BarCampRDU: My Thoughts

Damn! We have some brilliant people living here in the Raleigh-Durham area and Saturday’s BarCamp RDU was proof of that.  More than 200 people participated in nearly 50 sessions ranging in topics from "How to Accelerate Failure in a Start Up " to "Home and Landing Page Designs".

We all gathered at Red Hat the host of BarCampRDU for the past three years.

Though I had to leave early to spend time with family that was in town, I was able to sit in on some great sessions.  Here is what I learned:

Note: The number one lession from Saturday is that I have so much to learn and I need to work even harder to learn from others in this area.

Session 1: iPhone Application Development aka "NDA’s Suck"

Sadly one a the thing I learned on Saturday is that NDA’s suck, because of Apple’s NDA we were limted in what we could discuss regarding the iphone and its potiential as a mobile platform.  After we got past this conversation hurdle, we talked about the types of applications that would be powerful on the platform and obviously location based applications we a hot topic. Groups then broke off to talk about design, jail breaking, coca development and other iphone related topics.

Session 2: Twitter and Microblogging aka "The Lovers vs. The Haters"

93Ocatane lead a heated session and discussion about twitter, he made a point to invite both the lovers and the haters and both groups brought it.

"The Lovers" aguments:

• Twitter is easy to use
• Its mobile
• Facilitates offline meet ups
• With unfollow option you control the amount of "noise" in your twitter stream
• The API has leaded to rich third party tools
• Desktop and mobile Apps are key for a better experience
• Its a great information filter.
• Offers insight into people’s lives
• 140 characters makes you get to the point.

"The Haters" arguments:

• Its a waste of time
• Its unreliable
• Too basic, needs more features
• Too much noise and pointless tweets
• Not enough built in features
• Not enough space to write.

In addition to the lovers and haters throwdown, we also had some folks who discussed how they used twitter for internal company communication and how they were intergrating twitter into their businesses.

Session 3: Responsible Crowdsourcing aka "The Big Picture Session"

A small group of us gathered in a conference room to discuss crowdsourcing and its impact on business. This was by far the most interesting session from the stand point of a broad discussion with good specifc examples.  The basic theme of the discussion is how do you crowd source something and reward everyone in the crowd fairly vs just giving the reward to one person.

This was really interesting with some great examples. Here are a couple of great example of crowd ourcing is responsible and a win for all involved.

http://recaptcha.net/ – Did you know that the service that fight bots and spammers, uses you to help identify words that computers can not identify? True Story.

http://www.gwap.com – Some folks at Carnigie Mellon made crowdsourcing a game, you have fun and their computers get smarter.

http://www.namethis.com – A really cool site that uses the digg model to reward all participants in a crowd for creating company names.

I huge thanks to all that brought great insight to this session.

Session 4: RSS Tricks For Non Programers
We had a great session on RSS here as some tools that are useful and on some level free to help solve you RSS related issues.

http://feed.informer.com/ – Turn multiple feeds into a digest and much more!

http://www.aiderss.com/ – Helps reduce the noise from RSS feeds to leave only the news the reader wants.

I know that I forgot to include A LOT of other info, so please drop any additions in the comments.