Tech users and programmers emerged from Des Moines and the surrounding areas to participate in today’s BarCamp Des Moines event, hashed as #dmbarcamp and aggregated back on dmbarcamp.org.
The topics for the event are crowdsourced and then voted on by the participants to determine the presentation order. Nine hour-long sessions were scheduled with 3-4 groups holding discussions during each session.
One session that emerged in the morning was on microblogging, specifically trying to discuss the idea of signal versus noise and some of the basic functions and features being used.
I got to lead the microblogging session and field some great questions from the audience. Because several of the participants were new to the concept, I also spent some time on the origins of Twitter and its functions.
Other topics in the microblogging discussion included:
- applications being used
- which platforms are out there and what they do differently
- how to find the signal amongst all the noise
- cleaning your follower list
- ways to consume data produced by microblogging
Due to time constraints, Twitter was the main focus of the conversation, but I also introduced Microblink as a source for news and updates on the industry as a whole.
In addition to all of the sessions taking place, many of the participants are microblogging about the event with the #dmbarcamp hashtag and uploading photos via Bright Kite and TwitPic.
Rob is one of the founders of Microblink. His interests include how people are using microblogs and the community growing around them.
Mike writes and edits for Microblink day-in and day-out. He is known as the marketing guy and handles most of the microblogging accounts.
Mark writes development-oriented posts as well as news items. He's not afraid to dive headfirst into technical topics for the sake of the team.
Mike thanks for giving this discussion today. Also I love the theme you are using on this website, is it a theme or something you created yourself?
I was glad to be able to speak on the topic and share my opinions on where this medium is and where it is going.
As for the theme on this site, its something we bought from Woo Themes (see ad up at top right) and then customized to suit our style and function.
This is do damn cool. Wish I could have been there! When's the next #dmbarcamp??
We're already talking about the next event, but I think BarCamp Des Moines is something that will happen once per year.
Another thing that was discussed in smaller circles was planning individual, more-focused events throughout the year to keep the spirit alive. These other events might be things like WordCamp (Wordpress), SocialCamp (social media), CodeCamp (programming), etc.