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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. :)

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BarCampMilwaukee5 Intros

BarCampMilwaukee5 was held October 2nd and 3rd, 2010 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

When we were planning BarCampMilwaukee5, Gabe asked if there was a way to point a video camera at people as they introduced themselves and project it on the wall. My answer was “yes” and we pulled together all the equipment to do it, and I somehow became the camera operator. As long as I was rolling, I threw a tape in, and this is the result.

This video is about 43 minutes long, and while I compressed it as much as I could without losing too much quality, it’s still about 480MB. I hope it serves as a historic element of the fifth BarCamp held in Milwaukee. You’ll see the people who were at the opening session and hear just a little bit about them.

This video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. You can also find this video at blip.tv or download an MP4. Enjoy!

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MKEDH5

MilwaukeeDevHouse5 is Friday, December 3rd, 2010… Details at Web414.com

See Also: MilwaukeeDevHouse5 – Hack the Bucket! and BarCamp ReCap at Web414 and maybe even Design Inspiration.

Come ready to think, discuss, and take action… Your ideas? We want them!

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BarCampMilwaukee5 Lightning Talk: Firefox 4

At BarCampMilwaukee5 we did Lightning Talk where you get 5 minutes to talk about a subject. (5 minutes only! We time it and when the alarm goes off, you’re done!) I talked about Mozilla Firefox 4, which is/was in beta at the time.

My main point was too let people know that Firefox 4 is much improved over previous versions of Firefox. I know a lot of people who have switched to other browsers (mainly Chrome) due to speed issues, and while speed is important, I don’t think it’s the most important thing.

My suggestion to people was to completely wipe their existing Firefox profile (which could easily be 5 years old by now) and install the Firefox 4 beta, and see how fast it was. Don’t install any add-ons, just start browsing fresh, and see what happens. Keep an eye one arewefastyet.com too, and see how those numbers and lines are looking.

I also touched on Mozilla Drumbeat, Game On, Firefox Sync, and Firefox Home. I probably left out a lot of things I would have liked to mention, but I did this unprepared. Also, you can actually say a lot in 5 minutes.

Special thanks to Chris Larkee for filming the Lightning Talks. You can find them all at YouTube, and Chris said they are all available under a Creative Commons license, but since YouTube has no concept of such things, you’ll just have to take our word for it. You can also find this video at blip.tv

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MilwaukeeDevHouse5 – Hack the Bucket!

Hack the Bucket? Hack the BarCamp!

It’s been a long time since we’ve held a MilwaukeeDevHouse, and while Milwaukee Hacker House has been doing somewhat regular events, DevHouse hasn’t, but we’re changing that!

BarCampers, Web414ers, and anyone else that does a meetup or event at Bucketworks, we invite you to MilwaukeeDevHouse5, happening on Friday, December 3rd, 2010, from 5pm to Midnight.

Here’s what I’d like to see happen: We do some brief intros, explain what we hope to accomplish, then we generate some ideas, and then we make those ideas come true. (There will also be food & drink of course! It needs at least some party atmosphere!)

We may not finish everything we start that night, but it should serve as a starting point. Also… the sky is the limit.

The sky is the limit. Really. We mean it, Any idea should be shared. Do you think there should be an iPad on the wall in every room? Should BarCamp have electronic SmartBadges that alert you to things? Should the grid wall be a giant touch screen? Want permanent videoconferencing and video streaming stations everywhere? RFID tags on everything? A grid of 20 monitors on a wall displaying artwork, photos, and data? Robots that serve us drinks? Anything. Don’t let any limits to your imagination keep you from sharing.

Once we have all these (possibly crazy) ideas, we’ll set about trying to make them happen. The “iPad on the wall in every room” idea might turn into “computer near the wall in every room” until, you know, we get the funding to make all of these dreams come true… but really, we’re hoping to spark some ideas, and adjust them to fit into what is possible with the resources we do have, or can secure.

I’ve got a few old computers, displays, and other hardware at the office I’ll probably bring along in the hopes that we can hack them into something interesting.

Will you join us?

(The graphic is based on an original photo by Tracy Apps, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Thanks!)