Are You Ready To Bar Camp?
Bar Camp, an open multi-day event where people can share ideas and talk about just about anything they like, is a very important event for me. Two years ago I attended the first Bar Camp, which was held at Social Text's offices in Palo alto.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bar Camp began two years before this piece as an open, anyone-can-present gathering hosted at Socialtext's Palo Alto offices, and the corpus shows the template already replicating city by city: Bar Camp Dallas ran in January 2006, and Seattle's Mind Camp in November 2005 was working the same participant-driven formula.
What makes the format notable is its positioning against the invite-only cousin — Niall Kennedy's write-up of Foo Camp in 2006 captured that closed-retreat model — while TechCrunch's own party-calendar coverage from August 2006 shows these gatherings hardening into fixtures of the Valley scene. This column reads as a veteran attendee (first Bar Camp, two years prior) telling readers the open edition is worth showing up for.
First-order effects
- Attendees get a venue where the program is set onsite by participants rather than by organizers, with startup offices like Socialtext's absorbing hosting costs that ticketed conferences would otherwise charge for.
- The writer's framing matters commercially: TechCrunch lending its audience to Bar Camp signals to startups and developers that attendance is now a mainstream career activity, not a fringe meetup.
Second-order effects
- Companies that host gain a self-selected room of developers and early adopters without sponsorship fees, turning spare office space into a recruiting and visibility asset — an incentive that helps explain why the format keeps finding new venues.
- Each successful edition lowers the coordination cost for the next: the Dallas and Seattle offshoots show a copyable playbook (wiki sign-ups, donated space) spreading to any city with enough participants.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open unconferences become standing community infrastructure for Web 2.0 — running parallel to invite-only retreats and shifting the industry's gatekeeping from who gets invited to who shows up and contributes.
The trend: Participant-run unconferences are replicating across cities as the open-access counterpart to invite-only tech retreats, becoming a default layer of the Web 2.0 scene.