a little. This session was very cool too because the presenter was a real lawyer and knows what he is talking about.

BarCampFrankfurt was a great event, well organized (thanks Franz, Robert, all the sponsors and Cisco) and I love the location (okay, maybe the corridor was a little to small, was hard to go from one room to another if 100 people cross) and maybe we need a way to project the schedule on other places, so people don’t have to run to the lounge every time. And of course I enjoyed it very much to see and met people I know from other BarCamps and to meet a lot of new people and minds to stay in contact with.

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Second Life by Stephan

The 3D-world does not seem to be well known by the participants, they ask various question about it and the speaker has some good quotes. He also says the next French president has a Second Life character, like the US candidates use MySpace. The question now is: How can you as a company monetize your Second Life world? In Web2.0 you can always put Google AdSense on your site, but in Second Life? A good point is, you don’t monetize it directly but the visitors may keep your business in mind and you can count as cool company and close to your audience. The problem with how to drive users to your island isn’t solved yet. For the next day Second Life was still a big topic while networking.

WorldCafeEnvironment

Wow! This was a four hour event inside of BarCampAlsace3. All in French and a lot of new ideas on how to help fight the destroy of our earth (Tara Hunt would have loved it). This was one of the most intense session – if you can call it a session – I have been to.

In short how a World Cafe Works:
There are several tables with 4 to 5 people, on of them is a key-person. That person stays on his table while the others move to other tables. There the key-person of that table explains the solutions / ideas / thoughts the previous group had and then the group continuous to think and brainstorm. At the end, some groups are going to explain what they have found out and a big discussion with all participants starts. You can find our top three results here and some other ideas / problems after the images.

 
Click for larger pictures on flickr.com

• Problem with far transport of meat and other nutrition
• Plastic and paper bags -> recycling
• Using the train instead of traveling by air
• Big interest in environmental protection
• Financing public transportation by taxing cars and car drivers
• Allowing to transport your bike in public transportation
• Doing hobbies less dangerous to the environment
• Talking about problems, open other people’s eyes
• Don’t travel 340km just for a BarCamp
• Asking your city/district what they do to support the environment

If you have other ideas, please let me and others know by posting you comments  or start an initiative to support protect our planet! 

Intranet Covoiturage

French people are very green. You can see this on this event as well. Everybody talks about CO2, la nature etc. And they talk about train and carsharing / ridersurfing. Stephan wants to create a website that helps users find people driving the same direction or way as them and connect them for carsharing or carpooling. He has no idea for now how to earn money with it, because the French law does not allow to take money for such thing if you are a private person. Any suggestions are very welcome and will be redirected to him.

BarCampRhine 

Philippe presented once more his idea of a BarCamp event on a ship and traveling from one country/city to another. The participants are very active and we build a list of things to do, what to think about, some possible sponsors and some ideas about the date this all could happen. My question was if the sessions are on the boat or if we leave it and have the session at a “traditional” venue. But no, all session should be on the boat. This is of course very interesting.

The second part of the session is outside. We are all sitting in the sun, discussing and thinking about this great project. I will post a special post about this session on our BarCampSwitzerland blog in the next few days.

The my second camp outside of Switzerland is now over and I enjoyed it very much (eve if I haven’t understand all – not even the jokes). It was great to see a complete different BarCamp, less geeks and more entrepreneurs and managers. The sessions are less technical and Internet focused. And of course I enjoyed it very much to meet a lot new people and share my mind with them. You can find my Flickr images on my photostream and all BarCampAlsace3 there as well.

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After finally arriving at the ETH, I parked and run into Dominik and William. While grabbing my stuff, I discovered that I forgot my beamer. Sorry again for that ). We walked to the venue – which was the same as last October, the same rooms and all. But this time, there was a guy with a professional looking camera set, some nice and comfy chairs and music. I grabbed my number, pinned it on my shirt and was instructed that I am at the welcome and “get-your-number” desk. Shortly before 10 AM, Ronnie asked where everybody is. I told him, they all show up at the same time and the others will be late. Well guess what: I was right. Even the locals were late. Peter Hogenkamp started the intro session at 10 AM and we still welcomed a lot of people at the desk. Has anybody recorded it or knows what he said?

At 10:30 the crowd came out of the intro session and walked towards the (almost) empty schedule. And again, it started to fill pretty fast and all session were set. And here is my complaint: Due to the late start and the early finish it was only possible to schedule 4 sessions per room (4 sessions times 5 rooms equals 20 sessions). That was actually pretty bad. But we are discussing to change location for the next BarCamp or BlogCamp event. At the ETH we had to leave both times at 17:00 (5:00 PM) and clean up everything very quickly. Any ideas or suggestions?

The first session I went to was called “Wissensmanagement mit internem Multi-Blog” (en: Knowledge management with internal Multi Blog) by Jürg Stuker (CEO of namics ag) in German.
They always had the problem, that if people needed information, they sent emails to the whole company what generated a high volume of emails nobody really wanted and cared about and that the actual information and solution died in somebody’s inbox and others had to ask again.
A half year ago they rethought this and came up with a “multi-blog-platform” where every user could start a posting on a topic (his example was: a designer was searching for “red websites”) and the co-workers can comment to this post and add value. Pretty cool concept. But I had my doubts if really everybody was using this. He answered that the biggest “bloggers” are the consultants, they like to talk anyway he added. But the stats he showed that the real top-posters are the engineers, the CEO, a marketing guy and some consultants. He also added, that the designers needed the most time to “get it” and use it. But now the whole system gets between 10 and 30 new posts/comments a day. I really see a future in this. But we really need an open source system together with some nice AJAX features like Stephanie Booth wants.

After the short break I went to the talk by Mr. Minute. He was in jail over Christmas and New Year and blogged from inside his cell. Pretty freaky, right? Mr. Minute quickly explained why he was in jail, why he decided to go to jail instead of paying a fine and what he did there. You have to know, in Switzerland you might be only “half-prisoned”. That means, you can leave the prison during the day and go to work. But at 20:00 you have to be back. You are not allowed to have laptops, mobile phones or other stuff in your cell. But there are ways to sneak in stuff. He said everybody has two or three mobile phones and leave one of them at the counter. And somehow he managed to keep a laptop over night and started to blog. His first problem was: “How do I get connected?” One of the prisons neighbors had an open access point. But on evenings, the connection was so slow, it was no fun at all. Later he sneaked in an external antenna for his WLAN-card. That worked better, until it broke. The next thing he uses was a beam device. Shortly after powering it on, Net Stumbler beeped like crazy. He now had connections to APs from far, far away. Maybe I need one of those as well? Pretty cool session and one of the geekiest I have seen until now.

After the lunch break with some other Bloggers (like Jens from BlogWiese, Bruno Giussani, Gabor, Jul and others - drop me a note and I’ll add you, I really forgot your names *shame*) I went to see a “real” (white hat) hacker: benbit - with glasses and a cap. His session title was: “Wie man sich in einem Blog unbeliebt macht – Live hacking”. The English title is something like: “How to make enemies with your blog”. He discovers XSS vulnerabilities. And because he is a white hat hacker - a lot of the participants didn’t knew the difference between black and white hat hackers, bleh – he informs the companies and does not use his discoveries. But he complained about the unwillingness from such companies to fix the holes. He talked about the Swiss national TV and found a XSS in their contact form. He asked the participants about sites he should check. bö said “ringier”. Benbit first tipped www.ringer.ch instead of www.ringier.ch, yes the keyboard was bad . In the first input form he found, he tipped in ‘>huhu and already found a XSS. The Ringier employees weren’t that happy

The last session of the day was Gabor’s “talk” … em discussion about “The Future of Blogging Technology”. It was the only session I went to the language was English. His point is, that blogging hasn’t changed over the year. There are of course new ideas like twitter (btw. twitter isn’t that big in Switzerland) and his explanation “who writes/blogs for who”. I really hope he shares his slides. For a better transcript surf to Stephanie and her blog post.
One sidenote: Stephanie is right, posting should be more AJAX like. I love the Flickr way to rename and add description to an image. That can’t be to hard for Matt and the WordPress guys (I don’t talk about plugins, we want it native!).

After cleaning up and packing, we decided to meet at the NewsBar in Zurich Downtown. But only 5 other people showed up. Did the others meet somewhere else or was that to “un-organized” for the rest ?

That was it, BlogCampSwitzerland. At the outro session, Peter asked who would come again in half a year and 80% raised their hands. Maybe we have another BlogCamp or BarCamp event this year. For that, I made a little list what we should change for the next time:

• Maybe another location. ETH is cool, but we want to stay longer. I remember in Berlin, we sat around in the yard for a long time and talked, blogged, surfed and discussed.
• We should have some dress stands (Kleiderständer).
• Make a two day event. The evenings are often so cool.
• Please, bring your cameras, dv-cams, microphones and shot, record, and podcast about the event.
• More sessions. At BarCamp we had around 5-7 sessions per room. A had around 25 sessions in 4 rooms. It is more intense, but you also have to talk about more.
• An AfterCamp event – organized and communicated to others. Reserve some tables somewhere. Tell everybody where we meet! This is so great. You can talk and discuss on other stuff or on things that happened at the *Camp. And you network a lot.
• Maybe we can finally find a sponsor for t-shirts.
• … please add your ideas, needs and comments below!

Again, somebody showed up with a tie

You can find my Flickr images on my set and hundreds of other photos under the “blogcampswitzerland” tag. My videos will be linked from the BarCamp site and blog.

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BlogCampSwitzerland

It will take place at the same locations as the first Swiss BarCamp, at the ETH Zurich. Hope to see you there

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I just chatted with Franz Patzig from BarCampCologne and I told him about the planned 5’000 people BarCamp next summer in the US and A. He came up with “this will be our Woodstock”. And I really have to agree. Will this be our Woodstock? Can you miss that if you are in Internet/Computers/Web? I don’t think so.
Any comments on the logo/idea?

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(And maybe this will be my last post about BarCamp on this blog )

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You can speak at LIFT
I was at Barcamp Zurich this past Saturday to see how these conferences work, and there is a good reason for that: on Friday we will offer two large rooms (130 seats each) to anybody who wishes to give a 20 minutes talk. It will work like this:

• anybody can propose a talk
• we will create a digg-like interface where LIFTers can dig the speeches they like the most
• the top speeches will be scheduled on Friday

We get so many offers from so many amazing people that we have to do this. All this will soon be available on the website

Of course it is not the BarCamp-Concept (only top session will happen), but it is a start.

LIFT is a non-free conference in Geneva with invited speakers (last year Robert Scoble, Cory Doctorow and more) and around 350 attendees.

It is great to see, that big conferences can change and become more open.

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The people showed up on time, Gabor and I, we could start with the introduction on time and offer the first apero. During that, the schedule was set up. Pretty quick and final, it seems to me. In general, the timing worked very good.

The sessions were interesting, a great mix of topics:

• various AJAX presentations and AJAX-problems
• Usability methods (better do a 30 minutes test than no test at all)
• Microformats
• Artificial life
  Organizing email
• BarCampRhine
• Funding and founding your company

And many, many, many, many more.

After the event and the second apero, we met at Niederdorf for a beer (or two) and more discussion. And I have to say, I had a lot and great discussions. Sorry to everybody I missed, I hope to see you at the next event or we can email.

We had no problems with the concept, it is very appreciated and a few already asked for another BarCamp (BarCampZurich2007 anyone?). I hope so, I would love to do it again. And I hope Gabor will have some time too .

A big thanks from me to all our participants – coming from all over, Geneva, Basel, Paris, Strasbourg and Germany, our volunteers (great job) and our sponsors (local.ch, Manroof, Google). Thanks for the “yummi” food (which I haven’t tried, spoken to to many people ) and the time spent with out. We’ll see us at the next event (BarCamp Blogosphere, maybe?).

PS: Parking in Zurich is either complicated or expensive:
My first ticket since I drive

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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

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