It’s been a little over five months since BarCamp NewsInnovation, and that has given us plenty of time to mull over the event’s successes and failures. BCNI Godfather Jason Kristufek has already weighted in, and I have a similar question to ask the BCNI community: what should change from last year’s event?
Last year’s BarCamp in Philly was wonderful from a networking and the “Hey, I know you on Twitter!” angle. It was also fascinating to give attention to members of our community who don’t normally get to occupy center stage. CoPress presented to university chairs. Punks like me got to ask the Web Ninjas at the Washington Post questions about their new projects.
Industry giants like The Philadelphia Inquirer opened up their workflow to the world while startups like Publish2 gave us a peak at what they were up to.
BarCamp also fell short on several fronts. The conference was perhaps too open, and I did a poor job of explaining to people how the event worked. But BCNI’s biggest failure was the lack of a product. Some thing to point to and say “Hey, that came out of BCNI!”
So as next April creeps up and wheels are set in motion for next round of BCNI events, we are mulling over some changes and I’d like the feedback of attendees and the community. First, the proposed big changes:
- We need a hack day. I bemoaned the lack of a product, and we are considering making part or all of the event a hack day-like event where a challenge is given to team to come up with a specific product. And the end of the day we all present our ideas and awards are given out. For inspiration, check out what the Guardian did. There are, or course, a few hurdles here. Largely, that a Hack Day should really consist of a 24-hour period. Secondly, I would guess that less than five percent of last year’s attendees were computer programmers. Most hacks may be a bunch of similar looking mashups using tools like Google Maps that don’t require extensive programming knowledge.
- The pre-event board. Someone, and apologies for not remembering whom, suggested that we crowdsource the creation of the schedule before the event. That is, we have a period of time where people can submit topics they’d like to hear about and then a period of time where people volunteer to speak about that topic. We would still leave blocks of “free time” where people can sign up for a presentation the day of the event, but this might help better build buzz and attract some people that were scared by the “unconference” format while still preserving the openness.
Minor changes:
- List of attendees before the event. Last year we didnt reveal who was attending. This was a mistake and stopped some important pre-event networking from happening.
- A Shorter event. The day was about two hours too long. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. would have made more sense.
This is just a small subset of my ideas, but really I’d like to hear what you guys think. Did you attend last year? Did you want to? Are you interested in another event?
Please, comment below or weigh in on Twitter using #bcni.









