BarcampLA is done
I had a tremendous time at BarcampLA, which ran this weekend. The energy and intensity were very high throughout the two days, and I had a lot of really good conversations and attended some really good presentations. Mack Reed has a great write up on BarcampLA, and the BarcampLA pics are streaming in on Flickr.
The most relevant talks I attended were the GTD session by Heathervescent, Carmen, Greg Cohn, and Jon Bischke (I finally understand the hype and am going to jump in when I'm done at ETech), Ian's Media 2.0 Physics presentation (it applies Umair's PPT to the music industry, and Ian wove some great music industry stories throughout), and Jason Calacanis' talk in which he called BS on 10+ things (including Yahoo helping the Chinese government find a dissident journalist, which sparked some lively discussion).
During the introductions last night, a common theme was excitement about connecting with other LA-based geeks. I think the community has established a good core group of folks and a shared experience at BarcampLA, and we're looking forward to building on the Barcamp momentum with a geek dinner in early April.
While I'm pretty drained, I'm also excited to be heading down to Etech tomorrow to hear some more interesting people speak. I don't expect the same high level of engagement, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think if there's one lesson I (re)learned here, it is that it's easy to take the initiative; you just have to decide to do whatever it is you're wanting to see done. Of course, it's a lot easier if you have collaborators like Ian, Sean, and Jason, awesome hosts like Dave, Jimmy and Dino at Little Radio, fantastic sponsors, and a really passionate community of geeks who want to be involved and help out. It was inspiring to be there!
Post-mortem to follow.
Technorati Tags: barcampla, barcamp
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Comments (Post | Latest)
thanks for putting it on, Kareem! i thought it was terrific.
Excellent, excellent event, Kareem. I've already had three people who could't make it ask me when the next one is.
Kareem, thanks for your energy and efforts to bring this all together. I enjoyed myself, learned a lot, met some great sentient minds and most of all, I was able to birth my new avatar, GTD Mistress Chi Chi, into the Metaverse. Mad props and kudos to you, Ian, Sean and Jason for an awesome event and am looking forward to future intersections!
Greg, Mack, and Carmen, thanks! But we just attempted to provide the framework... it was active participants such as yourselves that really made BarcampLA a success!
See you all at the April geek dinner!
Kareem