Before I even consider this, I think my title is ineffectual in actually grasping the differences I want to point out. This comes from a distorted sense of scale we have when it comes to barcamps. What makes a large scale camp large scale? 50 people, 100, 1000? And what makes a community camp community based? The people, the location, the feeling?
Some camps which I would consider very much community based, such as barcampcork are actually quite large (over 100 people), whereas others are much smaller (such as barcampnortheast with around 30 attendees), and yet both maintain a strong community feeling. On the other hand, barcamplondon 3 and 4 (neither of which were attended by significantly more than 100 people), didn’t come close to exuding that sense of community. How ironic that I live in London, and that’s where my local community is. I’m not knocking the London camps for not having that community feeling, I’m not even sure that it is something that organisers can even control, but is drawn out from the people that attend. And in reality, the types of people drawn to barcamplondon and quite different from the people drawn to barcampcork. Almost every attendee at Cork, with the notable exception of myself, has a vested interest in the Cork and wider Ireland geek community, whereas the London attendees either seemed somewhat blasé about the whole barcamp thing (are we that spoilt over here…?), or were in town for the barcamp.
We can also consider super-sized camps such as barcampberlin which I attended a few weeks ago, which was due to be attended by 600 people, and drew somewhere around the 450 mark (my guesstimate). It’s actually quite hard for me to make a comparison with berlin because of the nature of my attendance at the event. I travelled to berlin with a few friends, and very quickly we started hanging out with other Londoners at the event. I don’t believe I spoke to more than 5 local, or even Germany based, attendees throughout the entire event. This came down to the fact that I was very comfortable knowing my 10 friends, and knowing all of their friends, who happened, mostly, to be my friends too, and there was no need to break out from our group. Additionally none of the sessions were in any way discussion group oriented, and so there was no permission to engage with total strangers about mutually interesting topics. This makes it very hard to meet people.
Maybe it all comes down to my social networks at these various events, but I do have a strong suspicion, that this is influenced by the style of event, the type of people attracted to it, and the pre existing connections you go with. Could Berlin have been made as warm and welcoming at Cork? Probably not, but simply because the logistics of making an event that large work on a small community scale are virtually impossible. What about London? I think engaging the community in organisation would have been a big win. There was a feeling of isolation between the organisation of the camp and it’s attendees, which somewhat undermines some of the core principles. Ultimately I think any barcamp has the potential to feel “just right,” but the parameters for this kind of success don’t always lend themselves to “popular” destination such as Berlin and London.
All that said, I’d love to organise a community based barcamplondon. Who want’s to join me?
