There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make SELF 2010 even better than last year’s event. SELF is currently accepting proposals for talks on all things FLOSS.
Had a lot of fun meeting new people at tonight’s @CHSTweetup organized by Christina (@ErgonomixPR) and Kristin (@chasrunner) and held at Bambu over in Mt. Pleasant.
There was some of the usual blogger/Twitter crowd, but also a bunch of new Twitter faces, and even some non-Twitter users (who were of course educated on how interesting and useful Twitter can be). It’s always nice to associate new faces with the Twitter handles.
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.
BarCamp is all about the participants. It’s the participants that give talks and presentations on stuff they know about. It’s about sharing the stuff you know with others who have similar interests or want to find out about what you’re talking about. If you’ve ever watched a large group of people, you’ll inevitably see small groups of people form together. Typically those in the groups are connected by a common factor (friends, interests, etc). Others are just joining in on the conversation. That’s more or less what a BarCamp is, only with a little more (but not much) structure and organization. It can be organized around a theme or particular topic, or just one big free-for-all. Most importantly,
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.
There’s a meeting tomorrow (July 22) at the Muddy Waters West Ashley for the initial planning meeting. Come along if you’re intersted in helping to organize Charleston’s first Barcamp! You can also keep up with what’s happening with the BarCamp on Twitter and Facebook.
Had a great time at CREATESouth today. There were some excellent keynote talks given by Tiffany Trent on creativity and writing, and Tee Morris on the “social” in social media.
The keynotes were followed by a delicious BBQ lunch prepared by Andre Pope
Andre Pope chopping up BBQ porkBBQ lunch
Following lunch were the breakout sessions, organised into 4 different tracks: Community, Writing, Media and Art. I started off with the Writing track and Marsha Guerard’s talk on editing, which I quite enjoyed.
Then popped over to the Community track to catch Chuck‘s talk about organizing groups using Meetup.com and Jared‘s meme talk.
Caught part of Kreg Steppe’s presentation on digital photography where he talked about what’s ok and not ok to photograph, and Creative Commons licensing. A very informative session. Wish I had made it in earlier to catch the first part of his talk.
The final session of the day was the discussion panel in the Community track about geographic communities. There was a pretty good discussion about how the media was starting to use Twitter and some of the benefits and challenges in getting meetups going so that people participating in social media can get together and meet in person.
Community track discussion panel
Overall I had a great time at CREATESouth, meeting and putting faces/voices to more people, and came back a little more refreshed and energized than when I went.
