This page is used by attendees and organisers of the Apache BarCamps to record their notes, thoughts and plans.
BarCampApacheOxford (April 09)
(to follow)
BarCampApache EU 09
Signup - we had a board with the time slots, with plenty of space for multiple sessions per slot, but the board didn't enforce this with boxes. The result was that when the 1st talk for each slot was in, lots of people who were queueing to sign up stopped, even though we told them you could have more than one talk per slot. The conclusion was we should either have broken the signup sheet slots up to make it much clearer that multiple talks were accepted, or had a big signup sheet with no times, and assigned them later.
2 rooms - the 2nd room was too far away, and didn't get used. It needs to be close enough that people can just pop between rooms to get a feel for what the other talk is like. If it's too far, people won't wander, and will stick to one session, and that distance for "too far" is quite low
Discussions - the room was laid out with lots of round tables, and people tended to pick the tables near the wall. This seemed to make getting discussions going a bit harder, so possibly a different layout (not sure quite what) would've helped
T shirts and badges - double sided badges was a good idea. T Shirts seemed popular, though we ran out of large's very early
Numbers - nearly half the people ended up speaking, which was good. It might've been nice to have more people, but that really would've needed the 2nd room working, and maybe even a third if we had lots more
Signup - really needed someone at the main signup desk all the time between 9am and 10.30am, to guide people over, avoid confusion about registering for barcamp vs main conference
Lunch - took too long, and we lost people who didn't come back afterwards. Ideally we'd get sponsorship to fund lunch, but as that's unlikely, we need to work with the hotel more beforehand about lunch. We'd though we could order food to the room, the hotel didn't, need to clear that up so we can do next time
Hokey cokey - was good to wake people up. If there's a bar, make people do it before the bar opens!
First two talks - had organisers give the first two talks. One being fun and short, the next being heavily discussion based. This sets the tone of the barcamp at the start, and stops it being too presentation heavily