We’re in the planning stages of BarCampMilwaukee2 and I’m trying to come up with a few session ideas. We don’t want to do all the same things we did last year in Milwaukee, or earlier this year in Madison. I like fresh ideas.
So what should we do? What should we talk about, present about, have a workshop on? OpenID? I’d like to give an overview and maybe have people set up OpenID on their own sites, or at least sign up with an OpenID provider. I’m still really interested in Drupal, but I’d like to go deeper into it, and maybe look at how to improve your existing Drupal site. I see some weaknesses in Drupal which might be easily remedied if I just knew what to do. LED throwies? I’m hoping I can convince someone I know in Milwaukee to come show us how to make them.
I’m also really interested in doing something like a mini-One Minute Film & Video Festival, where we’d either determine a theme at the beginning of the event (and do a workshop during the day to help aspiring makers) and then do a showing at 10PM Saturday night, or maybe we’d just ask people to put together short videos we could show at night. I think it could be similar to the Wii Fight Midwest at BarCampMadison, in that it was something happening on the big screen, and gave everyone a break from talking and thinking. Some people participated by just being the audience, and that’s actually fine once in a while…
So what ideas do you have?
7 replies on “BarCampMilwaukee2: Ideas”
I’ve got a few ideas I’m kicking around. I love the one-minute video idea. _Love it_.
1. I’m thinking I’d like to try to manage/organize a “beginner’s track.” Start off with a “WHAT IS A BARCAMP” session designed as more of a mixer to help get people into the spirt of asking questions and breaking things. From there you could have sessions surrounding basics.
2. So, I’m kicking around “JFGI” session, where we’d JFG questions that have come up during the day. Think of it as an Open Q&A session? Host it late in the evening and have a question box aviallalbe during the days events.
3. Intro to Linux. Don’t be scared! Try out some distros. I’d be happy to donate my collection of live-disks to the session, but I think it would work best if there were a couple of machines for hands on experiences.
4. Organize a UbuntoLoco Milwaukee team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams)
5. I still want to do a session called “Copywronged!” I’m not sure what the session would really be about, but i think it’s a great name.
Great start Gabe! But with regards to idea 2: Why would we be talking about the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis? It was the first thing that came up when I googled it. Anyway, I have a couple of ideas as well:
1. Since it is Milwaukee we should mod the Wii fight to Wii rollling. Bowling is the most popular sport in the world and you still look silly participating.
2. Podcasts. There is no time of year better then when the SXSW podcast feed fires up again. I think video of the whole confab will be too intense and would require some people to be in production all day. Thats no fun. I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop. Video of some more interesting visual sessions (read robots) would be neat. In fact, we should have a session room dedicated to video so were not schlepping stuff all over.
3. Down by the river WiFi shootout. If we can get some people and teams together that know about it ahead of time this could be a fun multi hour session.
4. Flickr slide show of BCM2 tagged photos, that actually works.
5. Jam Session. Bring and “play” anything that vibrates at 20-20,000Hz. Low tech auditory stimulators welcome.
6. Pirate Radio. Find an amplifier and antenna of questionable FCC compliance and have Bucketworks radio for the weekend. Put a sign out front on 6th Street with the freq and call sign to allure passersby cars.
7. Silicon Chef. Only computer parts can be used. Un-heatsinked procs for a heat source. Those PCI metal slot covers for knives, and cooling fan Cuisinart’s.
KeVroN, you rule… my comments:
1. Bowling – DEFINITELY! Milwaukee all the way… Do we need to dress appropriately?
2. I can do some audio recording. Problems is, my recorder does 2 hrs, then needs to be off-loaded. It just fits the Web414 meetings. I do minimal tweaks, just cutting off the beginning and end, and using Levelator. I think we can do some recording.
4. Awww, I can try to make one that actually works this year. I have better gear now. I think.
5. Sounds good. (ha ha ha!)
6. You’re the DJ!
7. You’re crazy.
I still think it’s a good idea to have one hour periodically devoted to teaser sessions (Speed-Geeking)…
I think this time around I’m going to scrap the intro to Drupal stuff, so we can get down to business… there’s too much cool stuff going on to ignore…
How about a Youtube session? Get a list of a bunch of awesome and/or hilarious Youtube videos and watch them. There is some seriously funny stuff out there and I bet we could get some really funny videos.
*shrug* It really isn’t very technical but it would be fun!
Vorak, any way we could do that but not limit it to YouTube? There’s plenty of awesome stuff out there that is not on YouTube. I know there are some sites that let you build a playlist of videos, so that might be worth exploring.
Hey, BarCampDC is in two weeks and I’m one of the sponsors… so I’m going to steal… er… share all of your good ideas and give a hat tip to you crazy cheese-eaters. ;) Here are some of our ideas so far – https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampWashingtonDCSessionIdeas