Hong Kong's First BarCamp

Last Saturday just under 100 people crammed into Yahoo! Hong Kong’s offices in Causeway Bay to hold the area’s first barcamp. As an organizer, I may be a bit biased, but I thought the event was a success. The schedule was filled with almost 30 half-hour presentations, demos and discussions ranging user rights and privacy to web 2.0 and social networks to next generation TV technology to digital T-Shirt printing.

If you weren’t able to attend, several videos, recordings, and articles about the event are now being posted to the wiki and the Facebook group.

Reflections as a organizer

We had a really great group of sponsors and organizers for this barcamp. A lot of things didn’t come together until the very last week, so we were a bit nervous, but it turned out great.

We started at 10:00 am, had 3 rooms and split the day up into 30 minute sessions. It took about an hour to do introductions and create the schedule. In retrospect, we could have started earlier and left more time for others. The short sessions was also interesting. It allowed for a lot of sessions, a fast past, and a lot of energy. It also meant everyone was constantly coming in and out of the lobby to check the schedule. Sessions were often cut short. I don’t think I’d like to go to 1 hour sessions, as that seems too long. Maybe 40 minutes with a 5 minute break in between would be best. Not leaving enough time between sessions for people to move around was also a problem, so the 30 minutes sessions were really like 20 minutes. I would also try to have session leaders tell announce the next sessions so less people have to walk back to the main schedule board.

Using PostIt notes for the schedule board worked very well, as did using a large whiteboard. The short introductions of all attendees (stolen from FooCamp) still took a while, but I think it’s important. The T-Shirts and the food (sandwiches from Pret a Manger sponsored by Outblaze and drinks from Drinkazone) were great.

So the question now is when we will do this again?

Hong Kong Startups

I lead a session on startups in Hong Kong. I promised that I would create a space for us to continue that discussion after barcamp. Initially I was going to create a Yahoo! or Google group, but I’ve since been in touch with the owners of hkstartup.com and we’re working to fix up the site (and some bugs) to use that space. I’ll post updates here this week and we get things ready.