Hot on the heels of BarCamp, I attended Day 1 of Mesh.  (It was no co-incidence that the two were held so close together.  Mesh panelist/speakers Tara Hunt and Chris Messina helped to organize BarCampTdot).

Mesh was organized by a group of bloggers who felt that the type of discussion taking place in Silicon Valley should happen in Toronto.  So rather than look to others, they organized a conference themselves.  The group includes Mark Evans, Stuart McDonald, Matthew Ingram, Mike McDerment and Rob Hyndman.

I think that it is incredible that this group could organize a conference in 9 weeks.  They had a great group of speakers and panelists.  In some cases, I think that they asked their favourite bloggers and perhaps not the people most authoritative people to speak on 'Web 2.0'.  Who would I rather hear from?  Someone from Yahoo, Microsoft or Google.  Someone from a hardware vendor (RIM?).

The group of attendees at Mesh was a real cross section.  I saw many of the same people that I saw at BarCamp or previous DemoCamps.  Many active participants in Toronto's development community attended as did a number of venture capitalists.  Also, there were many communications and marketing specialists attending from traditional industries.

I think Mesh could have benefited from a Web 2.0 101 stream and an advanced Web 2.0 stream.  The huge attendance and questions asked at Tris Hussey's well done 'Blogging 101' presentation illustrated how new these concepts are to most people.

I enjoy the topics that are discussed at Mesh but I don't think that there is enough acknowledgement that these concepts are very advanced and not yet mainstream.  I know that traditional media is going to go through huge changes because of Web 2.0 but I still have friends who say 'What's blogging?'.

On Saturday I attended day one of BarCamp TDot.

It was a great day.  Joey DeVilla has a great post on what Barcamp is, if you've never heard of it before.  To summarize BarCamp is an event for developers, product managers, marketers, students, designers .... anyone really to get together and talk about what interests them.  Generally, the topics are about technology but it can be a particular topic (Ruby on Rails) or theory (Agile Development).



I really enjoy the format of allowing people to self-organize and make their own presentation.  The rule of Barcamp is 'no participants' which can sound a little FightClub-ish but is really intended to say 'everyone can participate' or in other words, 'we all have the same authority to speak and contribute as a presenter'. 

BarCamp Tdot was organized by Jay Goldman and David Crow.  They did a great job.  It was held in a warehouse in Liberty Village.  There were drinks, and food.  I will post my notes from each session I attended.

My general impressions of BarCamp is that there is a great need for both DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Toronto.  Many people seem to be so happy to be able to attend this type of event to share, learn and meet other people.



What I noted was that there is not a broad enough spectrum of people attending BarCamp Toronto.  I *thought* there was no one from IBM but I was later correct by Jen Nolan that there were 5 attendees.  But I didn't meet anyone from ATI, RIM, Motorola, Bell Mobility or a major financial institution.  Perhaps BarCamp is supposed to be 'grassroots' and Tucows is the most corporate they want to take it but there are talented engineers doing interesting things at all those companies.  A few of us had a discussion about this and I was reminded that there could be another association for tech companies in Richmond Hill / North York.  So BarCamp/DemoCamp Tdot may really be BarCamp Downtown Tdot.  Personally, I would like to see a greater cross mix of hardware and software developers.