DemoCamp Toronto 19 was announced on Thursday, after a 7-month hiatus. It’s moving to a smaller venue as part of an attempt to get away from the “trade show” feeling of the last few ‘camps — lots of people had said that they were too big, and that the proportion of attendees who might plausibly one day present had shrunk too much.
Unfortunately, a smaller venue means there’s only room for smaller — er, I mean “fewer” — people, which in turn makes it harder for newcomers to break in. The day before the announcement went up on his blog, David tweeted, “DemoCamp Toronto details coming tomorrow. Wowsers looks like we’re full UPSTAIRS before the announcement, I love the back channel.” On seeing this, one of my students swore and said, “OK, so how do I sign up for the &*@!ing back channel?” The only comfort I could offer was that I didn’t find out about it ’til after all the tickets had gone either…
I don’t think there actually is an answer to this problem. Big get-togethers have low signal-to-noise ratios and require unsustainable levels of effort to organize; small ones have all the problems mentioned above, and meeting more often isn’t feasible for people who have children to tickle, companies to run, or assignments due at school. As David says, there are lots of other ‘camp-style events now in Toronto that make it a lot easier than it used to be to get to know the community; maybe we just have to accept that you have to choose between thousands of fans in a stadium and the intimacy of a coffee-house show.
From a historical perspective, the Bar Camp stuff originated as an alternative to O’Reilly Media’s Foo Camp. Foo Camp was, and still is, invite only. Bar Camps are also largely self organizing and achieve lives of their own pretty quickly it seems.
The classic solution to not being on the backchannel is to create your own backchannel. Students actually have this easy as they have access to the University infrastructure. I would like to think that the students who would attend this type of event are working on some neat stuff and could demo it. By students, for students.
Creating your own actually solves two problems.
1) the cant-get-in problem that is being grappled with in the community now
2) the content relevance problem which has threatened to bubble up occasionally but has so just stayed simmering below the surface
The other option is of course making it invite only. EIther through controlling committee or you have to apply to attend. This is significantly more work for the organizers but works fantastic for small groups that want high signal-to-noise. The Testing community does this for its workshops.
Then there is also the hybrid where you invite people, but they can each invite someone else.
And to comment specifically about DemoCamp, the big part of the event, for me, has always been the networking anyways. Likely less than 5 demos I have seen I would consider memorable, but I made a number of connections through the pub interactions afterward.
-adam
I’d be thrilled to see a student-led DemoCamp-ish thing, but for most students the biggest payoff of camp events is making contact with people in industry and seeing what they’re doing (not just hearing about it).
I think UofT CS is the perfect place to be the hub of a lot of such activity; thats where a lot of true software startups in town could/should be emerging from. If we have people smart enough to go work for Google and Microsoft, why not atleast connect folks to the local tech startup scene in town and see how things shape up..
How about this kind of an event Greg:
- An event called the “Campfire”, at the open cafeteria in BA, after-hours, say from 7pm onwards on a Friday of every month (Classroom setting doesn’t quite cut it)
- We’ll get 1 key speaker every month, either someone who has created a successful startup, some local investor, etc etc. We’d have casual talks/open-air presentations on topics ranging from AJAX to Angel investing, etc.
- It should be open and free to all – ample opportunity for students to network with others.
What do ya think ? Only concern is getting the space in BA. If not that, then MaRS Centre.
Varun
@Varun sounds exactly like the initial DemoCamp plans. MaRS is probably out of the question due to facility costs. However, I’m sure that Greg has access to Bahen facilities to run it at UofT.
I’d show up.
Let me know what you need David.