Tag: barcampmilwaukee

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BarCampMilwaukee8

BarCampMilwaukee8

Yes, we will be doing another BarCamp in Milwaukee, and yes, it will be the first weekend in October, though we’re only doing one day this time, so join us Saturday, October 5th, 2013 at Bucketworks “Summer Camp”, located at 161 W Wisconsin Ave, 2nd Floor, right above TJ Maxx in the Grand Avenue Mall.

Show up around 9am, and we will wrap it up by 9pm. In-between it will be the usual user generated conference wherein we figure everything out the day of the event. Who will be speaking? What will they speak about? We don’t know… but we will figure it all out on the 5th. Think of it as an “idea swap meet” where you share your knowledge and thoughts, and others do the same. You will leave with new things in your head, and maybe even some new friends or partners in crime.

We’re going all retro by doing as little planning as possible, but if you would be so kind as to register at barcampmilwaukee.org we would love that.

Also, bring some lunch money. There is a food court. Hey, it’s not like were asking you to bring your own chair! (Yes, we did that before.) It’s not like were asking you to bring your own utensils! (Yes, we did that too.) Oh, we may be able to provide parking for cheap. Would you pay $5 to park all day for this free event? Let us know on Atrium, or elsewhere, somehow.

It’s all so… undefined. Exciting, isn’t it!?!?

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BarCampMilwaukee6 (Almost!)

THANKS.

Whew, check it out… it’s nearly time for BarCampMilwaukee6!

I’m sure a lot will happen before then, but there’s already a lot that’s happened in the last few months.

So I’d like to take this chance, before BarCamp even happens, to thank the people who got us this far.

All of these sponsors!

And all of these people!

There’s probably more people and organizations I could list… but I actually wanted to finish this post before BarCamp. :)

If you show up and take part next week, I will personally thank you. Well, maybe not personally, but if you hear me says “thanks” to anyone, just assume it’s meant for you and we’ll be all good.)

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MadCamp ReCap: Sessions

Duct Tape Crafts

(This post is Part 2 of my MadCamp ReCap. See the first post as well. In this one I’ll cover all of the sessions I attended)

How to make duct tape crafts
The first session I attended was led by Quinn, the 9 year old daughter of Andy Lester. She showed us how to make a pen and some duct tape into a flower. So in a room of 9 adults, none of us could make one as awesome as hers. This was a fun session, and would be perfect for KidsCamp at BarCampMilwaukee6.

Egg-Bot
Photo by tronathan

Introduction to the Egg-Bot
Hmmm, I don’t know that I can review this session, as I was the one who led it. I basically gave an Egg-Bot demo, and talked about what it does, and what I’ve learned, and showed some designs I’ve printed, and I threw some eggs. I then attempted to print a Bendyworks logo, and an Athmapolis logo. I guess this session went well, people seemed interested, but hey, who doesn’t love an Egg-Bot!?

Jason asks... What's Next?

How I made a CNC laser with junk from the basement
I got to know Jason earlier this year, and he may be Beaver Dam’s most prolific maker. (But hey, it’s Beaver Dam.) Anyway, I think I helped convince him to attend, and even lead a session at his first BarCamp. He walked us through building a CNC laser device out of scrap (mostly old CD/DVD drives) and some parts that had to be bought. Great session! I love hearing makers talk about their projects.

Greg Tracy

Twilio Magic – building phone apps with a simple web service API
I actually only attended a few minutes of this session, which almost didn’t happen until I pointed out to Greg that the flyer mentioned a Twilio session. Well, I caught some crap from Greg because I cut out of this session to hit up the Hackerspaces talk going on 10 feet behind me. (To be fair, I finally got around to digging into Twilio the day after MadCamp, and I’ve already written some fun sample code.) Anyway, I’m familiar with Greg’s Twilio projects, and we even used one during the day, the MadCamp Notifier. (Note that the photo above is not from MadCamp, but a photo I took of Greg at BarCampMilwaukee5 last year.)

Chris from Sector67

An Introduction to Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, and Coworking
This one was interesting. It was so interesting I left the Twilio session (sorry Greg!) because I was pulled in by what I was hearing. My disclaimer: I’m a member of Milwaukee Makerspace, but I am not an officer, or a founder, or in charge of anything. Anyway, the Sector67 guys led this, and talked about how they run their space. I brought up a few points about how Milwaukee Makerspace does things (or at least how I understand they are done) and I sort of felt like there was a little tension about the differences between how the two places operate. In talking to other later, people were not surprised, stating that almost every space will operate differently, and often one space will thing they are doing it exactly the right way. :) I’m really hoping that at BarCampMilwaukee6 we can have a talk with people from Milwaukee Makerspace, Sector67, Pumping Station: One, and Twin Cities Maker, since all groups will have people present. I should probably propose this to all of those folks. It could be a great learning experience.

Joe from Sector67

Introduction to 3D Printing (MakerBot/RepRap)
This one was simply awesome. I’ve been in love with the MakerBot for some time now, and wanted more info. Joe from Sector67 gave a great overview of 3D printing, and also talked about (and had present) a RepRap machine. We saw a bunch of samples that had been printed, and at some point Chris did get the MakerBot talking to the laptop he had and we got some printing done. It sounds like Joe and at least one printer might also make it to BarCampMilwaukee6 as well, so get ready for more 3D printing fun.

DSC_4760
Photo by Clint Thayer

Lightning Talks
The Lightning Talks, just like last year, were a lot of fun. I just wish more people would do it! I think if you didn’t lead a session, you should jump at the chance to do a Lightning Talk. If they didn’t stop me, I’d probably do 5 of them. Seriously. It’s just 5 minutes, talk on any subject, I tend to go pretty fast, so I hope it’s not boring. (I did the Time Lapse Bot again, and showed the raw footage from earlier in the day.) I have some favorites, but I also have an audio recording of them all to publish, so I’ll wait until I do that before I get into those…

So that was MadCamp (aka BarCampMadison the 4th.) I enjoyed it, and I await the next one. In the meantime, BarCampMilwaukee6 is coming up soooooon.

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BarCampMilwaukee… Six!

BarCampMilwaukee5

Remember when you first heard about BarCamp? In case you forgot, the first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, from August 19–21, 2005. Good old Wikipedia has a BarCamp page we’ve pointed many people to.

Back in 2005 I was pretty heads down and wasn’t really involved in Milwaukee’s technology or web communities. (I really don’t know what communities existed prior to 2006, so I’ll just say I wasn’t involved.)

Hypnotoad

So in 2006 I found myself in need of some networking, and community, and so on, and ended up going to the Milwaukee Web Design Meetup in May and June of 2006, and just after that, I wrote a blog post titled BarCampMilwaukee? Which, unless anyone wants to dispute, may have been the first seed of the tree that grew to be what we now know as the mighty oak that is… BarCampMilwaukee.

Lots of people helped along the way, including Justin Kruger, who ended up finding James Carlson and Bucketworks, which ended up being the venue for the first BarCampMilwaukee.

BarCampMilwaukee Introductions

Bucketworks also hosted the third and fifth BarCampMilwaukee, and for the second and forth, we were unable to use their building (moving, floods, occupancy issues, etc.) they got us venues to use. Bucketworks also acted as the fiscal sponsor for BarCampMilwaukee, allowing us to operate as a non-profit organization. In my opinion, Bucketworks (and their parent organization, The School Factory) have been more than just a venue over the years, they’ve been a great partner and a significant reason why BarCamp happens here in Milwaukee.

Bucketworks has had its share of ups and downs, and they ain’t perfect, and they don’t always get everything right, but for six years now, they’ve been a part of the BarCampMilwaukee experience. With BarCampMilwaukee6 coming up, it’s nice to know we have a solid venue with tables, chairs, an Internet connection, WiFi, a kitchen, lots and lots of space, and the things (and people!) we need to put on a user-generated conference.

BarCampMilwaukee2 Buttons

So, BarCampMilwaukee6? Yup, it’s happening October 1st-2nd, 2011 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I just renewed barcampmilwaukee.org and at some point the updates will start flowing, and shirts will be made, and meals will be planned, and we’ll do it all again, for the sixth time.

I hope to see you there! :)

Update: I mentioned Justin above, but I also should have mentioned Bob Waldron! Take a look at his blog posts from July 2006 and you’ll see that he and Justin were sort of running parallel to my initiative, and once we found each other and joined forces, things started to happen. Thanks Bob!

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BarCampMilwaukee: Progress

BarCampMilwaukee We’re about two months past BarCampMilwaukee5, and I stumbled across an old blog post of mine titled BarCampMilwaukee2: Ideas which was posted about two months before BarCampMilwaukee2 happened. I hope that made sense…

The post mentions a few things that we wanted to do at the time, and I’m happy to say we’ve (finally) accomplished a few of these things.

Kevin had the following suggestion:

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. That’s 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.

Ah yes… Audio! Kevin says “I was thinking of setting up audio recorders and running them non stop.” Well, we came pretty close on that one. The Convo Droid consists of a Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder with an 8GB SD card. It can easily record over 30 hours of high quality audio. I ran it pretty much non-stop during BarCampMadison3 and BarCampMilwaukee5. I captured a ton of audio. In fact, I probably still haven’t processed it all yet. (We need to define a process for BarCampMilwaukee6 to mark the beginning/end of a session, and do a better job of tagging the audio.) For BarCampMilwaukee5 we also had Gabe Wollenburg and Joshua Cowles capturing audio. Most of it showed up on the BarCampMilwaukee Blog (I also set up my own site to allow for automagic download “podcast style” see my audio tag for more info.)

Kevin also mentions video… a bit more resource intensive than audio, but still doable. For BarCampMadison3 I had two MiniDV video cameras, and a handful of blank tapes. I managed to capture a number of sessions, which you can find by browsing through the barcampmadison3 tag. I would have recorded more, but I ran out of tapes… I was able to do a lot of video capture at BarCampMadison3 because I wasn’t really involved in organizing or running it, so I was free to capture. For BarCampMilwaukee5, I was too involved in running things to deal with setting up cameras and swapping tapes.

If all goes as planned, we’ll have at least one room in Bucketworks wired up for quality audio/video capture at the push of a button before BarCampMilwaukee6 rolls around…

And if you’re wondering why we care so much about capturing and publishing the audio and video from BarCamp, it goes to the core of what the event is all about sharing knowledge, not just with the people at the event, but the people who couldn’t make it, or don’t know what BarCamp is yet. Share what you know… Learn what you don’t. :)