Barcamp Chennai 3

Although I've heard a lot about Barcamps (an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment - source: barcamp.org), This is the first time I've been to one. Yes, Barcamp Chennai 3 is my first one and will probably be something I'll remember forever.

I arrived at the venue quite early and found that most of the people present at that time were members of the The Knowledge Foundation (who were also organisers of this barcamp). I registered to talk about Rang De and microcredit second up. First up was Kaushik Ram who talked about a library that can be used to code web server back ends using Javascript.

Since I figured that a lot of people would be bringing in a lot of laptops and would have ppts, I thought just talking and showing the Rang De website in the end would do. The talk went on quite decently with the feedback I got (those present over there, do correct me if I'm wrong - I don't mind bash-ups! ). However, I failed in a few aspects.

• I failed to talk about how Rang De has fit in very nicely with the existing microfinance network in India.
• I didn't showcase the Rang De website on the projector thanks to Ubuntu failing to connect with the projector properly. I Could have saved my Rs. 100 of Rang De credit to show the investment process today (which I just did yesterday).

Some of the other sessions I listened to and found interesting were:

• Volunteers of the Knowledge foundation (Syed, Namirajan) talking about events to conduct in the future such as Ideacamp - an event to exchange ideas and build teams, and Risecamp
  
• A talk on element5 (Arvind Chordia) - emphasizing on energy conservation and how they want to start helping in marketing renewable energy solutions to the urban crowd.
• Senthil talking about his application for people to comment on movies that are in the making in order to ensure quality movies come out
• R. Vivek's "lightning" talk on some of the mistakes he made in the first eight months of his startup interviewstreet.com.
• sanandnarayanan talking about his prototype collaborative mind-mapping tool
• Talk on entrepreneurship and love by Ram
  
• Himanshu, a barcamp geek talking about using LinkedIn effectively
• Shymala's talk and demo of Drupal
• Shiva's image-filled presentation on how to market products well

Some feedback that was discussed about Barcamp 3:

• it was totally conference style, not at all unconference - everyone was listening to a single speaker rather than various discussions going on at difference places
  
• very few tweets/live blogs on the event
• not many people external to the usual chennai barcamp group arrived
• no wifi setup

But at least a barcamp happened in Chennai after quite a long time which is good to see. Thanks to Ashwin and team for organising it!

Do share links to your online profiles if I've mentioned you in the blogpost (doing some crowdsourcing here - lets see if it works!) by commenting on the post. Any Links to photo albums would be appreciated too.