Why attend Barcamps ?

Barcamp Movement is growing at a phenomenal pace worldover, specially in the geekworld.
A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants

Reasons to attend Barcamp

• In conventional conferences you get to listen to seasonsed executives from the corporate world, in Barcamps you are likely to get to hear to the young bright innovators.
• Speakers are not invited at Barcamps, they nominate themselves to give a talk
• Usually the exact agenda is decided on the day of the event, often speakers chose the time they would like to deliver the talk, so it is pretty ad-hoc
• The presentations are much more intense, engaging and interactive usually backed with demos.
• Participants are highly energetic,usually are entrepreneurs or working in innovative startups.
• Barcamps create a lot of buzz in the blogging world, thus giving much needed global exposure to startups and participants.
• Most importantly, everybody is supposed to participate and not just be a spectator, thus there is lot of fun and diversity.
• Barcamp attracts generous sponsorship, thus they are free to attend and thanks to sponsors you are also served with food and some goodies like T-shirts and stuff.
• Participants also support with accomodation for those coming from outside cities and also there is car pool running.
• Participants are very open and receptive to making new friends and learning new stuff which makes sharing and networking easier for all.

Barcamps are initiated by a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers who are committed to create an open learning environment for the benefit of all. Participants register themselves on the barcamp wiki page, and also bring along their friends, thus there is zero cost marketing, often there is a waiting list at popular Barcamps.

I have attended and presented at a few Barcamps in the country, those held in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune and it has been a great experience to have met some lovely new people, some of whom I have been able to exchange a few opportunities. Barcamps provide you Knowledge, Networking, Exposure and Opportunities, so do take out time and participate.

To check out barcamps in your city, check out http://www.barcamp.org
If you don't find your city, you might as well put together a small team and organize one.

In India, the upcoming barcamps are
Bangalore : Dec 2 and Dec 3, 2006 ( http://www.barcampbangalore.org )
Delhi : Dec 9, 2006 ( http://barcamp.org/BarCampDelhi-2 )
Pune : Dec 16 and Dec 17, 2006 ( http://barcamp.org/BarCampPune2 )

ITVidya team will be attending and participating in Pune, hope to meetup some of you attending.

Regards,
Ajay Sanghani
CEO, ITVidya.com
Cell : 098200 20753