Cristiano on Tech/Life So, what’s my BarCamp topic?
BarCampLondon5 is almost a week away and I haven’t figured out my talk yet. I gave two talks at BarCampBrighton3 last month, both photography related, but both not really that well visited which means I’m now kind of without ideas and instead would like to ask you: what should I talk about?
Photography
I still have the feeling that it would be interesting to talk about photography, but it is hard to guess what would be more interesting: an advanced topic or a more simple topic. At BarCampBrighton3 I talked about Histograms and HDR photography, both talks attracting mainly the few experienced photographers. Later on I heard a few people claim they wanted to hear my HDR talk so it might be worth to do that one again.
Instead I could do a beginners/hands-on session, bringing my 2 DSLR and 1 SLR camera and maybe asking some fellow photographers to join me to give some newbies their first hands-on experience with a semi-pro camera. I think this could be loads of fun for everyone, especially if we could bring some nice objects to test people’s photography skills on.
Bookmarklets
Alternatively I could talk about how to make a bookmarklet. I have some experience with two bookmarklets that I made in the past and I could give people a quick overview of what is possible with bookmarklets, the tools you can use to make them, security and limits, and maybe eventually a hands-on session in making a simple bookmarklet.
What do you think?
To sum up my story, I want to know what you (the people attending BarCampLondon5) think would be an interesting topic I could talk about. I think BarCamps should be focussed a bit more about what people want to hear but I guess that’s for a different blog post.
I have been to a couple of photograph sessions at prior BarCamps but did not find them overly useful. They were good sessions, and I think many would have benefited from the guidance, but I feel most people who were interested enough to go to a session have already learned the basics.
Perhaps another option would be to have a short photowalk for the length of a session. Start at the venue and then see where you end up.
I would be interested in learning more about producing bookmarklets for Firefox. I suspect that most would not be, but who said that a session should be sell attended to be successful.
I am planning to do a session on Dyslexia with some help from others. Don’t worry, it will not be that boring. If you are a member of the geek community, and if you attend a BarCamp you could well be, then please help my out with this by completing our survey at http://tinyurl.com/4m83ln .
I’m in the same boat. Last time I thought I had a great topic – XMPP and as a hook how you can fix twitter and other such services, but only a handful showed up.
Voluntary Economics ran like clockwork and is still by far my favourite presentation, but, another repeat performance? Not sure if that’s in the spirit of barcamp. Then again, at least half are barcamp virgins, it’s been a long time, and it’s still very relevant, so, I’m leaning towards another run of V.E.
HTTP Hacking was fun and fairly well visited waaay back in Barcamp Brighton 1, my first real barcamp, but between HTML5 and a lot of development in dojo and other such libraries, it’s less and less relevant.
I doubt its possible to ask people what they want to hear (it has been traditionally difficult to engage barcampers before the event in a meaningful way, and about 95% of the talks I go to are interesting because I like the topic as I see it, not because I planned ahead and actively searched the board for specific topics). Still, that would be very useful.
NB: With all your BC5Spillover efforts, are you going to BC5 or BC5S on saturday? Just wondering.
@reinier I will definitely be going to BCL5, not BCL5-S. I was thinking of hoping by them as I want to check out their venue for GeekDinner related activities, but it’s impossible. Mainly because BCL5 is not really in central London and BCL5-S is really at the Strand.
I’m a little bit obsessed with the Javascript Revolution that’s going on right now so I vote for bookmarklets. I’m not attending BCL5 but I still think it would be cool for you to do a talk on interesting things people can do with bookmarklets.
Cristiano,
apart from the above, which is very cool btw, I suggest we run a joint session on making a twitter aggregator /directory for the “#” tag. The upcoming.org of twitter… it can be very simple yet useful for event people to promote and inform.
Is there anything like that out there?
I was actually planning of not doing some massive coding before the event (no time, etc) and instead enjoy the event a bit more. I can show you my event manager for the Geek Dinners.
That would be cool! I suggest we discuss that with others to start a project together! So you don’t have to bother with code!
J