(photo by Kevin Monko / Monko Photo)
We’ve been watching the #bcphilly tweets and you guys have shared some really great ideas, praise, and observations. We ask that you continue to do so by commenting on this post. Your feedback is invaluable to us for creating an even better BarCamp next year. For those of you who attended last year, we hope that you enjoyed the changes we added this year.
Thanks everyone for attending and participating and making this a great event! Now give it to us straight!
11 Comments
Great job. BarcampPhilly was life changing. It was so cool to be able to share an interact with folks who have the same interests.
A great event: from venue, content and execution. Yet more evidence to support why Philly is where technology and community intersect.
Looking forward to Philly Barcamp III!
You guys really rocked it. Only suggestion (and I voiced on twitter) is to ask for descriptions. Some of the session titles were a bit misleading or could be misunderstood and by the time you walked out to something else, you missed something cool. I know it’s kind of against the unconference feel, but with multiple floors involved, it would help.
Thank you for all of your work to put this together though! Was really a great day and capped off awesome at Nat Mechanics!!!
Absolutely loved it. It was my first BarCamp and I am already looking forward to next year! I actually led a session although I didn’t plan on it when I came there. But it was an amazing experience. One suggestion, get a bottle water sponsor. Other than that, purely awesome.
Jason – I was totally wishing we had thought of bottled water too! Or at least a water source. If we stick with Old City Coffee, they can fill up some of those coffee cambros with filtered water. We want to try to keep the waste to a minimum, so if we encouraged people to bring reusable water bottles that would be great too… and yes, maybe a sponsor would want to provide those!
BarCamp was great! I would certainly come back in the future. My only suggestions would be that more information be included in the schedule. A brief description and the session leader’s Twitter handle would be cool. Thanks again for all your hard work on this event!
There were a bunch of feedback and suggestions given at the itty-bitty bar camp retrospective talk.
Notes are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonnieaumann/sets/72157622803726870/
Champions for following up on particular suggestions for improving the @barcampphilly experience for next year:
Scheduling App http://tr.im/F581
– @carlism @tommybgoode signed up to code more
— auto-generate hashtags from the app?
— make app reflect the board better, easier
— They especially need outside help with usability
Lecturey Talks
– a mysterious stranger (due to my bad photo-taking) volunteered to help organize/distribute some sort of quick & dirty guide to giving a bar camp talk, including possibly finding clips, writing up a list of general presenting tips
Topics Overlap in Schedule http://tr.im/F586
– @carlism offered to champion an 8am “How To Barcamp” talk during/before schedule
- @tommybgoode signed up to write up notes on the topic overlap experience
– Big sheet of basic instructions for how the schedule is created @bonniea suggested and volunteered
Awesome job everyone. Truly an amazing experience. My sole recommendation for improvement next year would be around scheduling – perhaps defining broad “tracks” or subject areas — i.e. coding, creative thinking, user interface stuff, future thinking, law, business, life, hookers (which seemed to be a big topic area this year), miscellaneous, Philly-stuff, etc. — and then allocate one or two or more rooms for each track. That might make it easier for folks to schedule + not concurrently schedule similar topics – i.e. someone might want to schedule user interface topic 2 after topic 1, to allow people interested in that topic to attend both. I love the somewhat randomness of BarCamp, and just some structure to scheduling might improve the experience + with broad tracks, might even result in some new or better courses perhaps. In any case – looking forward to another BarCamp next year!!!
I also support the suggestion of descriptions for sessions.
While I realize you’re at the mercy of the venue, the wireless network was *extremely* difficult to use.
As a parent, a childcare option would be nice.
Barcampphilly is too successful to be held only once a year. I hope you’ll consider having one again in six months.
This was my first BarCamp and it was a terrific experience. Well run, especially considering all that goes on at once. I too think it would be useful if sessions had a brief line about what the content will entail.
Also, at one of my sessions, before starting, the presenter had everyone state their name and professional role. This was helpful in terms of providing context to both questions and answers, and also in case you wanted to speak to someone later you knew who they were, so if it can be suggested that others begin by doing this too, that would be a nice gesture.