Barcamp and shared spaces

Just got back from Barcamp Texas. The definition these particular organizers forwarded is a good one:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc technology gathering for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction with attendees.

So no, there were neither tents nor pubs involved. The ‘bar’ bit is a reference to the “hacker slang” ‘foobar’, which is in turn a reference to the military’s ‘fubar’. To give the elevator pitch, it’s a free and open response to the costly, closed O’Reilly model.

Walking into the presentation space, I felt a little bit like a precocious pre-teen invading an Ivy League student union. None of the discussions broad forms were unfamiliar, but the whole experience was pervaded by a steady tone of mild embarrassment/humility as I stumbled around filling in the details. The better part of that humility was, cheesy as it sounds, a certain amount of inspiration; a challenge to raise my game.

For example, the hosts and initial organizers of the camp were guys my age. It was great of them to let us into their space, but what’s remarkable is the nature of the venue at which they did. Each of these handful of kids were bros/broettes – i.e. mutual friends – who happened to be young creatives with a small but growing client base. So they got a shared workspace; an office in which they work on projects individual and joint.

What got my gears turning wasn’t the particular idea of a collective office space, great as it is, but the simple idea of a shared creative space; of the ways in which it would encourage actually making stuff, and doing so among the encouragement and criticisms of others. It’s tough otherwise for me to produce in a consumer culture.

All I can offer is I magazine–format site that all of you are welcome to use as a platform for more formal writing. I’m still working on it, but what I have so far is here: www.ethanmoore.net/mag. The idea at it’s most utilitarian is that we can put up our serious writing - from academic papers to two paragraph blog insight - in a centralized place to point potential employers/schools to. It, of course, could be more than that, but at the very least it would still be useful.

Let’s do a thing.