Shourya Sarcar interprets Gandhian thought for folks interested in BCB5:

But, lately, one of Gandhi’s quotes have been striking me hard inside. It’s forcing me to get out of my comfort zones, realign my biases and admonish myself more effectively.

Be the change that you want to see in the world

And that’s my only request to people who want to see changes happening in Barcamp Bangalore 5, coming up somewhere around November this year.

Let’s not just say, “This did not work”, “The auditorium was not effective”, “The sessions were boring”. My challenge to you (and myself) is “What are you going to do to effect a change ?”

Positive emails are one way to make a great start. I have observed that there are two primary types of emails that come in

1. This went wrong
2. This went wrong and I wish this would be the way it was

We need to create the third category: This went wrong and I wish it was this way and THIS IS WHAT I AM GOING TO DO ABOUT IT.

The rest of the post deals with common gripes and possible constructive responses. Link.

(Originally posted to the Barcamp Bangalore mailing list.)

We’re now two months from the next Barcamp. This is the time to start plotting: what do you want to see in BCB5? What did you not like about BCB4 that you want to see fixed? What do you think will help improve the event?

Here are my ideas:

Given that most people seem to agree the collectives format worked fairly well, we should do it again for BCB5, but with some changes.

1. Get collectives more focused, by defining them around shared purpose rather than topic. This works at two levels: the long term purpose for a group that exists outside Barcamp (like BangPyers, BOJUG, et al), and the specific purpose within Barcamp. We’re more interested in the latter.
2. Give collectives more autonomy over how they organise their resources. It’s really their event anyway. “Resources” includes the collective’s identity: how they exist as an entity independent of Barcamp, how they advertise themselves, how they tie in their other activities with what they’re doing at Barcamp.
3. Since the participation just keeps going up and we have no interest in turning away people, we’ve got to scale the event such that it retains its small group atmosphere while accommodating everyone. I can’t imagine how we’d do this other than by treating Barcamp no longer as a single event, but as an event of events. Kind of like a carnival, with something different going on in each room and corridor. If you stay with the same collective or three, it’ll be exactly like the smaller Barcamps we had previously. If you want to explore and learn something new, just wander around.
4. Better scheduling. Spontaneity is great and all, but it really would help to know what’s going on where. In the last three Barcamps, we tried IRC and found few takers; we tried live wiki updates and found it worked great, except for the folks not toting laptops; we tried SMS and found it brilliant, except for those who mysteriously couldn’t get updates, or got too many. There’s no apparent correct solution to this, but we ought to try anyway. Two things: refine these communication channels and ensure somebody is in charge of keeping them going, and make an advance outline schedule — not enforce particular timings on anyone, but make a schedule — and then push for compliance with that schedule. A schedule could be something like a particular room being available for half an hour max, without exception, or a collective meeting for a particular time period without any specific schedule within that period.
5. As a corollary to the previous, it’s becoming clear that the best Barcamp experience is when you don’t try to attend everything that’s interesting. We’ve got to tweak the atmosphere so that the value of going narrower but deeper advertises itself.

We’re seeing two clear trends in Barcamp: entrepreneurship and inter-disciplinary interaction. The latter is a fancy way of saying that this a place for people who do completely different things to meet and discover shared interests. I see the second as fundamental to the first — to be an entrepreneur, you need to know what people who are wholly unlike you see of your target market — so perhaps it’s not two trends as much as two focus areas from a wider spectrum. The question for us, then, is whether Barcamp should move towards encouraging these further, remain neutral, or push them out into their own events.

We’re approached by startups during each Barcamp that hope to partner with the event. This is great, we’re happy to see anyone consider Barcamp a valuable forum, but having that discussion during the event is a bit too late. The correct time to do it is now, when we’re sufficiently in advance to make a plan that works for all without going nuts managing the logistics. (Like I’ve mentioned elsewhere, some parts of running an event this size are so dreary, they make us want to stop bothering, or to do it as a career plan, out of a company put together to manage such events.)

Ethan Zuckerman explains how tiny countries are using international institutions to take up asymmetric battles to protect their primary industries:

Antigua is currently battling the United States at the WTO over online gambling. Online gambling, which is Antigua’s second-largest industry after tourism, is largely prohibited in the US. The US has asked sites to block access to American users by geolocating and blocking IP addresses, and recent legislation prevents US banks and credit card issuers from processing payments to overseas gambling sites. The WTO determined that this behavior constitues unfair trade practice and is preparing to allow Antigua to sanction the US.

Since raising import duties on US goods in Antigua is hardly likely to damage the US economy, the WTO is considering a novel solution of hitting the US where it hurts: intellectual property. Under a proposal under consideration at the WTO, Antigua would be allowed to violate US intellectual property rights by selling legal pirated copies of US books, movies and software, giving the tiny nation (70,000 people, $870m GDP) an effective trade sanction against the US. Predictably, copyright holders are now lobbying the US Trade Representative to back down before their industries are damaged. The result is likely to be that Antigua manages to change US law and get online gambling legalized. (Thanks to Charlie Nesson, who’s been following this issue closely and pointed me towards this story.)

Fascinating.

JP Rangaswami on maintaining parallel careers:

My father’s lifetime was contained in one job. I will probably have seven. My children will probably have seven — but in parallel, not like my sequential efforts.

As the cost of travel and communications continues to drop, and as social networking begins to impact our lives, I think we may see the same thing happen to bands. In my father’s time a musician belonged to one band. In my lifetime musicians belonged to seven. My children will see musicians belonging to seven bands at the same time.

I find this profoundly meaningful. The Barcamp Bangalore organising team already behaves like a formal organisation, affording a career in event management for all of us. It may be unregistered, with a floating population, existing only during the weekends of the two months preceding each event, but exist it does.