scales, robert scales

It was great to be part of the organizing team of the second Barcamp in Vancouver.

This is a shot of us sporting the "fuschia" shirts!

I did a session on open source business development, I am sure someone will write something on it and I'll cross link. I was under the impression that my topic would not attract many people and 30 minutes would suffice, silly me! Room two was packed and half-hour was a tad too short, it seemed we where just getting started!

I enjoyed KK's photo-walk and I managed to get a bunch of pictures.

A special shout to John for his iPhone for Canadians session, maybe the hi-light of my day! Yeah I know; geek!

Thanks to Jordan Behan for an exellent post. Like Roland, I just shamlesly reposted...

QUOTE

Barcamp Vancouver, the 2007 edition is fast approaching, so get ready to get your Barcamp on. Unless of course you’re not already signed up, because the pattern is full, Ghost Rider. The pattern is full.

This year’s Vancouver event is already well over-booked, with a waiting list of over 70 people! So this post is more for the folks who are already signed up to attend.

Those of you not in Vancouver are encouraged to search Barcamp.org for your local event, or find details at that same site about how you can organize and host your own. Take a cue from the likes of Kris Krug and Robert Scales, Vancouver’s own adopted sons, who are teaming up to plan Barcamp Shanghai and Barcamp Beijing. Leave it to them to return to the land of the Great Wall with their free-spirited, open-sourcedness to host an unconference in a place where free speech doesn’t even exist.

Kris has been bugging me for days about posting my traveling and event schedules.

For some reason, August and September are always busy months for us!

We decided to make our life a bit more complex this year and added a third barcamp on our list of events to organize...

Hopefully we'll post more details about each of these events coming over the next few months:

Gnomedex 7.0 - Four RCS staffers are heading down to Seattle to see Chris, Ponzi, Schlomo, Corey, Jacob and the rest of the geekospher.

Barcamp Vancouver - Vancouver's 2nd Barcamp is expecting to attract 180+ people. I've been helping with some of the organization and Raincity is sponsoring the event again this year. I am looking forward to kk's photcamp and photowalk.

NewsForge: More On BarCamp

Bruce Byflield of NewsForge joined our group at BarCampVancouver last week-end. As it turns out, he had a pretty swell time: met some good people, was thoroughly impressed with the organization, learned a lot, was intellectually stimulated, and seemed to have had some fun along the way.

You can read his article in its' entirety online here. In it, Bruce highlights some of his positive experiences, while suggesting on how the Camp might improve as well.

Below is an small excerpt from his article after speaking with me after my session on Open Source Business.

"Open Source Business" by Robert Scales, the president and CEO of Raincity Studios. Scales explained his conviction that an open source business model was about more than working with technologies like Drupal and Ruby. Instead, Scales has tried to build his business as a cooperative, offering generous benefits and bonuses and encouraging employees to attend conferences. In addition, he has tried to build reciprocal relations with companies in the same line of business so that they can recommend each other when one is unavailable to work with a potential customer. Last year, he even went to the extent of making the company's financial position public , even though Raincity is not publicly traded. While he could not detail individual employees' salaries or the size of contracts due to Canada's privacy laws, he did give overall figures for both. "I'm really open," he says, sporting a Mohawk and all black clothes... However, it seemed obvious that, for all the humour, for Scales, his business model was not so much a buzz word as a way of life.