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.