It’s been almost 9 months or so since I first sat down with Charles Shapiro to discuss the possibility of organizing a BarCamp here in Atlanta. Charles attended the BarCamp in Birmingham last year. Through a series of different events and twists, it’s taken a little longer than a lot of us probably wanted to make this happen. There have been some recent people driving making this happen - namely Michael Mealling, Stephen Fleming and Lance Weatherby - just to name a few.
Today we had our first IRC planning meeting and made a lot of progress. I’m proud to announce that we have a date, venue, 3 out of 5 sponsors, wiki, logo and we’re well on our way to making the event a reality. There will be more coming in the next couple of weeks - including a signup page and more badges, flyers and details on the event itself.
First, the essentials:
Save the date: October 12th and 13th, 2007
Location: Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Tech Square in Midtown Atlanta
Because of space constraints, this event will be limited to the first 100 people that register once registration opens. We will be opening registration within the next 2 weeks and will announce more here as well as on our wikipage for how to register online. In the meantime, you can visit this page to add your name to the tentative list - however, this will not be sufficient to register. We will attempt to contact everyone on this list first before we announce public registration - but you must signup on the official registration page to get a confirmation of attendance. This is a first-come, first-serve event.
If you would like to read more about what BarCamp is - please do so before you signup. We would ask that you do not signup if you are not willing to participate. This is not a spectator event. This is not an event for vendors to meet prospective customers. While with any event like this we want people to meet and possibly forge interesting relationships, we are most interested in creating an environment for people to share their experiences and knowledge with others - and learn from others that have their own to give.
If you would prefer to go to a conference or an event and sit in the back of the room, this event is not for you. If you signup, be prepared to present and talk about what you know and interact with others. The simple rules are:
Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.
When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.
When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.
As in all BarCamps, this event will be completely free to all attendees. We provide this type of event because we have generous sponsors (yet to be announced) who believe in what BarCamp represents and a number of volunteers who want to make our community better and who believe that the sum of the whole is greater than the individual parts.
We are limiting sponsorship to five sponsors - 3 of which have been already selected. There are only 2 sponsorship spots left. If you are interested in sponsoring this event for a small fee, please contact me at jhaynie AT gmail dot com.
If you would like to get involved, there are a number of things can you do to help. First, blog and tell everyone you think can benefit from this event about it. Pass the word around. If you would like to assist with some of the various details pre-event or during the event, please let me know by contacting me via email.
Logo credit: Thanks for Patrick Fitzgerald for creating the original peach podcamp remixed logo and giving us permission to use it for Barcamp Atlanta!
On a personal note, I’ve been out of commission for the past month since FooCamp. I had a much needed vacation at Marco Island, Florida with the family and took a fews weeks off from blogging. Sometimes it’s time to not do something for awhile to realize how much you miss it. To answer everyone that’s emailed me privately wondering — I’m back to the blog!
technorati tags: barcamp, atlanta, unconference, georgia
