Dawn of the Unconference
The history of BarCamp and the power of community
Malcolm Levy interviews Chris Messina via telephone on May 26th
Malcolm Levy: Could you tell me a bit about BarCamp, how it started, some of the ideas around it and why you think the idea grew from its grassroots beginnings and where you see it today?
Chris Messina: Barcamp started in August 2005, when a friend of ours had been to FooCamp before, and he was waiting for his invitation and for some reason this time his invitation didn't come, and so he kind of suggested off hand, to a few of us, myself and Andy Smith, if we did our own little event. We thought it was a good event and there should be lots of opportunities for different people to go, instead of it being the same people all the time.
To give you some context, FooCamp is Tim O' Reilly's invite only event that takes place in Sebastopol, California. It's a yearly event, and basically 200 people go up to Tim O'Reilly headquarters and hang out and have a good time, and the event is unstructured.
Instead of complain about this stuff, we thought; why don't we do our own event and fork off on a new form. So, about six or seven days before Foocamp, we decided to get ten of our friends together and put it on and that would be that…and we'll call it BarCamp…FooBar. When we were planning the event we only had six days, so on one hand it was a significant task, but on the other hand we figured that it was a good challenge and we would see what we could do in that time period. As well, from my perspective as an organizer, I wanted to make sure we could document everything we did, so that later on, people couldn't complain about FooCamp again, but instead show them this alternative. I wanted to make sure that the blueprints for the event were open sourced and available for all to use.
Q: You wanted to make sure from the outset that it was open source and open to everyone?
A: That was the fundamental difference between BarCamp and Foocamp. That ours was run open source, and it was open to anybody. I had moved to SF in 2004, and the fact that I didn't get invited to FooCamp didn't mean anything to me, but for a lot of other people, they felt disappointed.
Somehow, we ended up with an event of over 200 people. This help set the model for what was to come later. People could say "look at these geeks taking matters into their own hands," and that we should stop complaining.
That was the first event, and people loved it and I think for a lot of people that was their first experience with open space events. And you know, this idea of putting up a grid on a wall and other people having the ability to fill it in just sort of made sense to me from an operation perspective, I figured that I didn't know what people wanted to talk about so let them figure it out.
When it took off next it was in Europe because there was another event that happened in Amsterdam, the European Open Source Convention, and unfortunately for whatever reason there wasn't enough space available for some of the smaller open source community projects notably Drupal and Wordpress who were not being represented.
Andy and I were heading over to Amsterdam to go to the Euro OS Con, and so we said; "Why don't we do the same thing." Why don't we do BarCamp Amsterdam. Of course we didn't know anybody there. We had no friends or contacts, but this time we had about a month. So we put it on a wiki, and somehow, this guy in Amsterdam had heard about what we had done, and decided to be our point person on the ground. And sure enough we had about 80-100 people show up and camp out for the night, and it was the first European experience with Barcamp. After that is when things started to pick up, when you would see another one and another one. Eventually, the community just took ownership of it, and now it's occurring every weekend in different places around the world, and now you see these different permutations and mutations of the idea.
Q: In the past couple of years we have seen corporations begin to try to mediate and define open source activities and communities. So I wanted to get into a discussion here about the word crowdsourcing.
A: I think crowdsourcing is like viral marketing. Two terms that make a lot of executives and people within the business world salivate, but it's kind of a red herring for the reality of things. Whenever someone tries to sell you that's a quick and easy fix for your virtual community efforts or your poor messaging and marketing, you need to ask "Is this really going to resonate with people, is this something that I'm going to want to stand up and talk about with people over and over again, or is this a Band-Aid fix?"
Part of my concern with words like crowdsourcing is that it immediately objectifies the means of production and ignores the reality that these are actually regular people who are contributing and giving you their time and effort. Personally I find it really disrespectful and ignorant because if you look at the industrial sense of economics the idea of labor sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, it's a way of describing mass means of production and the thing about crowdsourcing is that you are really looking at your customer and imagining them doing all of your work and this is sort of some global panacea where now you have all these people doing your work for you, because you can stop doing the hard work and get your customers to do it for you.
If you look at Firefox this could be the first great example of a new model of marketing an idea, finding out who wants to use this, how they want to use it, and letting people get out there, and work together figuring out how to use it on their own and how that resonates with them. I was really involved with that in the building of the Spread Firefox Project. To think back, and to call that crowdsourcing, really undermines my involvement, or for that matter, many of the people's involvement in what we were doing. When I worked on Spread Firefox I was a volunteer, but helping to create social capital.
Q: Because it's a social economy at the same time?
A: Yeah, if people don't have real connections to what they are working on and building. And they don't feel any real authentic ownership and you don't give them any authentic ownership than I think that it's pretty much doomed to fail.
Q: So where do you see the future of this going, will we see a backlash to crowdsourcing in the next few years?
A: I think the more that people recognize and realize their own potential and power in this equation the more impact it will have. The companies that really do good by their communities and go to bat for their communities and respect and become part of their communities will succeed. You're going to see a real ground shift in who is dictating the system and how this is being dictated. If you look at what Facebook is doing lately, they have a real commitment to their users as opposed to MySpace. The question people have been asking now is "Does MySpace even have a future strategy?" If you take a combative approach to what your users want and everything is business first, because you happen to be there first, then you might have choice in the amount of mobility -- but things change. People don't care about starting a new site if they lose their password or account. At this point they are getting a million spam requests daily, and if it means moving from MySpace to Facebook, then big deal. I'll start over again, I'll tell my friends to come over there. And that's the fun of it all. I can see a migration.
Q: A lot of people are writing applications to use with the Facebook API's. A lot of people are using the apps to do different work and interesting things at a grassroots level.
A: The CEO of WordPress, Tony Schneider actually wrote about this where now we are moving into an age of self-serve business development. If you create an API and a very simple way for people to interact with the API and use it, you'll find people coming in and serving themselves. Building applications, building mashups, making use of your tools because you've made it available and because they don't need to ask you anymore. It's a really interesting acceleration of innovation and in fact, I'm working on a couple of projects right now and with one of them, the biggest issue we are trying to figure out is "What not to build!"
Q: Where do you think the future in this trend is going in terms of "crowdsourcing," or whatever you want to call it?
A: If you look at what is being done, or has been done, it has primarily been building out fundamental services, focusing on one usage, like Upcoming or Flickr. So you have your photos, you have your video, you have your blog posts, your tags, and the search functionality, you have your business logic or your content management tool. The challenge for the next two years is how we weave all these things together.
So I've been pushing Open ID with a number of other people which recasts what is going on where you have all these different silos of identity being created and only when there is an acquisition made is there any sort of correlation between the different groups. What I'd like to see is a more sensical way of understanding a person online, by building some parameters into the system that help to set up a holistic view of a person. I'm still waiting for that to happen, in the meantime we can do a lot on a website with Open Identity and Open Format. The other thing I think that will be coming down the pipe is more sensible reuse of that data. Less a reinvention of the wheel and more about looking at how different systems are applied. So instead of just specifying that you are going to a specific event, you can actually start to coordinate travel, you can start to coordinate hotel space and you can get a better sense of how your life is interacting with other people.
I look at BarCamp as being the precursor for a lot of this stuff. BarCamp allowed people to get together, social geeks in particular, and to start to express themselves and learn about each other and interestingly enough, the social software did allow that and make it possible to help build those relationships.
Were coming up to the 2 year anniversary of BarCamp, and as an interesting aside, I did get invited to FooCamp.
Q: So in a lot of ways its coming full circle?
A: Yeah exactly, and to me this is a great demonstration of how individuals doing good things and good work out there have the ability to change and affect what's really going on in very reel ways. So I don't think people should underestimate that……
Q: Closing: If you could suggest three websites what would you recommend:
icanhascheezeburger.com
techmeme.com
osx.iusethis.com
(Edited by David Cohn)
