Loveletters

I’m at my first barcamp this year, in Furtwangen a small town in the Blackforest. Its a small sleepy town whos redeeming feature is a university. The students here organised the BarCamp as a semester project which I think is really cool.

Unlike BarCamps in larger, more easily reached cities, the newbie quote is really high, around 75%. That is really good and we can expect a whole lot of new input. I’m still thinking of holding my own session on politics and social media, or maybe on science blogging, but not today ;)

I’m not sure I’ve ever explained how a BarCamp works, so I’ll just explain quickly. A BarCamp is, as the chemist would say, selfassembling conferences for all things geeky and nerdy. The organisers don’t organise content, but only infrastructure like rooms, WLAN, coffee and flipcharts. The whole thing is sponsored, so there are no registration costs. Today I got a ride from Stuttgart and I am sleeping at the location so with the catering here I have absolutely no costs for the weekend.

Content is contributed by the participants. Each person is requested to write about, twitter about, or hold sessions. Of course you can prepare a session, but like the open space concept, this leaves space for discovering synergies and creating new ideas. So some of the sessions are always spontaneous. More about BarCamps is here. At the begining of the weekend each participant introduces herself with her name and three tags, mine are chemistry, politics and blogging.

Well, session introduction is over and I’ll go take a look at what is on offer :)

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