I overheard something the other day (by Waterfront) as I passed a couple of 20 somethings. One person was saying that they’d gone to BarCamp and that people there had asked him “what his Twitter was” and that people seemed shocked when he didn’t have one. He added “I mean, heh, I don’t even *want* that shit now.” to the amusement of his companions. These people did not strike me as particularly geeky/nerdy—though I admit I only overheard a small piece of conversation.

I bring it up because Joe Bowser mentioned his dislike for the “social media echo chamber” as one of the reasons for wanting something different. My own feeling is that people in the blogotwittersphere don’t realize how much of a niche activity it still is to participate in these things constantly, especially with a public persona (as opposed to just hanging with your friends on Facebook, which is what most people do). The techie angle is probably a bit different than the “non-convert of social media” angle, but in both cases it seems people are saying “I don’t want to be part of your conversation because I don’t think you’re saying much meaningful.”

Whether that is just a perception or matches reality is up for debate, but the perception is there nevertheless and drove at least this person away.

Now, when it comes to matters of the creative process, it is not my intention at all to lift up programming as the holiest of crafts or anything, and I think you’re projecting my specific background onto the point I was trying to make. If someone wants to teach knitting at BarCamp, more power to them. And they can talk about online communities, yarnbombing, etc while they do it. But that’s very different from just talking about “how hobbyists are using the web to connect and make an impact”, which is the academic angle. I think the latter will have a much harder time engaging the audience, and hence will result is more “net negative” contributions than “net positive” ones.

And hey, I don’t hate academia completely, I did spend 5 years on a degree myself .

I don’t interpret the call for a more “maker-oriented” event as a snobby, exclusionary move. I think what Joe is really saying is that for an event as general as BarCamp, we should place an emphasis on things we can see, touch, hear, feel and interact with, rather than ideas we need to talk about for 30 minutes before people understand what it’s about.

Ah, so this is really at root about hating on academics.

Perhaps this is the BarCamp version of the guiding principle at TransitCamp: namely, solutions playground, not a complaints department. It is a qualitatively different beast with transit, since transportation modeling takes a little longer than a one-hour session; but the thrust I’m getting from what you are saying, is what the founder of Architecture For Humanity once said of his organization: that all objections end (or at least change) once you build it and show that it works.

The rules of inclusion and crowdsourcing say that any contribution, no matter how small or intangible, is valuable. I’d like to be able to believe that. But my cynical side—fuelled by years of experience—says that nothing derails an open endeavour more than aimless, spontaneous chatter without result.

I would say that this would call for finding ways to help those who bring the “chatter” you speak of, to direct their enthusiasm in ways that enhance their capacity, skills, etc. that can still be of peripheral value to both project and individual, and to have this transparently communicated/negotiated. This seems preferable to saying, “You are the weakest link; goodbye” (exaggeration, but comparable to the vibe I’ve been getting).

My re-visitation of this thread is prompted by my thought and instinct that there is a very slight — perhaps too slight to be doted upon at any length — effect of trait-gendering, i.e. talking being lower down on the hierarchy of making. I understand the creative/collaborative creation process as you’ve described it, Steven, and I’m not one to demand that all processes proceed morally, especially when the task at hand is to bring about something that didn’t exist before. The dismissiveness of it guts me, perhaps, because I personally haven’t been able to get past psuedo-coding for the past year — not because I can’t, but because I know my core competency lies elsewhere.

(And just to bring the gendering full circle, an attempt at metaphor: I don’t relinquish my right to ask for less salt, just because I happen not to be the one cooking tonight. But maybe you just don’t want me hovering and mouth-breathing looking helpless in the kitchen while orchestrating a three-course dinner.)

Again, on the flipside, I can see how a maker-focus exists in contrast to, say, the situation in many corporations, where technical people are often exploited and shoehorned into processes that aren’t conducive to their creative process. I’d be at BazCamp, but — ha ha — I’ll be at an academic conference on interdisciplinary approaches to the city.

I’ve long had a dilemma in my opinion of the open source world. The rules of inclusion and crowdsourcing say that any contribution, no matter how small or intangible, is valuable. I’d like to be able to believe that.

But my cynical side—fuelled by years of experience—says that nothing derails an open endeavour more than aimless, spontaneous chatter without result. That is, if you feel the need to contribute questions to a discussion, you should contribute at least as many answers. If you don’t do so, then you’ve increased, not decreased, the distance between “where we are” and “where we need to be”, and your contributions have had a net negative effect. This effect might be temporary and cause someone else to pick up the negative slack, but more of than than not, such negative contributions stack up and quickly demoralize the people who are actually doing the work.

For someone who is technical and geeky and makes things, it is hard not to see a lot of social media as being incredibly unproductive in this way. Sure, everyone might feel better just by talking and spreading awareness, but ultimately, until people sit down and git’er done, you haven’t accomplished much. In fact, quite often, the blog/twitter crowd sees the act of raising awareness about a particular topic as a goal unto itself, and feel satisfied that they’ve contributed equally just because they’ve tweeted about it. And yes, I realize the irony of lamenting this in a comment on a blog.

More to the point, I do believe we’ve reached a tipping point in the BarCamp-landscape. The first participants of BarCamp were shamelessly techie ‘makers’ because of how the event came to be—techie people were the creators and early adopters of the models that inspired BarCamp, and they brought a sense of focus and enough shared interests that made the first BarCamps such a success. That initial audience has now grown into a more general one. That’s a good thing for inclusiveness and getting a wide variety of topics on the table, but it’s really bad for focus and for in-depth idea manufacturing. It leads to an event where you are expected to seriously participate in a dozen different disciplines, which is a bit unrealistic.

So, I don’t interpret the call for a more “maker-oriented” event as a snobby, exclusionary move. I think what Joe is really saying is that for an event as general as BarCamp, we should place an emphasis on things we can see, touch, hear, feel and interact with, rather than ideas we need to talk about for 30 minutes before people understand what it’s about. That way, we can go home after BarCamp enriched with answers rather than questions.

For more abstract kind of discussions, I think you are better off going to or organizing a specific event (TransitCamp, ChangeCamp, etc). That way, you can accumulate a critical mass of people who can take the inevitable initial flood of ‘net negative contributions’ that you get from any presentation, and organize a working group where everyone figures out the answers to the questions raised. Something like that could of course also happen at a BarCamp, but I’m not sure it should happen there.

Thanks for weighing in.

It’s hard to be in the position that you’ve described being in (on your comment at Joe’s post), because in my perspective, what you’re really advocating for is to keep the environment innovative, and a diverse organizing committee will naturally have disagreements on what precisely that means, bringing what they do from their everyday context.

What I completely forgot to say in my post (I’ll take any and all accusations of blogging through the comments ) is that I think there’s a time for being broad and big-tent, and letting the cross-pollination between disciplines occur. And there’s a time to be insular, nurturing your strengths and doing deep-dives into the thing you’re focused on. I think we need to be clear in communicating our expectations to event audiences in what each type of event looks like and is for. For instance, I would never confuse a hack night with a BarCamp. If we want BarCamp to be more maker-focused, or look more like Toronto’s DemoCamps (10 minutes, no PowerPoints, working code or something to demo), let’s have that conversation in the open.

I’ll go hunt for the BarCamp Vancouver organizer’s mailing list and join up. I probably can’t get in the trenches to actually help organize, but I can surely heckle worth a damn respectfully, of course.