beCamp, Charlottesville, VA

Friday and Saturday I participated in beCamp here in Charlottesville, VA (I might win the award for least distance traveled for my four block walk to the event). For the unitiated, beCamp is a variant of BarCamp, an open, participant-driven event, where the schedule, content and discussions are created and led by the participants for the participants. Often called an “unconference”, BarCamps are based on the idea that the real value in conferences often come from the adhoc hallway conversations between people, and are thus structured to facilitate that kind of interaction throughout the entire event.

In short, my first beCamp was a great experience. Since beCamp is focused on software and web development, as one of the few non-developers in attendance, I definitely did not have the deep experience or expertise in being able to actually create the technologies we discussed, but hope that I was able to bring some knowledge and insight into creating business based on these technologies.

By the nature of concurrent sessions on different topics, I could not make all the panels. But from what I did attend, what did I takeaway?

• Once you get passionate and intelligent people talking about topics they love, the conversations are great. In many sessions the idea sharing and discussions could have gone on far longer than the alloted times.
• Structure matters: the level of engagement and conversations are a direct impact from the open, participant-led planning for the topics.
• Web 3.0: great discussion kicked off by Ahson around a range of topics and issues regarding the evolution of the web, evolving standards, microformats, the semantic web, advertising revenue models, paying for services, location-based services, delivering targeted, localized services, and other related topics. My take: the Web 3.0 model is to deliver personalized services and content using context and location-based information aggregated about the user.
• Marketing Small Businesses Online: discussion led by RJ at OpenSource Connections, mostly about using people and the web to deliver messages and leverage trusted influencers. Online and offline, it’s still hard to reach people we do not know with our messages.
• Cloud Computing: discussion led by Eric Pugh at OpenSource Connections about the opportunities to use cloud computing for creating applications. In short, the resources are there to create highly scalable yet inexpensive infrastructures for web applications. As a web user, I’m excited about the potential for new, innovative solutions to online and offline user problems. As a businessman, I’m excited about the potential for fast-evolving businesses and high rate of business transformations created by the low barriers of entry and resulting intense competition in the area. It’s a great time to start a new business.
• Raising Capital for your Business & Selling your Business: great discussion led by Kyle Redinger at DeParis Redinger. A lot of interest from potential entrepreneurs in learning about raising capital, one of the few sessions that I was able to provide some knowledge of my own, hopefully I was helpful.
• Facebook / OpenSocial Development: discussion led by Ashish, a lot of conversation about developing applications for social networks and issues of data portability and developing across a range of popular and niche social networks. Developing for OpenSocial is not yet as easy as it should be, some gaps still exist in companies implementing the structure.
• Google AppEngine: discussion led by Ashish about the AppEngine infrastructure and framework. As a non-developer, I was most interested in getting the opinions from developers about whether AppEngine is a big deal: my takeaway is that it’s a great opportunity to create highly scalable applications without having to worry about a lot of typical infrastructure concerns, but the vendor lock-in is a huge concern due to the inherent lack of application portability.
• And lastly, there are some great, committed, tech-focused people in Charlottesville.

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Photos: a couple more from beCamp up at Flickr.