My Take on BCB5

Barcamp Bangalore (BCB5) was at IIMB on 17th and 18th of Nov, 07. My overall experience was good and much better than that of the previous event (BCB4).

Things I liked...

• Collectives. Yes, I liked that the initiators continued with the much debated concept of collectives. Collectives give me a way to find the right audience and to subsequently network with them. It also meant that I get only the interested audience.
• Better scheduling. Scheduling was much better than BCB4. The wiki based scheduling gave an overview of what to expect and the on the spot notice board scheduling told what's happening and where.
• Matz! This time around the initiators ear marked a few areas in the corridors and lawns as meeting places named as D1 to D6. Mats, mattresses and pillows were arranged to make you feel comfortable. This enabled small and focused groups to get together and have an informal discussion.

Things that could change...

• I still believe that there could be a nominal entry fee for the participants. This might reduce the number of participants, but will pull in only the fully interested participants.
• Oops.. I never heard anything about the 'open collective'. Were there any discussions?

To me this looked to be a better barcamp compared to BCB5, especially regarding scheduling. I'm looking forward to the next barcamp. I'm in fact thinking about joining the organising team to get a feel of the challenges they face in bringing up this impressive event!

SPM Collective at BCB5

SPM for Software Production Management.

17th and 18th Nov were two useful days for me at Barcamp Bangalore 5 (BCB5). I had earlier proposed the collective on Software Production Management. Things went well as per the plan. On Sat morning we huddled around under the cozy shade of a tree for our discussions. The quick self introductions were followed by a brief session from me on basic setup for S/W production management. Followed by this, Kaetan from ThoughtWorks gave a lively session on implementing continuous integration through Cruise Control. He showed us a short demo of CC.rb.



The end of Kaetan's session started an impromptu discussion on eXtreme Programming, especially on pair programming. The guys from rails factory chipped in with some useful contributions.

Thanks to the folks who turned out and contributed to the discussions. It's nice to know a few people who are passionate about this field. BCB5 played as a platform to meet and network with like minded people. I'm hopeful of converting this good start to a long lasting and mutually beneficial community.

I'm going to send a mail to all the particpants seeking ideas to form and sustain this community. If you have some inputs or if you would like to join this community, please do get in touch with me.

Software Production Management at Barcamp Bangalore 5

Barcamp Bangalore 5 is just around the corner. It's on 17th and 18th Nov at IIMB.

Like BCB4, this Barcamp will also be around the much debated concept of collectives. This time though the initiators have refined the general guidelines for the collectives. The initiators have also put up a very nice discussion board to discuss collectives and other general topics.

I have proposed the collective "Software Production Management". Through the collective I expect to meet like minded people and to have some useful discussions. The term "Software Production Management" is not often used. But I coined that as the title for the collective to bring the related areas of configuration management, build management, release management and change management under one umbrella.

How to be part of this collective?
If you are interested in this collective, you can register by posting in this thread.

Apart from this I also see a lot of very interesting collectives like "Weekend Entrepreneurship", "Blogs and Blogging", "Facebook" etc. It promises to be a great BarCamp!

BarCamp Bangalore 4

BarCamp Bangalore 4 (BCB4) happened on 28th, 29th of July at IIMB. If you are hearing the name 'BarCamp' for the first time, this link has some basic info. The official BarCamp site has some in depth details. In simple terms, it is an unconference, an ad hoc gathering of like minded and passionate people.

This was my first BarCamp. I Had heared a lot about BarCamps and was more than keen to attend this BarCamp, especially when there were sessions on photography, cycling, startups, blogging ... and more!

Collectives
This BarCamp introduced the concept of collectives. Collectives are groups of people who get together around a common interest/theme/ideology. There were around 30 collectives in BCB4. I was part of the photo, bicycling and startup collectives. Some of the other prominent collectives in BCB4 were the bloggers collective, the internet collective, FOSS, UnBand collective, BangPypers...

Bicycling Collective
This was the highlight for me in BCB4. About 15 of us, who regularly cycle/want to cycle met and discussed various interesting topics for about two hours. Some of us took our bikes to the venue. I'll be writing a separate post on this.

Startup Collective
This probably was the biggest of all collectives! It was useful to hear many successful entrepreneurs talk about their experiences. I particularly liked the session from Sujai of Sloka Telecom. He hilariously explained his hiring and compensation policies. He mentioned about an young employee who wanted to get married, but was finding it tough to get a girl as he was working for a startup! That's a strikingly true scenario in the Indian middle class society.

Photo Collective
A bunch of enthusiastic photographers met behind the Audi irrespective of a light drizzle to discuss some good topics related to photography. Vinayak gave an introdcution of Bangalore Weekend Shoots Flickr group.

Feedback
This was my first BarCamp. It lived up to my expectations! Now I know of special interest groups in my areas of interest. But there was a striking difference in the quality of dicussions between the bicycling and the startup collectives. We had some foucssed and highly participative discussions, but the Startup collective was mostly of 'conference' style sessions. One difference between these two collectives is the number of participants. It's good to have many participants, but it's more improtant to have serious participants. I would suggest to have an entry fee of about 200 to 300 INR for BarCamps, so that only the serious particpants attend. This also means that the initiators need not scout for too many sponsors.