BarCamp Bangalore in on!

So BarCamp is officially on here in Bangalore. I walked in at about 8.30 am and found a few people hard at work already. Quite a few people walked in around 9ish and I’d estimate around 50-60 people have arrived and I guess many more will be coming through different stages of the morning…

There are five spaces for the sessions and Jace has innovatively named them Toddy, Arack, Narangi, Santra and Feni. I guess that should get folks started in high spirits!

More as the sessions start….

To find other live bloggers, check the Bar Camp page.

Photos being uploaded here frequently.

10 Am: Atul Chitnis on Mobile Computing and Pete Deeemer on the Art of Scrum

– The Art of Scrum is a project management methodology applied to software projects and has been used at Yahoo for the last one year. All teams around the world are implementing it and surveys of the team revealed that 2/3 of teams feel they are more productive with this system. The methodology uses what is called Sprint(cycles anywhere between 1-4 weeks) and also conducts regular reviews (including daily stand-up sessions with team members) in the product cycle.

11 am: Tara Hunt of Riya.com talks about Pinko Marketing

The trend today is to go away from commercial marketing to commons based marketing.

What is commons based marketing?

– Build something that’s amazing and then let go
– Early adopters will use your product and promote it for you (Flickr.com is a good example)
– Bloggers will take it forward if it’s good and if it works for them, they can be an influential community
– Instead of taking it to the elite, go to the amateurs
– They are more valuable, experts in their own way
– There is a section of population to be paid attention to, this includes niche sections
– The process should be highly participatory, you stay out of the way and let the community take it (BarCamp is a good example)

As a marketer:

– Be a community advocate
– Go with the flow
– Predict the future (needs/trends emerging)
– Reward your community (incentives, know that their work is appreciated)
– Be your own client (if you don’t use it then others won’t)
– Let go (You can build a better filter when you’re a part of the community)

11.30: Sathish & Jayanth

What do you do when you miss a class in school or college?

Copy someone else’s notes and try and catch up! Or fall behind in your class. Well, this new concept that has been suggested by Sathish and Jayanth is about podcasting in schools to create a student teacher community.

So whenever you miss a class, all you need to do is log in to a website and view a podcast of the session you missed! This could be a mix of audio/video podcasts.

There are of course, many challenges to this concept, including the fact that teachers today don’t have access to computer resources today. There is also the bandwidth issue that comes into play when you talk about multicasts or streaming audio/video. An interactive session with the audience is going on and throwing up more perspectives on the idea.

More on: Podshaala

12.00 noon: Arjun Ram & Arun Ram on Taazza.com

How news has evolved over the years in terms of reporting and delivery…

On the scene today are CNN (360 degree view of the world), Google News (News aggregation), NewsVine (Social News), Memorandum (Meme Tracker).

The Indian context: Where are the local boys?

Some sites which offer news aggregation are Samachar.com (news links), NewsHound (News aggregation)
and Indian news sites (RSS adoption).

But where is the real innovation?

That is where Taazza comes in : offering features like meme tracking, ‘insta’ news mash-up, location based news, ‘meme’ digging. News should be available with minimum fuss and effort and that is what this news aggregator is all about.

Some of the differentiators of the service include the ability to catch up news stories for a specified time window. News stories are also integrated with tools like Wikipedia, Flickr.com & Google Maps.

For example, if you’re reading news about the the bird flu, you can at the same time get related related articles on Wikipedia. The objective is to get a news foundation but also integrate with other tools.

Arjun proceeds with a live demo. What you can expect from the Taazza team: News Podcasts, Indian Blog tracking, Tea Kadai (News river) and APIs RSS & JSON.

Visit Taazza
Taazza Review

1.00 pm: Ram Narayan from Adobe : Rich Text Applications and FLEX

These days everybody seems to take advantage of AJAX and jump into web 2.0 in any way they can. Why should Adobe be left behind and whats better they have incorporated the technology within their trademark flash technology. They have come up with a product called FLEX which is basically a flash based MXML tag library. Their library is quite large and the demo was quite impressive. It did seem a bit proprietary but it remains to be seen as to how well this technology integrates with your normal html based AJAX applications.

12.45 : Chris, Tara, Alex, Jay
Chris talks about how BarCamp started…

How Bar Camp started, a little about the history. Why pay thousands of dollars to attend a conference, they asked? They had no money and no venue and came up with the first BarCamp in 6 days! Everything was then documented in a Wiki for everyone to share and learn from. From there it has spread and today BarCamps have proliferated all over the world. In India, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad have had BarCamps with Bangalore following and Mumbai in the pipeline. Amit Ranjan talks about his Delhi BarCamp experience.

There is a discussion about the spirit of the BarCamp, the diverse backgrounds of people attending, local flavours in depending on cities (Delhi had people of entrepreneur backgrounds while Bangalore has a large developer community as participants.

2 pm: 1clickblog.com: Mobile Photoblogging, Anuj Khurana

A talk on a service that provides the sync between mobile and web content. 1clickblog lets you instantly publish photos from your smartphone to an online photo album (photoblog) to share with others. You will of course need a phone with a data connection. It offers features like tags, titles etc. And also allows cross-posting to multiple blogs. They are looking at the service as a ‘digital lifestyle organiser’. While many communities operated as silos, today there is an increased cross-linking between them and this is a feature that 1clickblog incorporates. Check out their website.

Other sessions going on:
Amazon Web Services, Nilesh
Art of Scaling : Devdas Bhagat

2.30 pm: Managing a LiveJournal Community, Jace and Nishant

Some of the stuff being discussed:

The challenges, high and low points of managing a community online.
Some interesting experiences and incidents.
What about flame wars?
The role of the moderator? When does he/she step in?
How much moderation is required?

Jace says that a community is defined by its crisis points. It’s these kind of incidents that bring the community together (or against!) and also creates spikes in traffic. A community would be dead without crisises. At the same time, they can get unpleasant and nasty. The discussion took different cases over a period of time and how the community survived and handles these incidents. You can read more about it here.

3.00 pm: Independent Music, Infinitymag.com, Shreyas

This session was about creating a community or forum for Indian musicians to reach out and share/publicize their music. As of now, they’ve got an Internet radio website, playing from a collection of 200 odd songs. The guys who’ve started this aren’t really sure about how to take it to masses given limited time away from their day jobs. So, the session was all about inviting thoughts/ideas from the audience for them to make this successful.

4.00 pm: Lightning talks going on. Amit Ranjan on harnessing the power of blogs, a gentleman I couldn’t identify on street performance protocol. Other sessions going on are Micro Formats (Chris Messing). and Sumeet on Write Web, Information Overload (Manish J)…

5 pm: IP laws and issues relating to copyright, patents etc.

Devesh Bhagat: Closed source software is a trade secret. It’s patented, cannot be cloned. It does not go into the public domain. It is copyrighted also. We get into DRM issues. Fraud being conducted by industries. Privileges are being abused. Questions that have come up: who decided to give them these privileges? Why is not being revoked? Who is responsible? Politics behind it being revoked?

OVER AND OUT
The last session has ended and we’re all winding up. Posting pics and to our blogs. Some folks have left. Some of us are making plans on what to do next…

IMAGES FROM BARCAMP

More photos