Organised By:
- Free and Open Source Software Association India
- OpenKick Technologies

Key Dates:
Drupal Camp- August 8-9, 2008
Job Fair and Code Sprint: August 10, 2008

Venue: Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar

Drupal Camp is an event for local and global Drupalers. Like other camps, this Drupal Camp India is defined by the people and it is for the people, who are interested in DRUPAL, in particular for the learning and sharing knowledge and ideas with each other among the local and global Drupal community. This will also be the first ever Drupal Camp in India. This drupal camp is beneficial for all IT professionals, Freelancers, Companies, Colleges and Students who want to secure their future with latest Open Source Technologies.

The benefits with attending with Drupal Camp are:
Learn about Drupal and other Open Source technologies
Network with other Drupal Developers and Companies
Business Partnership with Indian and International Companies
Job fair where major Technology Companies will tap on Gujarat’s Talent

For more details on the event visit DrupalCampIndia

Subscribe to Geek RSS Feed here.
Subscribe to Gyaan RSS Feed here.
Subscribe to the combined Let Me Know RSS Feed here.

I initiated a couple of sessions in BCB6. The first one was on Startup Pains. It was inspired primarily to identify authentic issues that I could take up as a KickStart.in initiative and do my bit towards making Bangalore a heaven for startups. It was led primarily by Prof Suresh. He brought in some presentations and put in a lot of facts in the picture. We got some 5 pain points. 4 of which we had compiled before. The solutions too were something in lines of what we had thought of earlier.

Chetna forced me to sit down with her for her session on Star Signs, astrology, palmistry etc. She chipped in my name and handwriting analysis as well. The session on Star Signs was informative, I figured out that a Star Sign is different from Sun Sign. And as expected there was a lot of debate. I asked if Rajiv, (the guy who was an armature palmist and who seemed to know the most about the topic) if he could tell 1 major incident from my past. If he could accurately say that, I would be a convert. He couldn't but he did say a thing about creativity which I agree with.

Astrology got even more heated arguments.

Now my turn came to speak about Handwriting Analysis and I was already thinking like "what am I doing here?". Anyways, I chose not to talk much. I offered to do a 2 line analysis of 10 people who volunteered. I'll tell 2 things about each of them. If all of them found those two things to be their typical qualities then people could take Handwriting Analysis to be a Science and if it did not match, they could brand it a pseudo science or whatever. And there was only 1 line to read from. It was a gamble, the data was insufficient. But I thought it would be fun and took it on. Result: Out of the 20 or so handwritings that I analyzed, all agreed and only 1 disagreed with a thing I spoke on optimism. I don't know what the others thought of HandwritingAnalysis though.

Shourya was at his cynical and logical best though! When I looked at a sample's T bar and spoke a thing about enthusiasm, he commented immediately about the 2 exclamation marks that the sentence carried (something I hadn't even noticed!!!).

But thats not what made it my best barcamp ever. I just loved the participation. For the first time, I didn't go to the gates to tie the banners. And when Aditya and I went to the L Cluster after the feedback session to clean the place up, we were surprised to find that everything was spic and span!!! This kind of things happen when people take the event as their own. I guess in BCB6, the majority did take it that way!

I met a lot of amazing people as usual. It was just too good an experience to describe in words.

Thats how it all started, and since then I have had the privilege of being one of the organizers* of every Barcamp thats happened in Bangalore. I must acknowledge that the people I have met here. We usually read about inspiring people, I have had the privilege of working with them. To name a few - Arpit, Aditya, Jace, Arun, Puneeth, Kallol, Pradeep, Akash, Shourya, Aashish, Nishant and the rest of our lot. Man, they are all such amazing people.

BCB (The First) was a super hit and BCB2 kind of lived up to the expectations of the crowd. The ThoughtWorks office was like the coolest place to host a BarCamp in. Then came BCB3, Jace had this idea of cross pollinating various segments of the society together at Barcamp. We debated this for a month :P . Honestly, no jokes here! Arun, Jace and Akash did some extraordinary work and ported the website to MediaWiki. He also initiated an absolutely ass-kicking brainstorming session in which we listed down everything that we could think of in the Internet, Mobile and Society Domains. He then went on to create FreeMap diagrams of the same and posted it on the site. I must say, BCB3 involved the maximum effort. It was also because, sponsorship was a problem and nobody wanted to sponsor the Venue. Finally we got IIM and things moved Gracefully. BCB4 saw a great team member leaving in the form of Arpit. He had single handedly managed several tasks and now he was leaving for his MBA. We aslo had a great team member in the form of Aashish Solanki coming in. He has been the champion of all design related activities of BCB preparations ever since. After acknowledging the efforts involved in organizing a BarCamp, we decided to keep the venue static. Aditya, the lean mean networking machine was always full of ideas and contacts without whom we couldn't have reached far. It was Aditya who introduced Mansi to the team after BCB3 I guess! And her presence has been indispensable since she joined. When BCB3 ended, the Mobile and Society crowd were very happy. Internet was so just the same and everyone complained about the venue. But having gone through the pains of finding a venue once, we were very glad that IIMB offered us to continue having Barcamps in their campus. I am sure the junta doesn't mind it much this time around. Oh and I completely forgot Collectives. That was the theme of BCB4. It received a mixed response. Come BCB5 and Collective based discussions were moved to a Forum. We had a tough time generating enough enthusiasm in people to user the Forum though. We also debated having a code jam but dropped the idea for the sheer amount of effort required to carry it off well. The star of BCB5 was Nishant Baranwal, Mansi's brother. This dude managed all the finances like a pro. Srini Yelandur cracked off an amazing deal with Google. And then came the recently concluded Barcamp Bangalore 6. (NOTE: I am writing a quick post, and my intention is not to talk about what everyone in the org committee did, but to put down whats coming in my mind immediately. I would love to acknowledge the amazing efforts of Pradeep, Shourya, Saurabh Laddha, Saurabh Minni, Kunal, Jayanth and everyone in the team whom I have surely but accidently missed out). Basic intention is to speak my heart out on acknowledging the amazing folks who are just like my family now!

BCB6 has been my most enriching experience. I have never witnessed so much participation in a BCB before. And the feedback session too was awesome.
* Now ofcourse, there is nothing like a distinction between an organizer or a participant. But there are a group of participants who invest their time and energies to organize the event and take care of the nitty gritty details. I am referring to this set of people here.

This time I attended

• Incubate at the IIMA Aditi Gupta [aditigupta AT iimahd DOT ernet DOT in] -A little session introducing the incubation centre at the premier institute of India and the CIIE's initiatives.
• Using Project Management Body of Knowledge(PMBOK(R)) of Project Management Institute, USA to build Ecosystem Supporting Innovation and Entrepreneurship Collaboratively, Balarama K. Varanasi, PMP balaramakv@yahoo.com
• Spicebird, Open source collaboration client - Sivakrishna E, Prasad S of Synovel
• Blogathon India, and the usual Blogging Collective by Blogaloreans (http://www.blogathon.in) discussion
• Building High Performance and Scalable Websites, Vinayak H, Akamai
• SEO isn't just about meta tags, Mani Karthik OrganicApex
• Hamburgers, Donuts and Social Media Marketing, Ashwin Ramesh OrganicApex
• Branding by Akash Srivastava, User Experience Consultant

Overall, quite a good experience for me. Also met, Netra Parikh from DMI/Pinstorm and a lot of other people. Couldn't attend Mrinal's sessions either.

IIMA session was boring, but then it did not have any interest to me.

The session from Akamai was pretty good. I could see that the Vinayak was not only experienced with what he was talking about, but he also knew how to handle a crowd and steer the conversation back to where he was leading. It was quite refreshing to see someone who was a bit more professional.

The next one about working without venture capitalists by Balarama was ok. His idea was very good, where he would like startups and entrepreneurs to register and offer services and get services from the same pool. But there were a lot of practical difficulties as it came to notice during the lively discussion.

Spicebird looked like an awesome product. Looks like it might have a future. I will download it now and check it.

As usual, it was good to meet the blogathon guys again.

SEO session and Social Media Marketing sessions were quite okay. Those guys were young and energetic. All the best for their venture.

Branding was a session on how important branding is for any product or service. It was a discussion.

Some feedback on barcamp (my humble opinion):

1. Need a little more structure in the sessions
2. Speakers should know that they can get side tracked and lose precious minutes
3. Organization skills need to be honed. Better positioning of happenings
4. Experienced speakers needed
5. Should keep separate sessions for novices and expert users. I believe barcamp was full of techies (at least most of them) and so the sessions were not that great when people talked about things which most of them already knew. Separate sessions on the same topic for different crowds should solve the problem

The good things about barcamp:

1. Barcamp rocks - for techies
2. Networking - I was able to network and make friends with quite a few people
3. Good awareness for a lot of people on latest trends in web, technology, etc

I should be around for all barcamps at Bangalore from now on. Cheers!

barcampbangalore6, barcampbangalore

What is the classic style? Very simple, there are no spectators. Every attendee is a participant and he/she has to speak. In this way, everyone understands each others ideologies and the spirit of BarCamp.

This time, we had three categories on the wiki - Speakers, Volunteers and Talk ideas. If you wanted to attend BCB, then you should register yourself as a speaker with a topic, as a volunteer to take up any task or request for a topic which you would like to hear more on.

Day 1 saw a lot of new faces at the camp. We have quite a few from outstation too. Live twittering and live blogging have taken a leap forward during this camp. I could not participate in sessions, but was just going around and doing some writing. I need to admit that I have just not been active during this camp. Also, I could not attend Day 2 as well :( Hope I don't repeat these things going forward.

Here are few fellow tweeters who were live tweeting - BCB6, Prasanth, Vaibhav, Sanjukta, Jerry and Aditi

Here are few pictures which I took on Day 1.

For those who are aware of the American Pie movie series, the above line should definitely ring a bell. But here am referring this to the ongoing Barcamp Bangalore 6 at IIMB. Bangalore,www.barcampbangalore.org The 6th summer edition 2008 is scheduled on 19th and 20th April.

The sessions were varied at its best. For geeks, for environmentalists, for social causes everyone had thing or the other to speak and discuss upon. Personally, I could attend sessions on Life Blob, RIA Web development, Kamasutra lessons and Dating sessions.

Started my day with demo of Life Blob. www.lifeblob.com. Life Blob is a social site for individuals and groups to post and track events as blobs. In a individuals life time in everything he has done has been captured as blobs in a timeline. So, if one were to look at a person's profile, his timeline for a particular year will show all the stuffs he/she has referenced on the web at that particular time. These could the photos uploaded/ blogs or events attended. This startup has a 3 member team, all of them ex-Trilogy members and friends. It took them about 6 months to bring up the site with Ajax/Java/MySQL being the supporting technology behind it and currently with one server supporting the traffic. The site has a slidebar in the bottom to show the time line and facility to import photos from flickr and picassa among other features.

Next there was a 3 hour long session on RIA based web development. It consisted of 4 sub sessions. RIA products from different vendors were discussed. The sessions were, Introduction to RIA, RIA using flex, RIA with OpenLazzlo, RIA using MS Silverlight.

Mrinal gave a background and introduction of RIA. He took us through the complete evolution of software products on how they evolved from dumb terminals to the web 2.0 age. He pointed out the limitations of HTML based static rendering of UI and how RIA caught on due it its visual appeal and ease of development. This was followed by a demo cum introduction to Flex framework. This was done by Harish and Raghu from Adobe. They highlighted the advantages of building desktop like components with flex for the web to experience the RIA. The flex framework itself is a set of librarys on top of the flash, which is opensource. But currently, the IDE they have is licensed. Although there are free alternatives available.

Next on, OpenLazzlo- a open source framework built on top of flash was presented. It was pointed out that the OpenLazzlo apps on the web left lesser footprint when compared to SWFs generated by flex or flash. A full fledged IDE is still not avaliable for OpenLazzlo. Next up, two of the Microsoft members came out to talk on their RIA based framework Silverlight. Silverlight is used for their live search engine. I did not attend the same for obvious reasons!

Towards the end of the day, there were two non-tech sessions that I attended. First was tips from the great book of love - Kamasutra. This carpet session was taken by Shashi. I missed the initial 15 to 20 Mins, which was supposedly the most interesting parts. By the time I joined, he was reading out what the "scriptures" spoke about breaking the ice with the opposite sex. In his interpretation, he suggested all these lessons could be used by guys to create a impression on the girls they want to hit on. Most of his tips were received with loud cheer and applause. Trust me, I had never attended such a discussion! It was very interesting and filled with humour at times and even informative!

Dating session was the last one for the day for me. This was a casual and light open discussion on different dating related experiences. It was mostly directionless. but still the one liners from some of the participants made it worth attending. Most cleaches and stereotypes were discussed and at one point everyone were giving suggestions for a certain individuals problem in life. He somehow wanted to know if he could ever get to speak to a nice girl he knows in another team in his company!!

Overall satisfying day!

Tags: barcamp, bcb6, barcampbangalore6

From the morning sessions scheduled today morning (that's nice concept, though. To get time slots for your sessions you need to come early and grab the slots. Hehehehe!) I attended

• Designing your Logo in 20 mins, Aashish Solanki Blog - I found this quite good. Aashish did do a good job in explaining the importance of a good logo, especially so for startups. He explained about three types of logs - Simple Typo (Microsoft), Art/Symbol logo (written word workshop) and Symbol+Typo (Rich and Traditional). Apparently, he has designed logos for Barcamp, pluggd.in, Aavega, KickStart.in, etc. Nice! He also did a quick 15 minutes on-the-spot designing for barcampr.
• Blogathon India, and the usual Blogging Collective by Blogaloreans (http://www.blogathon.in) - Mohan. Met Sanjukta, Mohan, Sandil and others. They have a great thing going. I think I should write about one of the topics. Hmmm...
• SEO, Universal Search Optimization,How Search Engines Work, How small Businesses can Make use of these Free Services, Suresh Babu site - this was also quite good. I hope guys got some tips. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who have no idea what SEO is all about.
  

I did not attend (although I wanted to)

• Mobile Applications for India Market- Open discussion , Sunil Maheshwari (www.mangotechno.com)
• Radhika Tandon (radhika@naandi.org). Education for the girl child - in rural & tribal India - Myth? Dream? Reality?
• Write a book using Vi Kushal Das

Hopefully will be there for tomorrow's sessions too. I am missing the afternoon's sessions due to some unavoidable reasons.

Its a great team and we all enjoy great camaraderie and team spirit. Every one of these guys has a busy week day. Come weekend we all came together to think BCB and its execution.

The picture says it all - the energy, the spirit and the passion to team and make a difference.

From left clock wise.... Amit Singh (green jacket), Arun Ramarathnam (yours truly!), Kesava Reddy, Shourya Sarcar (red tee), Suresh B, Kiran Jonnalagadda (face partially hidden), Aashish Solanki, Pradeep BV (struggling to raise his face), Akash Mahajan, Nishant Baranwal, Srinivas Yelandur and Harinath Pudipeddi (hand in pocket).

It is one great team that rocks!

Powered by ScribeFire.

It had a dull start, not many for bloggers collective. After break fast we walked around a bit trying to figure out what's happening where and saying hi hello to a few campers. Arun was taking pictures of all at the break fast table, Prashanth of Blogalorean made it today, he was busy playing cricket yesterday, Amit (labnol) Agarwal wouldn't be taking any session today, said I'm here to just meet people today. Jace is going around taking a lot of pics, they are not using the mega phone today, you gotta shout to collective participants for your collective.

Bloggers lazed on the comfy mattresses and had some discussion on Bloggers Responsibility.

Discussion started when Nithya asked a question, why are bloggers so difficult, why is it too much to expect that they'll blog about our initiative to help us. She and her husband has started a website which is a platform, Muziboo, for sharing your own created music. If you are a musician, singer you can upload your work there for critical review. It's like musical blogging may be. She has approached many bloggers seeking their support in spreading the word about them by blogging but no response.

 

She says, they can write about Om shanti Om but not about an effort started by their neighborhood barcamper or blogger. Answer Nithya is, says everybody, "what is it in for me?" OSO get's me traffic. That raises the question of social responsibility. May be there isn't anything for me as blogger but shouldn't we, once in a while, be doing some thing good, even if we get nothing out of it. True one can't impose upon a blogger what to write but may be a conscience can be built. That's a question that shall remain unanswered for a long time.

Do visit Muziboo and if you like it do a favor, blog about it, spread the word.

Bloggers dispersed on that note, the mattress and pillows were now occupied by collective on 'online conversation and word of mouth advertising.'

Chandrachoodan started the discussion by talking about Gang of Girls by Sunsilk. A platform which talks very little about shampoo and sunsilk but is a classic example of word of mouth advertising. it's a platform for users or others to interact and express. He then spoke about a blogger who wrote something against Club Mahindra which became so huge that if you google for Club Mahindra it comes as the 2nd result. So that's the power of word of mouth.

What is to be noted is negative feedback runs faster than the positive ones. And its easier to say "It sucks" So how to encourage more positive feedback and get them going around.

• For word of mouth advertising to build up you'd have to give enough time
• Optimise social networking sites like facebook and orkut

• Give personal touch to the relationship you have with your existing users / consumers so that they'd get more on board.

word of mouth advertising collective

That was more or less the summary of this collective. It was attended by around 40 campers some sitting some standing all attentive. Also happened this morning, discussions in the other interesting collectives, Social Shopping and Weekend Entrepreneurship.

My laptop ran out of battery at this point so I had to move to a room where I could charge it. Sneaked in Latte (that's the name of the room) where Mobile Internet collective were having intense discussion on 'following web standards.' I didn't get much of the discussion but could gather one point (representation could be incorrect):

• Mobile applications don't follow standards..what's the incentive? Handset manufacturers should have an incentive to design device in such a manner it supports all application.

Headed for Lunch after this. Lunch today was a bit light not as many items on menu list but very satisfying nonetheless. Post lunch the atmosphere understandably got. even more dull but I was looking forward to one very interesting collectives, Design Barcamp Collective. Proposed by Aditya Mishra who has been with the core team behind BCB and also recently organized the Mumbai Barcamp.

But before that I quickly went around taking some pics, had a little chat with Abhishek Thakkar. Abhishek is the man behind www.smsgupshup.com. A cool idea he introduced to us as a part of the bloggers collective. The mutineers quickly joined the gupshup and also created Munity's sms group which I also joined. Abhishek is also probably amongst the handful podcaster both in India and Bangalore. A guy with great sense of humor it was nice to know him. Abhishek's Podcast - www.guttr.com

In another room Arun gave a talk on his weekend entrepreneurship project www.taazza.com. This is a site which tracks online news from all over and presents in a much more reader freindly manner. The site is designed keeping in mind the different news reading habits that each individuals have. It works on some sort of algorithm or something I couldn't get that tech bit. His objective behind the session was to get as many critical review possible and he got plenty which he jotted down on a BCB5 note pad. Good to see people still take hand notes. Sad that I don't, reminds me I used to have a very good handwriting.

At Designing Barcamp Collective heated discussion, lots of energy in the air, around 40 campers including the core BCB team along with complete newbies. Content, structure, wiki, frequency, food, venue, T-shirts everything was discussed. Some bullet points I captured.

Aditya debating over frequency of BCBs

• Venue: IIM Bangalore is a bit concerned opening up its doors to 100s of people they don't know, but its not that much of an issue.
• Frequency frozen to be every quarter as decided after debating over quarter or half yearly...
• One camper says, the structure set by organizers needs to be changed, the organizers should do this and that, then Aditya answers, there is the fundamental problem, you see there is no Organizer at BCBs you organise BC6 if you wish to.
• We can do away with the K clusters rooms as they add to create confusion, but we definitely need the audi or an open space for the inaugural session.
• Collectives are a great idea but some improvement required with the structuring. There should be a minimum strength to be called as a collective.
• Time limit for each session - default or enforced? This wasn't decided really.
• If only people would contribute more to the design than in criticizing the structure. Aditya made a point of the 2-300 that came for the camp how many are here for the design barcamp collective? That shows.

So True. Some one called me up asking about barcamp after reading my cross posted mails about the New media and mass social campaign collective. He is from a completely different background, never heard of barcamps. So am telling him what is it all about. After some 15 min when I was done explaining, he asks, "but why is it organised? I was confused at the question.

"I am sorry I didn't get your question." Said I.

"I mean why do they organise this event? What's in it?"

"Nothing. There is no reason why. Just so that people can share and learn. Interact and network. there's nothing more in it than just an effort to do something that they like doing."

Apparently it is in comprehensible to most why would anybody take all these pain of arranging a barcamp, running around the sponsors, spend money from their pockets till the time sponsors pay up, why, when there is no formal body of committee to take the credits at the end of the day, why, when on the wiki board you don't see any of the core team members name, why...for what... Yeah... That's Barcamp Bangalore for you my friend.

Now thats not the topic here.

We happened to talk about SMS Gup Shup, the company that he represents, and the amazing idea that they have. So the stats goes like this -

April they go Alpha
May they go Beta
Nov they are close to a million (if you dont know what a million is ... its 1'000'000 users)
The number of users doubling every 40 days

Now thats a growth. What makes them click? What is so great about SMS Gup Shup? What made we mutineers start a Mutiny group in SMS Gup Shup as soon as he told us what it is?
The whole idea behind SMS Gup Shup is to get connected via SMS, its a blog, its a mobile orkut and its much more. It works like this.

You create a group
Invite friends to join in or they subscribe to you
You post SMS-es and it reaches all your friends
Whats you cost? 3rs
How many you reach? That many people, who have joined your group.
Catch? - No catch!
How to do it? - Just SMS for all the above steps

Now how does that sound??? Its cool i say. Imagine you want to tell all you friends how good or how shitty a movie is, right after you saw it? You start messaging and goes on adding people to the list and then you send.

By the time the last message is sent. They would have as well seen the movie.
Instead what if you can send in one message ... cool isn't it ...

Here are the steps straight from the site...

GupShup from Mobile

Start a Group - 3 simple steps to start a Gup Shup from your mobile phone:

• Create your group by sending an SMS to 567673434. Example:
  CREATE mygroup123
• Invite friends to your group:
  INVITE 98200XXXXX 99203XXXXX
• Send group messages to 567673434. Example:
  Hi, am Arun and this is my group for movie reviews.

Join a Group - Get messages from your favorite groups on your mobile phone

• To subscribe to group, sms JOIN followed by the group name to 567673434. Start your GupShup now! Example: JOIN GupShup

Come lets start GupShupping - Staying in touch is now just a message away...

:)

Sandy's laptop on a 'VERY LOW' connectivity, and currently on Ganti's lap

Gantiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, the official BCB5 Colgate Ad

The Secret Service was here too ...

BCB5 - Various Moods

Mela mein bichdey huey ... BarCamp mein miley ...

:D ]]> http://jerryreghunadh.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/barcampbangalore-day2-pre-lunch-updates/ Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:59:48 +0000 Jerry http://jerryreghunadh.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/barcampbangalore-day2-pre-lunch-updates/ Saunday morning .. yaawwwnnnnnn!!!! .. But its the day of Barcamp... no sleep... So i dragged my ass out of bed.
Its the day of CAT exams and by the time i woke up, at around 8am all my roommates had in fact left for the test. I have to say that i was one of the first persons to reach.
After a quick lunch with Abhishek Thakkar , who is having this talk on SMS Gupshup, the SMS way of twittering, i'm back in front of the discussion boards.
What is with the WiFi???- It keeps failing at times, on systems for no reason at all and then comes up all by itself.
Now that people are finally arriving and rooms are getting booked up, i see energy again in the atmosphere.
Bloggers decided to have discussion at D4 - 11am. It turned out that Sky was already there. She was trying to set the time zone and the WiFi connection on her laptop. Then people started dropping in thinking its some discussion and Vola!!! everyone is giving a self intro.
Then Nitya of Muziboo, complained that generally indian bloggers are reluctant and unwilling to help someone. She quoted her own experience as an example.
They started the Muziboo and she personally approached bloggers and asked them to do a review on the site and its features. But unfortunately of the 100+ people that she asked only 2 did it for her. This eventually became a hot topic and there indeed some discussion on that. People started dropping by with the noise level that we created. So finally everyone was sorry for the state of affairs and promised to help each other, starting with Muziboo.
Before we knew it was Lunch time and off we go to hog like pigs ...
:)

I'm Speaking too :)

Getting the WiFi connection

The Mutineers ...

E-Governance Session

Post Lunch ..

Amit Agarwal - Digital Inspirations, is talking on monetizing blogs. He is having no slides, no laptop, no geeky gadget, just talking. He is the first professional blogger in India.

So one advice from him - don't use TextLinks in you blog as it wont help you in the long run. Rather than reblogging, write an original stuff at least once in a while, coz reblogging and linking will make people leave your site and go after the original stuff.

People are just walking into the collective and the strength is building up.

Now amit is getting swarmed with questions... :)

And i'm still looking for the 2 guys who approached me b4 lunch for the blog review.

:D

5.31 pm My blog, Too long, the categories and tags on the top of the post is not required. Sandil making funny comment, too much of feminist content, but hey that's not a criteria.. Too much text not many pics. But I get 4.37 out of 5 given that I am a complete non techie.

5.12 pm http://readbarbi.blogspot.com/ very annoying says one here...but the creator says it is ok I make loads of money from it..I got $20 for 100 words, for each post i get about $10, whether it is ethical or not that's a different topic for debate. Here comes the question of do bloggers have social responsibility. This author's tech blog codeinsane.com however is quite good.

4.51 pm Quite a lot of takers for this session. They all want their blog to be ripped by Jerry. Next is http://www.reviewsaurus.com/ this is too cluttered for my eyes.. the big yellow boxes should go. But quite a lot of them here like the graphic. Arun says he'd scroll only for the title.

Next is http://myresearchspace.grs.uwa.edu.au/blogs/skys_blog/default.aspx this gets 4.85. It's quite good given the fact she is just taking up blogging.

Nex: http://howyoudoin.wordpress.com/ This is quite good again. Gets 5 out of 5 by me.

4.42 pm Currently ripping Mohan's blog. No name, great aesthetics, arun and I don't like the digg and other boxes. For domain name don't chose name that's too generic.think of Kingfisher..they hav everything under it tht has gt nothing to do with Kingfisher the bird. Chose such a name. Blogging India is too generic a term. Gets 4 out of 5 stars.

4.27 pm Currently ripping Barcamp Bangalore Blog

• The blog isn't updated on a day to day basis which as a event blog should be
• It doesn't mention who is maintaining the blog
• It is good to have your name if its an idividual's blog

4 pm At blogging collective, come if you want your blog to be ripped off for free. Real time blog assessment by Jerry.

• Readability
• Aesthetics
• organising the content.
• if its a event blogging updates should be more frequent.

3.30 pm Intense debate on 'innovation' in start up collective. Don't start a start up...Says the speaker...to be qualified by...for the wrong reason. But then there is no wrong reason if its your passion you follow it... and the debate continues.

3.15 pm Interesting session by Amit. Some of the key points,

• Don't try to monetize your blog unless you have around 1000k visitors daily, also don't do it if you are just starting out. Unless you have a high volume of content ads would put off your visitors.
• Re blogging (when you are linking to some nice article you read) is good but don't simply give a link, try to write something original otherwise people just want to go read the original article otherwise yours.
• Monetization works best if there is an integration between your contents and the Ads

2.00 pm Had a great lunch. Now at room Cappuccino for bloggers collective, session by Amit (labnol) Agarwal on Smart ways of Blogging. This is a much sought after session at most Barcamps. At other rooms and on the mats are happening Film Collective and photo collective.

Participant Speak

Hi what collective are you in?

I am in "I found my wife at BCB collective". Vinayak Das leading the photo collective met his wife Snigdha at BCB4.

12.30 So this guy I didn’t get his name is talking about his new start up Guru Geek. Says he got inspiration from various tech based conferences barcamp being one of them. In India the way barcamp has taken up is a huge inspiration to gather more people who can contribute on web usability, accessibility etc. He has spoken to people from barcamp from other places in the world and they are amazed at how fast barcamp has come in India, the first one happened in 2006 in Delhi and Bangalore is already seeing the 5^th Barcamp. Clap Clap.

Its my stubborn effort to gather people from all over the country who wants to share their thoughts and knowledge. I will be creating the website now and here. I need a support from all of you. This is basically a community for people who want to share knowledge on Web

 

12.10 At L-21 now, session on Collective Code Ownership from Somebody from Thoughtworks. The session is very intense lots of questions. I don't understand anything of it am here only to report. Earlier, after Raj's session at bloggers collective, there was a small session on how to start a blog for new comers to blogging by blog.mrmwrites.com. I am looking forward to this collective by Nishant from Goldman Sachs on Gender de mystification so glad he thought of it. Had a uick chat with Arun, Vikas, Balaji. Said hello to the friends from BCB4, Hari (he says he wants to talk to me on something) Whenever am attending such events I find myself so much in demand.

I am also Twittering the event. Follow me on twitter

I didn't get any participation for my New Media and Social Campaign collective. Yday evening Me Sandil and Jerry met up to do something for the Bloggers Collective. We think better together so now we have some cool talks lined up. Find them on the barcamp collective page.

11.15 am Raj is speaking on My SQL at L-12 Raj works for yahoo. Right now he is answering people's question which means they were listening. I wasn't coz am blogging duh.

I am at IIM Bangalore attending the 5th Bangalore Barcamp, around 800 people registered but turn out is real low. Look of BCB is more cool and funky this time.. instead of boring name tags they have these cool stickers which you can put all over you, your laptop...they read like, I am seasoned, This is my 2nd Barcamp, Ask me for help, Ask me for network help, I am speaking, I am live blogging etc. I am also twittering the event.

As mentioned here, I attended the last one but was not particularly thrilled with the experience. The collectives format seemed like a logical step forward in that it was supposed to reduce some degree of chaos but in the end, the effect was the opposite. Nonetheless, I met a lot of folks(in the unconference and friends in the campus) and had a reasonably good time. But somehow that wasn't enough for me to really look forward to the next edition.

After discussing with a colleague at work, we decided to volunteer for the next one. Unfortunately, all I could do in this direction was joining the mailing list and all my dear colleague did was join the mailing list and send a couple of mails. My contribution to this event has been zilch. There are reasons for the same but I would have loved to contribute. I am not the one relying on excuses to defend my case, so none are coming forth.

Anyways, the last 2 weeks or so (since the registration for this camp opened) have seen a lot of activity on w3 regarding the event. Apart from the numerous run-of-the-mill posts, there have been a few where authors have critically analyzed what is going wrong (if I may say so) as far as BCB is concerned and how it might be improved upon. Of these, folks who are currently involved with the organization of the camp have defended their case whereas other veterans firmly stand by the observation of BCB losing its ground.

Ashish from pluggd.in has done the balancing act (according to me) and I agree to most of what is said here.

Whatever said and done, any sort of event is an attempt by the organizers to try and make the attendees/participants have a good time. If it is a college fest, more emphasis is on the fun part. In a corporate/business setting, networking is where the focus is. And as far as barcamps go, it is a mix of the two. And frankly speaking, scaling up is not an easy task ... what with the footfall skyrocketing in the last edition. I hope things get better this time.

Generally, 'vote of thanks' is reserved as the last item in any MoC's agenda but I would rather thank the organizers now than later, for their continued enthusiasm and efforts.

In spite of my calendar teeming with activities today, I surely will be there, albeit for a small duration.

See you all then :-)

Anyways if you are at barcamp and are blogging/liveblogging or microblogging, leave me your link as a comment, I'm going to be following this from here :) And of course kudos to the organizers, impressive list of sponsors!

And yo! found some really nice badges on the BCB5 site, so if you are blogging make sure that you use them.

Barcamp 5 in Bangalore. For me its the first time, and i'm glad it is happening so soon. cause from the time I got to know some techie guys like thejesh, Hrish, Vinay. Vinu, HariKrishnan, I have heard them speak about Barcamp, and my curiosity really did increase a lot after that to know, what exactly happens there.. though these guys did explain to me what it was, but again "seeing is believeing more" :) And sometimes i thought, man! its BCB 5, that means I m four times ages behind all these techie guys, me lagging behind...but still, better late than never rite!!!!

So here it is finally, just for me :D he he.... JUST FOR ALL: Barcamp 50- winter edition at the IIM Bangalore on the 17th of november 2007. Be there... and you could get to MEET ME :D get lucky ppl and more great new friends and ppl around there.. that is what I m expecting atleast :D

And ya another great news is that: we are having a indie film collective at the barcamp at 3 pm at the room called LATTE :) So there we are going to talk and discuss loads on films and issues related to films and filmmakers.

We will have the following people coming and talking on the respective topics :)

Talks there are right now (but they could be re-ordered/changed later):

• Lessons learnt while making of documentaries by children - Vijay

• FilmCamp.TV's introduction as a support system to the indie cinema movement - Hrish Thota

• leveraging the know how of idlers hanging out at the numerous multimedia offerings in Bangalore - Pradeep Mangalath

• Evolving trends in filmmaking and distribution in the digital world - Sanjay Nambiar

• How can Indie Filmmakers come together and market their film for the big screen - Deepak H T

• Why Indie Cinema is a disorganized sector and still fun to be in? - Roopam Baruah

• How do we do screenings after we make films to justify the money involved - aamreeta gautam

• Do we need critics for Indie cinema? - Raghunandan K S

And I m going to attend the session on 'blogging' as well, and lets see what the big bloggers gotta say about it as well.... I am just so looking forward for the sunrise ....see you all at the BCB 5 - winter edition and yes, I m trying to get a camera to get some shots, lets see :)

For more information on BCB 5: http://barcampbangalore.org/wiki/Main_Page

Event: Bangalore BarCamp 5, IIM Bangalore (Website)

Dates: November 17-18, 2007

What's a BarCamp?
An international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Subscribe to Geek RSS Feed here.
Subscribe to Gyaan RSS Feed here.
Subscribe to the combined Let Me Know RSS Feed here.

Proposing the New Media and Mass Social Campaign Collective for BCB5

What is Barcamp?

BCB (Barcamp Bangalore) is a tech based (informal or un) conference which happens every quarter at IIM Bangalore Campus. Under this umbrella there gather around 400 to 500 young and energetic techies and few confused non techies like me...with an eternal question "how to use everything around for a social cause." The agenda of BCB is driven by topics proposed and discussed by attendees (this time its by collectives which are like focus groups). Anybody can propose a collective, or propose to speak on a particular topic in a collective. It's an interesting, fun and democratic way of interacting, sharing ideas, networking etc. People sit around under trees or canteens and talk.

Coming up this weekend (17th and 18th November) is the 5th Barcamp Bangalore (BCB5) and this post is to invite all friends in Bangalore to the event.

What about this collective?

If you haven't already heard of new media, it is just another word for internet, but in the present context it consists primarily of blogging, micro blogging, use of social networking sites like facebook, Youtube etc. Possibilities of creating impact, raising awareness etc. is infinite with new media, sky is the limit when you are trying to reach out to the world with a message.

Now, if you don’t want to take my word for it, join me and some friends at this collective where we can spend 2 whole days talking about everything related. Inviting all friends from civil societies to please be a part of this collective, you’d only gain from it, there’s no hidden catch, honestly.

The basic idea is to discuss how the various web 2 tools like blogging, social networking sites, audio video and photo sharing sites can be used to raise mass awareness or create a social impact etc. One of the main topics would be "how can an individual / organisation create a strong 360 degree web presence" sub topics can be, creating an event blog (for eg. a day to day account of how various incidents, of say human rights violation, led to a social campaign), how to link all your web existence in one place. 

Suggestions invited for more topics of discussion and names of speakers.

If this interests you kindly register yourself under this collective in the wiki registration page. Further to take part in the discussion list join the Forum (You'd have to re register yourself at the forum) 

So,

Dates: 17th and 18th November

Venue: Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Cost: Nothing (except what you'd spend in reaching the venue)

Be there, you'd only gain from it, there's no hidden catch, honestly.

Bangalore Barcamp 5 is happening on 17th and 18th November 2007.

This post is basically to make you a little familiar with the concept of Barcamps and also to give you the details with regards to Bangalore Barcamp 5.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Details regarding Bangalore Barcamp 5

When: 17th and 18th November 2007

Where: IIM Bangalore

Participant registration is now Open BCB5 Registrations

Related Reads: Barcamp Bangalore 4

Be there...
Cheers

Vaibhav

Be there on Nov 17,18 2007.Register Now

Barcamp Bangalore is back. Its BarCamp Bangalore 5 - Winter Edition at IIM-B.

After the success of the Collectives in the last barcamp, this one too is made as a collective one. Registrations for the collectives is also open at this link :

http://barcampbangalore.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4