One important thing to mention – we really need volunteers to commit to all time slots listed per team – we’d rather not have to manage a little bit of this and a little bit of that with individual volunteers, this makes for a lot of complexity with 12-20 volunteers over the course of the weekend. We really hope you’ll have the availability to serve the full team schedule.

Take a look at the information below and then send me an email (raven@rinzai.com) with your name, team preference, and mobile phone number if you’re interested in joining a volunteer team.

NOTE: The volunteer teams shouldn’t have to worry about missing out on BarCamp sessions as the time slots rarely overlap with session time slots (the Food Team has a small amount of overlap).

Setup Team
4-6 volunteers total
Friday: 4-7pm & Saturday: 8-10am & Sunday: 8-10am

The Setup Team is responsible for preparing the venue for the day, setting up and working the registration and badge station before the sessions begin, setting out the breakfast, and managing the t-shirt sales (only during pre-sessions). One volunteer from this group will need to pick up the breakfast order at Kettleman Bagels on the way to the venue on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The Setup Team gets to show up at the event before the public arrives and eat breakfast first. Beat the rush!

Cleanup Team
4-6 volunteers total
Friday: 10-11pm & Saturday: 11pm-12midnight & Sunday: 3-4pm

The Cleanup Team is responsible for de-cluttering the venue after each day, putting tables and chairs back into place and working with the CubeSpace staff on daily shutdown tasks. This is not deep cleaning, but straightening. The Cleanup Team gets to stay until the very end after everyone else is kicked out.

Food Team (Food Setup & Cleanup)
4-6 volunteers total
Friday: 5-7pm & Saturday: 12:30pm-2:30pm & Saturday 5:30pm-7:30pm & Sunday: 12noon-1pm

The Food Team is responsible for setup and cleanup of non-breakfast meals/snacks, restocking food items, storage of leftovers, and loading and unloading the dishwasher. The Food Team gets to eat first. The food team lead is Eva Schweber from CubeSpace.

Agenda Team
1 volunteer total
Friday: 8-10pm & Saturday: 9-10am & Sunday: 9-10am (plus occasional agenda reviews)
The Agenda Team…err person will be responsible for entering the session calendar on the wall at BarCamp into the online calendar for easy access by attendees online. The Agenda Team lead is Selena Deckelmann.

Thank you!

The event (as it stands right now) will include two hours of networking and one hour of demos from 7-10pm. This includes six demos. Based on sponsorships, we may offer a catered dinner (Nicholas’ anyone?).

Please edit the wiki and add yourself as an attendee and/or any demo ideas for the event.

See you there!

BarCamp Portland, May 11-12, 2007

Tech + Geek + Culture. The event for the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community.

BarCamp is coming to Portland on May 11-12!

What is BarCamp? It is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment, with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.

BarCamp is a FREE event and the content is determined by the attendees. The event will be hosted at CubeSpace, which has a number of conference rooms for breakout sessions, a large main meeting area, wireless access, easy access to public transportation, bike storage, and ample parking.

If you are interested in learning more about the event, please visit the BarCamp Portland web site.

Ok, one of the things I do poorly is personal blogging. With my open source blog, 451 CAOS Theory, it’s part of my job responsibilities. I make the time. With my moblog, Raven in Flight, I can post entries on the go with little effort. Rinzai suffers. Someday…someday…Anyway, I digress…This is just the explanation as to why I haven’t posted anything here yet about BarCamp Portland.

BarCamp Portland is coming! If you’re in Portland or nearby and have any interest in participating (or even organizing), please check out the site, and add you name to the campers list. Thanks to Dawn Foster at Open Culture for posting something about this today.

I moderated an open source panel at Bar Camp Austin last night. This turned out extremely well, and several people commented to me afterwards that it was the best panel they had seen all-day (compared to SXSWi). Quite a compliment for the panel.

Panels have not traditionally been part of BarCamp, as far as I can tell, but with a topic like open souce and the caliber of the panelists, this was a natural fit. I only wish that we had allocated more time, as the topics raised were interesting, and the audience had many questions for our panelists that we were not able to accommodate.

The Open Source Panel:
Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems
William Hurley, Chief Technology Officer, Qlusters
Doc Searls, Senior Editor, Linux Journal
Matt Mullenweg, Lead Developer, WordPress
Chris Messina, Open Source Ambassdor, Flock

Panelist Blog Posts:
Simon Phipps
Doc Searls

I will post additional links as they come in (and hopefully a podcast of the panel, as several people were recording it).

Whurley and I are already thinking about putting together a Bar Camp Austin Open Source follow-up event this year. Stay tuned…

If you’re in Austin on Saturday for SWSXi or happen to live here, I highly recommend visiting Bar Camp Austin on Saturday. We’ll be there from 9am Saturday until probably 3am Sunday morning.

The photo is of the Bar Camp Austin badge and t-shirt.

What is Bar Camp? It’s a FREE, ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment). Bar Camp Austin will be an intense event with discussions, ad-hoc technology collaboration, podcasting, demos, panels, blogging, mashups, meetups, robots, and pirates…yeah, pirates, real pirates…that sing…with swords.

Some members of the open source community that have RSVP’ed include:

Chris Messina, Open Source Ambassador, Flock
Jim Nasby (Decibel), PostgreSQL
John Bachir, Lyceum
David Geilhufe, CivicCRM
Alexander Muse and Kevin Marvin, SimpleTicket
Ryan Thrash, MODx
Doc Searls
Moshe Bar, OpenMosix

And of course, William Hurley (Qlusters) and I…and I am sure there will be many others. The events is not exclusively focused on open source, so it’ll be a good mix of disciplines.

I will be moderating an open source panel in the evening. Just prior to the panel, the WordPress crew are doing a meetup/dinner, and we are expecting a bunch of WordPress developers and users to attend.

Don’t miss out if you’re planning to be in Austin this Saturday.

Photo by Alexander Muse

I just wrapped up a day at Bar Camp Dallas. The event was hosted at the Dallas InfoMart, and it was packed with interesting presentations, group discussions, networking, and food. I gave a talk on a Community Office Space initiative in Dallas I am trying to jumpstart, and another on “Project Ofo” with Chris Messina of Flock. Chris and I are working together to form a support organization for open source projects, including fundraising. More details are pending.