BarCamp kick-off

Posted on 17 Oct 2009 by Desiree Kane

The second BarCamp Charlotte kicks off this morning at Area Fifteen in Charlotte. If you have never heard of BarCamp, here’s the skinny from the website:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

In layman’s terms the format is this: At the beginning of BarCamp those who wish to speak at the conference give their pitch about the topic they wish to speak on. Once the pitches are done, everyone votes and the attendees set the conference. Wikipedia says of it’s origins:

The name “BarCamp” is a playful allusion to the event’s origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O’Reilly.

CLT Blog will be broadcasting BarCamp live online today over at cltblog.com/live.

You can also connect @BarCampCLT and #BarCampCLT all day.