BarCampAlsace3 – A Short Visit In France

After a short trip of only 4 hours traveling I arrived in Strasbourg for the BarCampAlsace3 event. I headed down to the BarCamp venue and found myself again in room full of people and BarCampers. Philippe welcomed me and said the Second Life sessions starts any moment. But first I had to “paint” something on a white wall. I am not a good designer or painter so I just left my fingerprints. Pretty cool idea, maybe we should copy that or let everybody sign our big BarCampSwitzerland banner. The wireless connection has been made possible by sans-fils.org (webcam live image) and I hope I will understand the discussions, my French is not that good 🙂

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.