(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.)