Barcamp Belgium

Bart De Waele - Google’s dirty little secret

If you would like search engine traffic from a specific location or country… you better make sure that the IP-address of your server is located in that country!

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Here is the first of the presentation videos:

Clo Willaerts - Skynet
“What marketeers could learn from the pr0n industry”
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(picture by Pieter Baert)

Put seventy-five geeks in a pleasant environment with coffee, cookies and Wifi, let them talk about the stuff they feel passionate about and see what happens: Barcamp Brussels. The second edition is just finished and I’m happy to say everything went splendid.

We were definitely spoilt by our main sponsor Skynet, who took care of the venue, t-shirts and most of the catering (you rock, Clo). Also a big thanks to SAP for letting us use the SAP Lounge and Sven @ Adhese, Jo Wouters en Frank Louwers for their kind contribution to our catering costs.
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Some people seem worried about the fact so few speakers have gone through the trouble of writing down the topic of their speech on the Barcamp Topics page. While we did have a lot more topics than announced beforehand on the first Barcamp (May), there is now a striking gap between the number of announced attendees (100) and the number of announced topics (11).

That is why I would like to ask the attendees to add their topic to the Barcamp II speeches, so that we can get an idea of which tracks (Developers, Users, Knowledge and Media track) are most popular and have to be extended. Barcamp is in five days (Sunday), so most speakers should at least have an idea of what they want to present.

We get a lot of questions like “I would like to attend Barcamp Brussels, but I don’t dare/want to do a speech. Can I come or not?“. The answer is simple: yes and no.

The reason why we stress the whole “attendee = speaker” thing is this: we want participants, not viewers. We want a crowd of interesting and interested people. So do you have to do a speech? No. As you might see when you do some basic arythmetic, there will be more people than speaking slots. So there is not even enough time for everyone to speak. But do you have to participate? Yes. Some alternative ways to participate:

• we will have 4 simultaneous tracks in 4 rooms. We want to have audio and video recordings of each speech (last time we did not have them all). So we will need at least 4 people that will be present in the room, press the ‘record’ button at the right time and make sure the microphone was on.
• do you have a special talent or pastime? Can you make a podcast with interviews? Make cartoon versions of attendee’s faces? Take pictures of each speech? Create a scrap book with original viral campaigns? Set up an IRC backchannel? Demo Second Life for those who have never seen it? … There are dozens of ways to incite the interest of the people present.
• Can you spare a 30″ flat screen for a day? Do you have a really good microphone for digital recordings? An excellent video camera? Wanna buy drinks? Does the word ’schwag’ mean anything to you?

So speaking is not obligatory, but make sure you participate. That way, Barcamp becomes more valuable for everyone!

We’ve had some “localisation” issues to clear out, but now it’s confirmed! Barcamp Brussels will take place in the prestigious SAP Lounge, the same venue as DrupalCON the days before it. Our main sponsor is still Skynet and the date is still Sept 24th!!

Some details:

• speeches are short: 10 minutes of talking, 5 minutes of questions (if any) and 5 minutes of transfer between rooms. This is the “Elevator Pitch” formula!
• all presentations should be IN ENGLISH! We are expecting a more international crowd and that is the language everyone understands.
• there will be 4 separate rooms, so 4 simultaneous tracks. The proposed tracks are listed on the bottom of this post.
• the day starts at 9h on Sunday morning and finishes at 18h. Food and coffee breaks are taken care of. The environment allows for laidback chatting, working on laptops or taking a brief walk outside.

HOW TO PROCEED

If you want to participate:

1. put your name on the Barcamp Brussels attendee list (we’re already around 70 names!)
2. put your 10-minute topic on the Barcamp II topics page
3. prepare your presentation: focus on the important stuff, don’t go in too much detail and practise iot. 10 minutes is really short, and you will be stopped when your time is up, so that we can keep the four simultaneous tracks synchronized.
4. show up and have fun

The proposed tracks are:

DEVELOPERS TRACK

for those who write it

open software development: PHP, Ruby, CMS …

USERS TRACK

for those who use it

user acceptance, crowdsourcing, education

KNOWLEDGE TRACK

for those who plan it

entrepreneurship, information architecture, project implementation, folksonomy

MEDIA TRACK

for those who sell it

viral campaigns, the Flickr/Myspace/Youtube of …