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.
