At BarCamp, the T. and I attended the fantastically named session 'Your Shiny New Tech a.k.a. Keeping up with the Jones'.  In the session, we all revealed our new on-line gadgetry.

One participant (would like to link but I'm bad with names) was one of the BarCampEarth Toronto organizers.  He showed us Google spreadsheets.  Google spreadsheets was largely panned by the blogorati when it was first revealed.  It got the usual big deal another me-too Office app.

About a year before BarCampEarth Toronto, my co-worker, the Iron Chef Email (Product Manager) pointed out to me how Google Spreadsheets was now appearing in his Gmail interface.  His point was 'Well its nice but I don't get why this has to be online.'

In BarCampEarth Toronto, the answer was nicely revealed.  The BarCampEarth Toronto team had used Google Spreadsheets collaboratively.  They were a group of 4 or 5 people co-organizing an event.  They conferenced using Skype and naturally they tracked items using a spreadsheet.  The easiest way to do this with a group is to have everyone update at once and while you are talking.  We played around with this at BarCampEarth Toronto and it works well. 

Person A starts the spreadsheet, sends a link via email to Person B.  Person A & B can now update the sheet and both see the changes at the same time.  The spreadsheet app has almost all of the functions that you would expect from Excel (at least what I would expect and I have done some number crunching). 

If you have ever had the sad task of trying to 'share' an excel spreadsheet with an email like, 'Enter your updates and send it back to me' you will know how useful a collaborative version can be.  In the past, I have seen people try to use a central copy on a network server that everyone updates.  But more and more I find that I want to update things as I am holding a meeting and let everyone see the update.  Collectively agreeing on work items and listing them off is a powerful way to conduct a meeting and allowing everyone in the meeting to enter information is even better.  This is the ideal way to conduct team work.

Most interesting for me is when I described this tool to my sister, who works in international development managing projects around the globe, she immediately saw that it could be useful to her.  She already uses Skype regularly to meet with overseas colleagues now she can work on a collective tool.  When something makes sense to someone who is just trying to do their job and is not interested in technology for its own sake then its time to take notice.

Tools or applications that start to meet our slowly changing work processes and flows are the ones that stick.  And this is where I see Google having the most impact.  Its not about taking on Microsoft.  Its about building for the changing way we work and live.

Saturday was BarCamp Earth in Toronto.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc conference.  A group organizes it and gets a space.  All kinds of people show up with some level of interest in technology ( developers, marketers, graphic designers etc. etc).  Sessions are organized by the attendees and people talk.

The T. and I attended the BarCamp Earth Toronto and it was a great event! 

The group - James, Maria, Ryan, Dave & Dmitry did a great job organizing.

This was the first time for the T. to go and he was really impressed.  It made me realize what an incredible thing that BarCamp / DemoCamp is.  He couldn't believe that it was a free event that was well organized, incredibly interesting people / ideas being shared and free food.  It sounds funny but there was great food there, water etc.  I think that the food really contributes to a relaxed atmosphere of hanging out for a day and sharing ideas.

For this BarCamp, the organizers planned a BBQ on Sunday.  Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate and that has been postponed.  But I like this idea, especially the notion that the BBQ would be family friendly giving partners and/or kids to come out.  This is a great move to make BarCamp more inclusive to those who would like to spend time with their family on the weekend and also meet up with BarCamp geeks.

We attended three sessions having arrived at around 2pm or so.

We sat in on a session on designing a web site for SEO.  Great session by LiquidDesign I believe (did not get their card, wish I had.).  This session dispelled some myths on SEO and Google.  But most important the session leader stressed that a web site should be written for humans first, optimized for the Google bots etc. later. 

We also participated in a session called 'Your Shiny New Tech or Keeping Up with the Jones'.  A group of us shared new tools / cool new things we had found.  The T. particularly loved this session as he hadn't had a chance yet to play around with the new 2.0 apps as much.  I was impressed to see Google Spreadsheets in action, more on that in a future post.

Finally we sat in a session on McLuhan tetrads.   The best part of this session for me was discussing McLuhan's ideas in relation to YouTube.  A longer post about that later.

Overall BarCampEarth was a great day.  I don't have many suggestions about what to change.  I missed the grid populating session though.  The only thing I noticed that the schedule got a little off at some point.  My only suggestion would be to try to keep to a time schedule and ask sessions to end on time.  Conversations can continue after.  The MSN offices were a great space for this as there was lots of room to keep talking outside of the session rooms.  It seems challenging to interrupt a session and end it but personally I like this bit of organizational strictness.