HK Barcamp In One Week!

Where will you be a week from tomorrow? Well, if you’re in Hong Kong, I hope you’ll be at the Yahoo! offices in Causeway Bay attending the first ever Hong Kong barcamp.

What is barcamp?

Barcamp is an unconference and has nothing to do with bars or alcohol (not directly at least). The phrase actually comes from the programmer jargon foobar and was inspired by the O’Reilly FooCamps. More to the point, barcamp is an opportunity for people to come and share what excites them. Anyone and everyone is invited, but barcamp tends to attract technology professionals, programmers, hackers, web designers, startup entrepreneurs, bloggers, and anyone who finds themselves spending way too much time on the internet. There are some great videos that help explain barcamp. Here are two of them from Orlando:

How does it work?

The first thing we do at a barcamp is create the schedule for the day. Everyone attending is invited to participate. We’ll have a large board on which you can sign up to run a session during the day. That means you can show a presentation you have prepared, lead a discussion group, show a demo, or something like that. This means that if you want to present at barcamp show up early! Sessions will last around half an hour and we’ll have 4 rooms available during the day.

What sort of sessions will we see? Who knows? Barcamps have included sessions on everything ranging from:

• Scripting languages
• How to do podcasting
• How to build your own robot
• Using web standards
• Photography basics
• Rich Internet Application development
• Fundamentals of web marketing
• Do’s and don’ts of running your own business
• What new technology is going to come out in the next 10 years?
• Continous integration processes
• The future of TV on the internet
• Wikis and wikipedia

What do you want to learn about? What do you want to talk about? That’s the great thing about a barcamp, the forum is open and it’s up to you to help make this event a success.

Awesome! I want to go to barcamp! What do I do now?

1. Sign up on the barcamp Hong Kong wiki (click the edit button and add your name to the list)
2. Think of what you want to share or what you want to learn. Feel free to add to the list on the wiki.
3. Get the word out! Invite your friends and co-workers.
4. Show up Saturday morning at Yahoo! and enjoy the fun!

If you have any questions, or want to join as a sponsor of the event, feel free to email me directly at farra at apache dot org. See you in a week!