BarCampFrankfurt – Cisco Compatible

Here I am again, on my second German BarCamp (my first was BarCampBerlin in October). I met a lot campers from Berlin and from France and I finally met Franz Patzig and Robert Basic. They did a great job organizing this BarCamp at a really, really great location – thank you very much Cisco System, for the venue, the WiFi, the delicious food and the free drinks. I hope to get such a great sponsor for the next Swiss BarCamp (which a lot of people have asked for).
 I arrived on Saturday afternoon, just in time for lunch. They had done only one session until that because the intro session took more time than expected. Understandable, 180 people tagging themselves needs a while. My first real session I attend was the BarCampRhine one with Philippe Schoen. The Germans seem very interested in the idea. We got a lot of new ideas and inputs and need to collect and think about all of them. If you have an idea what software/tools we could use to organize such a big “un-conference”, please let me or Philippe know.

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.