Registration is now open!

http://barcampsd9.eventbrite.com

We’re playing by the same playbook as last season, since it went over so well.

*** REG CLOSES ONE WEEK BEFORE BARCAMP ***
We have to close reg a week before the event so we have enough time to print the shirts and assemble the badges, so please remember to register before the close of reg to ensure you get your badge and shirt. If you’re fine without a badge or shirt, walk ups are free and not required to register – but the security guards at Intuit will be stopping all walk-ins and getting ID and registering them as guests of Intuit, so it’s in your best interest to register!

Stay tuned for more details as they become available!

We’re also still looking for more sponsorship as well, so if your organization is interested please drop us a line at: sponsors@barcampsd.org

Hello campers!

(every time I say that I nostaliga back to the game starcon2. You oldschool gamers know.)

We’ve heard from Intuit and both BCSD9 AND 10 have been approved! For now we’re going to make BCSD9 happen and leave the planning of 10 for later, but rest assured it’ll be at Intuit!

We’ve dotted our i’s and crossed our t’s and its time now for sponsor roundup! We’ll be working feverishly to churn out some cool one pager documents to help spread the word and show sponsors what kind awesome ROI they get for their investments. If you work for a company that you might think would have some interest in BarCamp here in town, please let us know! email sponsors@barcampsd.org and we’ll be happy to give you all the information we have that is up to date. Until we finish shining that stuff to a mirror polish, heres a post we made a while back describing the sponsor process, its pretty juicy!

Stuff that worked: People *LOVED* the badges. Huge thanks go out to Geo for hooking us up with the folks to make that happen, and we’ll be doing them again. The $10 thing also helped tremendously, so we’ll also be doing that again

This season lets try something new: Everyone think of something thats never been to BarCamp before, and lets bring it to the table! I’m going to try and beg/borrow/steal/coerse/bribe some cool speakers into coming to BarCamp to give talks on neat and interesting things. What will you do?

Got cool ideas? Let us know! Were on twitter as @barcampsd and you can always email us at sponsors@barcampsd.org!

Stay tuned for all the juicy infoz!

-the elusive barcamp monkeys

Greetings, fellow campers!

BarCamp San Diego 8 is quickly approaching! Here are the deets
Date January 15th and 16th, 2011
Location Same as Last Time: Intuits Santa Fe campus – 7545 Torrey Santa Fe Road, San Diego Ca 92129
Cost $10 (let us explain…)

So last seasons BarCamp went off wonderfully! Only problems were that 357 people signed up and less than 200 actually showed – then about half of our food mysteriously disappeared. Two logistical quirks that we think we’ve been able to nail down with a slight tweak to the format of BarCamp.

This time the event costs $10 – but thats a soft cost – If you only want to come for a couple hours on Sunday or something, thats fine – you can come for free. Here’s the tug:

We wanted to give people who are completely committed to the event the first run at T-shirts, food and all the goodies and gimmies that come with the event. We wanted to avoid the possibility that people who contribute so much to the event won’t get dinner, or won’t get a shirt. This year there will be badges. The badges cost $10 and earn you ‘first run’ at the food and the t-shirts. Once all badged attendees get a first serving of food, unbadged attendees may partake. Registration is absolutely mandatory even for unbadged folks – we have to keep track of who came to the event so that we can adjust the scale of the event up/down based on the figures. The more track we keep, the better the event gets!

We’ll have our own registration area this time as well so that we can keep track of how many people show up and who got badges. The badges will have a detachable star in the center allowing attendees to turn it in for Saturdays dinner (or thats the idea anyway, we’re still figuring that out)

People who sign up early can even get their names/handles on the badges as well, making them a unique take-away

How awesome is that?!

Feedback is totally welcome – for a short period we had a discussion about format on our mailing list!

We’re also still on the hunt for more sponsors – so if you have any questions about sponsorship or are curious what it entails or what its benefits are, please by all means inquire within!

BarCamp San Diego 7 is 11 days away!
Here’s a quick preview of what you can expect:

There are still spaces available! As I type this, we’re at approximately 180 out of a possible 350 available seats. If you haven’t registered yet, please check out the wiki (link above) for the registration information!

Some things to remember:

• Business cards / moo cards
• Laptop + power
• Sleeping bag/tent/something (if you plan on staying overnight)
• And most importantly: an open mind!
• A fun and/or entertaining presentation!

And a few bullet points since we’re on a corporate campus

• Smoking is only permitted in the smoking areas. The security staff can direct you to where they are
• If you’re going to open a bottle of wine, use a bottle opener, not the wall *GLARE*
• There is no roughhousing permitted. At all. If you want to wrestle, do it in the parking lot.
• Be responsible with alcohol consumption. If you aren’t security will disappear you.
• Do not attempt to plug networking devices into any of the open cat5 jacks on the wall. Again, you’ll get disappeared by security
• BarCamp will have its own additional security staff this season. They have the same authority as Intuit security.
• This place is an office where people will be coming in to work the following Monday, so lets treat it with respect.

See you all in 11 days!

Howdy Barcampers!

BarCamp San Diego 7 is upon the horizon. It’s slated for July 10th and 11th at the Intuit Campus in Carmel Valley.

We’re currently in the sponsor-roundup phase – here are the deets:

Its 6 weeks out and we’ve only made about half our budget. If your company, your employer or your friends may have an interest in sponsoring BarCamp please drop us a line : sponsors@barcampsd.org

The details are almost the same this time around:

1) Primary Sponsorship – $1000+
2) Secondary Sponsorship– $750-1000
3) Tertiary Sponsorship – $300-$750

Visa Gift Cards or Checks made out to Dan Tentler (the sponsor/budget guy) are the preferred methods of payment. This gives us the fluidity to combine smaller contributions from sponsors with other smaller contributions to afford the things that make barcamp awesome!

Alternatively you can elect to sponsor one of our ‘direct vendor’ costs:

1) T-Shirts – $1500
2) Lunch Sunday afternoon Sponsored by DiVX
3) Lunch Saturday afternoon Sponsored by Yahoo
4) Dinner Saturday Night – $1500
5) Snacks – $1100
6) Beer Sponsored by 2guysdrink

You may be seeing some rather large names up there on the sponsor dockett – Thats because these folks smile when it comes time for BarCamp San Diego – our community is so fruitful and awesome that these wonderful folks acknowledge it by helping bring everyone together to share ideas and new technologies. They lead by example!

There are some folks on the mailing list that have talked about recording every talk – and we’ve also heard from another awesome individual who would like to record every single talk and publish them online a-la defcon-style talks – very high resolution and with cuts over to the slides so the folks at home can see all the details. So far BarCamp San Diego 7 is stacking up to be a mammoth, but we still need help!

Looking for a job? These heavy-hitters use BarCamp San Diego as a recruiting depot – so spruce up that resume!

Looking for a gig? BarCamp is full of of folks who need someone that does exactly what you do.

Looking for talent? BarCamp is packed to the gills full of it – come say hello to a future employee or contractor!

and for all you perl/regex/coders out there: s/barcamp/talent exchange/g

It’s been almost 2 weeks since BarCamp and the final figures and bits and bobs of data are finally trickling in.

There were roughly 170 BarCamp attendees.
There were over 275 unique mac addresses at the event.

That means each person on average had approximately 1.6 devices on the wireless network. The busiest time was between lunch and dinner on Saturday.

Heres the bandwidth chart for the weekend:

It’s interesting to note that you can directly correlate the peaks and valleys in the bandwidth chart with the happenings at barcamp.

Read the rest of this entry »

Barcamp has grown – again. This coming barcamp will be SD 6, which means we’re on our THIRD year of barcamp. Technically, since we had to push BCSD6 to January, we’ll be beginning our FOURTH year.

In the beginning we had to ask for wireless hardware, chairs, extention cords, you name it. As time went on the planning crew better understood what it took to satisfy the barcampers and adapted. I know I’ve personally paid out of pocket more than 3 times to get things covered – and I’m not the only one. This far along though we have a tightly regimented process, and we’ve been using it for nearly 2 years now – it works perfectly.
Read the rest of this entry »

So you may be asking yourself – I think I remember hearing something about BarCamp in November….

You’d be right – except when we dusted off our hardhats we found out that year end budgets were tighter than ever, and many companies in town were doing layoffs. It’s remarkably hard to get companies to pay for a BarCamp when they can’t pay their own employees – so we did the sensible thing and scootched BarCamp out to January.

here’s the current lowdown:

• January 16th and 17th
• Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

We’ve updated the wiki and created a new Eventbrite Registration Page for BarCamp San Diego 6.

We’re starting collection for sponsorships as well, so if your organization would like to sponsor BarCamp San Diego 6, drop a line to sponsors@barcampsd.org.

That’s it for now! Feel free to log into the wiki and add a proposed talk or host a contest for Saturday Night!

There are some last minute provisions that came up we need to get the word out for:

• We’ve manually backed out every order on eventbrite that contained more than 1 ticket. For Intuits security policies we need every attendees name, so people who got tickets like “Joe smith – 5 tickets” will need to have those extra four people go sign up themselves. This has also opened up a significant amount of spaces too – so more people can come! :)
• Intuit has some policies that they’d like to iterate to all the attendees:
• Attendees must stay within a 20 foot perimeter of the building. Going back to cars in the parking lot is okay, but the rest of the campus is off limits to us (that means the hiking trails, basket ball courts etc)
• Fire codes must be observed: no smoking in the building, and nothing that generates smoke inside the buildings
• Be responsible with alcohol consumption
• Do not attempt to enumerate the network. Be nice. This isnt a hacker con (viss is watching. he controls your packets)

Thats it! Short n sweet. We need everyones eyeballs on this, so please repost, retweet etc.

Howdy Barcampers!

So we’re about 30 days out and the numbers are in – we’re still short on funds so we’ve started taking up a collection to try and make our figures.

We’ve setup a Fundable.com account to collect donations to make our figures. Fundable is awesome because if the figure we’re looking for isn’t reached – nobody pays a dime. If the figure IS reached, then everyone pays.

Alternatively, if you’d like to make a direct donation, or if you work for a company that would benefit from sponsoring barcamp (read: any company), have any questions about what sort of awesome incentives there are for sponsoring a barcamp or are wondering how much value there is in sponsorship – drop us a line at sponsors@barcampsd.org!