2011 Sessions

The BarCamp Boston 5 session board. ©jeckman

Anyone is welcome to present or host a discussion at BarCamp. Session scheduling happens live each day at the event, as presenters claim spots on our schedule board throughout the day. If you know in advance you want to present, you'll almost certainly be able to find a spot. If you're not sure there's interest in a topic, we'll have a "Proposed sessions" section next to the schedule board where attendees will indicate interest by leaving checkmarks on your session.

Add info on sessions you're thinking about presenting at BarCamp here, so we can spread the word about what BCB6 will have to offer, and you can see early feedback / interest in your session.

Here's a template to use:

== Using AWK Programming Language to Pickup Chicks ==

This long overlooked programming language can be used to streamline your poultry operation

* Tags: Agriculture
* Requested by: Sam Perdue;
* Proposed Presenter: Seymour Geek

'''Feedback Requested:''' [are you looking for a co-presenter? want to know if people are interested?
what to know which sub-topics people want to know more about? ask for the kind of feedback you're
looking for here/]
* ...

Expanded Session Proposals

Why Quantum Mechanics is Weird

The two biggest ideas in physics are calculus, the study of change, and spacetime, the legal marriage of time and space recognized in all 50 states. Their love child, calculus done correctly in scalar + 3-vector spacetime, provides the difference between classical and quantum physics.

• Tags: Physics
• Proposed Presenter: Doug Sweetser

Making Word Clouds with WordCram

Sites like Wordle.net and Tagxedo.com let you make word clouds from text. WordCram.org is an open-source Processing library for making word clouds. It's simple to use, but extensible. It's open-source - no worries about copyright. Hook it up to twitter, a blog, Project Gutenberg, or any other data source.

• Tags: word clouds, text analysis, data visualization, Processing
• Proposed by: danbernier
• Proposed Presenter: danbernier

Feedback requested: Is there interest in this? What would you like to know about WordCram?

• ...

Teach Six Year Olds to Program

Are you a parent, educator, artist, or a six year old, thinking about learning to program or teaching young children the joy of programming and creating digital artifacts? I will share my experience in running a programming and robotics club for a group of elementary school children. Learn how to turn the young digital media consumers to producers, using the Scratch programming environment developed at the Media Lab. See some art, games, lego machines build by a bunch of 6 - 10 year old.

• Tags: education, parenting, scratch, programming
• Proposed Presenter: PK Shiu

Feedback Requested: Interested?

• I'm interested. danbernier, jesstess

Using Ruby to Process Large Data With Hadoop

Do you have data you'd like to process, but its taking so long that when you get the answer you've forgotten the question? Heard about Hadoop but hate java? I'll walk through some examples of leveraging Hadoop from scripting languages, so that you can process data on many machines and get answers sooner.

• Tags: programming, bigdata, hadoop, ruby, mapreduce
• Proposed Presenter: James Kebinger

Feedback Requested: Interested?

Democratizing Surveillance Technology - Building Our Own Reverse-Surveillance Network

At look at the philosophy, technology and law behind democratic/reverse-surveillance technology.

The cat is out of the bag - surveillance technology is here to stay. The real problem is that free citizens don't have ready access to the benefits granted by this technology. This presentation and discussion will be an overview of the new movement of people using personal and reverse surveillance technology, including mobile phones with free and open source software, to protect themselves from abuses of power and to create a transparent society by force.

More information at OpenWatch.net

• Tags: surveillance, mobile, transparency, civil rights, openwatch, foss, opensource, free software, android, iphone
• Proposed Presenter: Rich Jones

Feedback Requested: Would you like to know more? Are you interested in coming to this talk? Do you think others would be?

Cool Social Commerce Solutions & Facebook Stores

Do you have you have something you want to sell using Facebook? Is your company considering social commerce and what's to know what works? Have you wondered what works best for Brands and Sellers either on Facebook or using Facebook social plugins? Things like special Fan offers, early access to products for fans, group buying or crowd sourcing. Let's discuss if it even makes sense to sell on Facebook. Should you just add social features to your e-commerce store? With over $1 billion in projected Facebook commerce sales next year its worth discussing.

• Tags: Facebook, social commerce, ecommerce, social media, Facebook Fan pages
• Proposed Presenter: Steven Hall

Feedback Requested: Interested?

Proposed Session Titles from Registration

• XMPP on the Web with Strophe.js
• WTF is EBITDA - basic financial modeling
• Working with distributed teams
• Why Quantum Mechanics is Weird
• Why Lifecycle Marketing is the Future
• Where HTML is heading
• When to guide customers with UI
• What do you wish you learned in High School?
• Web design trends
• Visualizing your local social network
• UX Gamestorm
• Using social networking to transform scifi to military tech
• Using Poker To Make Better Business Decisions
• Use the Phanoto App at Red Sox games this season
• USB eToys Solutions - Somerville
• Unified Process for software development
• Understanding the Nature of Resistance
• Toscanini: An Affordable Gestural Interface
• Too many apps!
• Things That Suck
• The true value of check-ins
• The Morality of Self-Interest
• The internet landscape in China
• The Internet Culture in China
• The Idea Supercollider - Where Mind Mapping Meets Social Networking
• The Gloriously Immiscible: Oil and Water and Chemistry and Art
• TBD (but something to do with accessibility)
• Social Shopping v.s. Community Shopping
• SMS apps
• Smartphones are like cigarettes
• Self-publishing revisited
• scsh - The Scheme Shell
• Scaling High Performance Distributed Systems
• Sales Junkie
• Rewarding Shares
• Redis: Data Cheeseburgers
• Recruiting with Enthusiasm
• Real-time web
• RamenCamp: the Art of Bootstrapping
• Python and HTML5
• Python - Your Next Favorite Language
• Punch Trees, Get Wood: Minecraft and the Future of Online Community
• Protecting Macbooks from Theft and Data Loss
• Programming for kids and Adults with no CS background
• Practical LAMP on AWS using Bash/Ubuntu/RDS
• Physical Computing with Arduino
• Open Source, Public Goods and Economics at a Zero Bound
• Open Source Redistricting
• Open Source Election Technology in Rails
• Open Source Content Repository
• Online Startups: entrepreneurs meet programmers
• On the Bleeding Edge of The Web
• Mobile Broadcast Technology
• Mind Maps for Authors
• Meet RepRap and Makerbot
• MATH DNA WAR_GAMES
• Making it fun to get off the couch
• Maker Entrepeneurs
• Make your life awesome with Improv Comedy
• Make Word Clouds with WordCram
• Lean Advertising - getting low PPC prices
• Javascript FTW
• Islamic representations of androids, cyborgs, and AI.
• Introduction to hardware hacking with the Arduino
• Intro to Google Maps API
• Integrating Your Website with Your Social Media Presence
• Inception: Can it be done (with UX?)
• If you liked two junctions you are going to love three -- Fun with Thyristors
• I Wish We Could...
• I spent the last 10 months building a Linux board
• How to write a good Sales Plan
• How to make Python and JavaScript your friends and influence C#
• How to choose an open source CMS
• Home-grown prototyping frameworks
• Help! I'm a new freelancer!
• Hacking what we eat
• Grid-based Graphics Design for the Web, for Developers
• Getting things built
• FreeBSD in the real world
• Food as a Transformative Experience
• Finding Co-Founders
• Figuring out the correct pricing model for you idea/product
• Facebook Commerce & Social Commerce
• Engaging the middle school learner
• Engaging and Enchanting Your Community
• Developing Apps for Gadgets and Embedded Devices
• Designing for Human Empathy in Technology
• Design 4 Developers
• Cross Platform Development for Unity
• Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7
• Creating an Entrepreneurship Culture on a College Campus
• Contradance for Techies
• consumer internet, clothes and apparel
• Collaboration, Cooperation, Independence and Self-Sufficiency: Not a paradox
• Cloud Computing Ecosystem Support in Boston
• Can your electronics hardware handle the heat?
• Business Development
• Building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boston
• Building a backend API for a mobile app
• Bringing Ruby to the Map/Reduce party
• Big Data Case Studies
• beyond TeX: mathematics typography into the 21st century
• Beginner's improv
• Become a command line badass with readline and emacs
• Ambient Connectivity
• All-Platform Citizen Reporting - Not Journalism
• Agile and UX
• A Brief Introduction to Erlang
• 4 or 5 things to consider when translating your website
• 25 Ways to Maximize the Value of your Mentors and Advisors
• "Our Revolution is Like Wikipedia": Social Media and Political Power
• "If All These Able Minds Could Be Set Free": What is the demoscene?
• Excess Capacity

For BarCamp Boston 5 sessions, see 2010 Sessions.