I'm just some guy. I live in Shanghai, China, I play with the fine folks @ Raincity Studios. I'm learning how to be a better, wiser person as I grow older, and like John Lennon once said "sometimes I play the fool".
Reflection on Barcamp Shanghai
Submitted by scales on Tue, 09/26/2006 - 21:00.
China’s first barcamp
Last month, only a few days after Barcamp Vancouver, on our way to work Kris and I were speaking about our strategy for our upcoming second trip to China. It then occurred to us that it would be a great opportunity to help organize the first Barcamp in China, during our stay in Shanghai.
We immediately recruited the help of Crystal Williams, who had been a key member of the organization team that made Barcamp Vancouver a success. With less then a month to go, we sent a shout-out to the community with hopes to find more help on the ground and set barcamp Shanghai in motion.
Not your typical barcamp planning
As always, Crystal jumped right into action setting up the wiki on barcamp.org, setting up the organizer mailing lists, creating the logo and blog badges. and laying down the foundation to help the organizers move forward with a plan of action.
Through our own blogs and blog network, the official barcamp.org website, and an Upcoming.org posting, we had local “Shanghainese� volunteering to help within a matter of days. Luyi Chen and Jon Hancock jumped in quickly to lock down a venue, sponsors, t-shirts, and food, and Alex Cureton-Griffiths made early posts for us in his publication, Shanghai Networking News.
Roughly a week into planning, barcamp.org was blocked in China. Crystal Williams and Jon Hancock collaborated, working in shifts, to get a custom designed, Chinese hosted un-wiki live and functional in less than three days.
We had less than 4 weeks to get everything sorted out and needed to secure a venue ASAP. Luyi Chen helped us secure the Tudou.com offices for a venue and Pacific Epoch as a media sponsor. Jon Hancock made sure the website stayed live through tens of thousands of hack attempts and multiple server outages as well as securing a venue for our fantastic opening night party at T-Sens and catering for Sunday’s event. Special thanks go to Andrea Liu and Franz Patzig for their help scouting venues, negotiating contracts, and recruiting participants and sponsors.
The result was nothing short of a miracle and goes to show what people can do when they work together.
Our Sponsors
The key to run any barcamp in my opinion depends on 3 things, 1) a solid task master to organize the resources and peeps, 2) a great venue to host the event, and 3) sponsors to help cover the costs of food, internet, papers, etc.
Having the first two requirement secured, we where in dire need to raise funds to cover the cost, we wanted to keep the event free to attract as many people as possible.
Raincity and Bryght jumped right in and became the first two sponsors, Jon Hancock’s Shell Shadow followed immediately with website hosting and a cash sponsorship. Pacific Epoch became our official Media Sponsor and Tudou.com sponsored the venue, internet access, and infrastructure to host the event. ThoughtWorks, PowerE2E, and Vobile followed over the next week to put us at 10,000 RMB, fully covering t-shirts, supplies, and food for the event.
See the complete sponsor list here.
Over 60 participants and 19 presentations
The event kicked off with a party at T-Sens, a newly opened French bistro/bar on the Bund on Saturday September 23rd 2006 at 6pm. Over 25 people come meet the organizing team and socialize on the banks of the Huangpu river.
On Sunday the 24th we set up the location at 7am and by 8:30 the door open with Remco Marcelis manning the reception desk greeting all the peeps.
After a tasty breakfast, we started the sessions at 10am. We ran sessions in blocks of 30 and 60 minutes: From Open Source Business Development to Extreme programming with Legos, Philosophy, International Business Development, and kk’s Photocamp, we kept the attendees busy until 17:00. In total over 61 participants showed up splitting their time between 19 sessions. We took an hour off at lunch to feast on some great food provided by Wes’ Gulistan, The Kebab Caliphate. A great little restaurant located under the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum.
The official flickr tag was “barcampshanghai� at last check we had over 570 images uploaded.
The bulk of the attendees stayed for the most part of the day, providing us with some great comments and review.
We agreed to organize another Barcamp Shanghai in March 2007, again kk and I will be here to help facilitate the event.
Crystal challenged people to organize other barcamps in China (Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong look likely) between now and March. The peeps from Thoughtworks met with us this week in Beijing and will be taking the lead organizing Barcamp Beijing. More info soon.
Overall, I am extremely happy with how smooth the event went, the collective effort was crucial in making this a success. Organizers and participants alike should pat themselves on the back for coming together and making this happen.
By the number of references in Google, it looks like the international and the Chinese community is eager to see more camps and I am proud to have done my bit in bringing such a cool event to China.
