What To Expect

From BarCampWiki

Quick overview of how BarCamp Boston works from a practical standpoint, for the uninitiated:

• Upon arrival you register, get a name tag (in a literal sense, it has your name and three “tags”). Everyone wearing a name tag is really helpful in meeting folks and remembering their names. You'll have an opportunity to pay your optional registration fee here.
• An initial opening session with everyone attending gives intros to sponsors, describes how the event works, and has everyone in the room stand up in sequence to state their name and three tags. This is a handy way for people to find attendees with similar interests.
• If you want to give a talk or host a discussion, you write a title, brief description and your name on a big post-it and put it in the ideas area of the board.
  • Any attendee can host a session, and this is encouraged. If nobody hosted sessions, there would be no BarCamp. You don't have to be the #1 expert on a subject to host a discussion about it.
• About half the talks are open discussions with a facilitator, while the other half are more formal presentations. In both cases, there’s a lot of participation from the whole group.
• Attendees frequently review the ideas board and add check-marks to sessions they’re interested in. This gives session proposers feedback as to whether there’s interest in their idea before they schedule the session.
• Session-holders place their post-its on the schedule. The schedule is a big grid on a wall of time slots (horizontal) by room (vertical). Session-holders can move their own cards around, but not others’ cards. Check out the rooms available to determine which one is most appropriate for your session. In 2009, rooms ranged from 60-120 seats.
• Organizers open up the schedule in half-day chunks. Pre-lunch sessions are open in the morning, afternoon sessions open up at lunch time.
• About twice as many people show up on Saturday as on Sunday, for what that's worth.