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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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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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Web414 October 2010 (Audio)

Web414 Here is the audio from Web414 for October 2010 (aka BarCamp ReCap!) We discussed how the event went, reviewed a little bit of the media, and talked about how we can make BarCampMilwaukee better in the future.

You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)

Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed.

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BarCampMilwaukee5 Time Lapse Video

Time Lapse Bot was at BarCampMilwaukee5 on October 2nd/3rd, 2010 and was very busy! He took over 7,400 pictures and then compiled this video for us to watch. You missed the event? See it happen in about 4 minutes by watching the video.

You want to do something with the raw images? Download all of them here!

This video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The music titled “Insane Dad” is from Minus Kelvin via ccMixter and has a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License. You can also find this video at Vimeo and blip.tv or download the original QuickTime file or find an Ogg file at Archive.org… Enjoy!