I am going to convey the feel just with help of pics!
What is Barcamp? 70% people are first – timers => thats cool!
Intro sessions …
V.I.Ps – who needs them => put them in a corner!
Engrossed Barcampers …
Audience – theres no audience – everyone is participating!!
I have telling people about attending the upcoming Bangalore Barcamp this weekend and obviously the question is – what is it? Also by chance I happened to read Mark Cuba’s interview in IEEE Spectrum on ‘YouTube is doomed‘ (one of the coolest tech magazines according to me!) in which he says:
Just have fun and be good at what you do. Most people don’t make the effort to be the best at it, you know? They just try to make sure everybody thinks they’re the best. But most people don’t do the work. That’s what I tell people: if you’re going to do something, be the best at it. Take chances and learn from your mistakes. Put yourself out there to let people criticize you, and then learn from it. That is a never-ending process. You gotta keep on learning, always be learning. And most people don’t do that.It’s like sports. If you can’t shoot with your left hand, you’d better practice. Business is no different; if you want to get better you practice. You want to get better at coding, you read more code, you write more code. You let people pick at your code, and you compare your code. You argue with people. You put yourself out there. You say, “Here’s where I stand.” It’s one thing to put it in a bar conversation; it’s a whole other thing to tell the world, “This is exactly what I think: you are a moron if you buy YouTube.” I could be proven wrong. Worst case is that I learn something.
The concept of Barcamp is on very similar lines. The Bangalore Barcamp Wiki kind of almost nails it for starting (but you gotta come for one to get the hang of it!):
Barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering born out of the desire for people to meet up, share, exchange ideas and possibilities in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.
Barcamps turn around the notion of a formal conference by eliminating the distinction between speakers and delegates. Everyone is a participant, and is equally welcome to propose a discussion, speak up or add to on a topic they are familiar with. Barcamps are organized and evangelized largely through the web by a community driven, collective organizational process using a wiki as a tool. A Barcamp consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site and “on the fly”, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. While Barcamps are loosely structured, there are rules. All attendees are encouraged to present, facilitate or contribute to a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the event, via blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing, and IRC. Anyone can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki. Attendance is monetarily free and generally restricted only by space constraints.
I would also like thank the core group and organizers & volunteers to put the effort for bringing everyone together. Read Shourya’s take on why BCB 4 is bound to rock.
There are close to 1000+ registrant this time and I think it might just turnout to be one of the largest ‘conference’ forget ‘unconference’. What I think you can definitely expect is:
My advice – Come, Explore, Participate and if you like Camp (and sponsor the Bar if you want 
)!
Had to specifically blog two articles I read lately and the upcoming Barcamp bangalore (more than 1000+ registrants!). Smart Mobs had some news about Omidyar.net closing up, but the write up highlights very keenly the same philosophy or thought I had written about in a post called the 4Cs (I wrote that Commerce is not a very important spoke), quoting from there:
One of the things we’ve learned over the last three years is that self-managed communities can work. Given the tools and the space in which to use them, the community can and will manage itself and keep things running with little to no oversight. We’ve also learned that communities are all about the people, not the platform, and that’s informed our decision for moving forward.
And then Brian highlights the importance of environment / ecosystem in his post “Its not the features … its the environment!” at Social Degree
Do features, design and UI help create the environment? Absolutely. But the community’s environment make features valuable, the features don’t make the community valuable.This is evident in many of the online communities that I use as regular examples in my posts. For example, Sermo is nothing more than a forum. But they have created a high quality environment for doctors to interact. Such a high quality that they are able to charge hedge funds and big pharma companies $150,000 for access to the content that is being created by the community.
There is no formula to building a great environment, and therefore a community. Much of it is like entrepreneurship. It takes persistence, dedication, creativity, and a healthy dose of luck.
Luck is a key part, because you never know what member or action might be the tipping point. But as Bo Peabody (founder of Tripod) explains in his book “Lucky or Smart”, while you can’t force luck, there are a number of things that you can do to increase your chances of being lucky.
So what does this mean in the world of the Facebook Platform and Ning? It means that nothing, especially those two items, are the be all, end all of online communities. Facebook has a pre-existing, established environment and Ning is for the most part an environment out of the box.
And David (Genuine VC), says
What really matters is Brand.In the end, each media property means something different to a
different set of people. It’s the brand that’s important, not the
functionality.Take an analog analog here… a magazine. Readers of a magazine like
Time could care less about the printing press used to make the
publication, whether it was inked with the latest technology or an
antiquated one.When I explore a potential VC investment in a consumer-facing online
media startup opportunity, one of the questions I ask is: “what is the
long-term potential to build a long-term brand?” With any
media property, it either needs to have wide mass appeal with an
adequate monetization rate or a niche appeal with a very high
monetization rate. Whether or not it has a social element to
it depends on the audience. But in reality, from here on out, I suspect
almost all of new online media will be some type social media.
From my personal experience, same holds true for Flickr and the Indian MBA entrant community Pagalguy. Both the brands have garnered a very high following and its very cult like.
Flickr leveraged it in terms of a buyout and thankfully Yahoo phasing out it Y! Photos product (talk about power of the community! BTW its just forums and comments …). Else there might have been a big backlash and they couldn’t sustain having two development teams essentially trying to serve the same need.
Thankfully, Pagalguy also realizes this is working towards monetising and spinning out products utilizing its brand value.
Leaving behind with some questions in my mind. If you think a bit:
The Brand is what customer thinks of You. The customer / consumer own the BRAND! yes, you can influence them and try to manage their reactions but its beyond your control! So, the question is: How can you grow the Brand? How can sustain it? How can you monetize it?
Note: Brand can either be a huge company, community or can be just YOU.
Guess, to me more experience and reading will let me answer it 
awaiting your comments
Well, my mind was torn between buying a Nokia E65, HTC Touch and waiting for the iPhone (Wi-Fi Phones). As each needed around 50% of my monthly (yeah I am taking home less than my student salary I was earning 3 yrs back … talk about personal progression!), I decided to ditch them and revert back from to my Nokia E50. I had given the Nokia E50 to my Dad for him to experience the new mobile life. His Employer (SBI) has given him a Nokia N70 and he is happy
Having lived 5 solid months on a low end mobile with no internet – I felt different. My whole experience shifting to Bangalore has been different. Spent a few months with no net, no TV, no FM and no Newspaper at home. With Mobile being the sole companion … a revealing experience more on that later. But I searched on the net to equip my mobile with some programs and here are some links I found useful! Some of them did not install on my mobile as I have not upgraded the software on my phone I think. Here are some themes, games and utilities!!!
searched for a bunch of quotes on the net. Read a lot of poetry on death, living, mourning, grief, courage and moving on today. Here is my collated rain drops (my cloud you know!) … its lots of quotes in no particular order. Well spent a good 3 to 4 hours digging them – felt therapeutic – an emotional mood stabilizer for my bipolar state of mind I guess !
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief; – William Cullen Bryant
Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better. – King Whitney, Jr.
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. -From a headstone in Ireland
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. – Kahlil Gibran
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are. – Anna Quindlen
…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.” – Sogyal Rinpoche
Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. – David Searls
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.
Live you life in a manner so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice. – Native American ProverbThere is but one freedom,
To put oneself right with death.
After that everything is possible.
I cannot force you to believe in God.
Believing in God amounts to coming
to terms with death. When you have
accepted death, the problem of God
will be solved–and not the reverse. – Camus, AlbertIt is not length of life, but depth of life. – Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. – George S. Patton, Jr.
If you learn from your suffering, and really come to
understand the lesson you were taught,
you might be able to help someone else
who’s now in the phase you may have just completed.
Maybe that’s what it’s all about after all… – AnonymousDeath— the last sleep? No the final awakening.- Walter Scott
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. – Norman Cousins
Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death. – Anonymous
You think you’re the only guy that ever got a kick in the teeth? Well you’re not. It’s happening every day and it’s gonna keep right on happenin’ till this thing’s over. And you, you can sit here and feel sorry for yourself, or you can come on out with me and see how nice people are when they’re alive. – Dalton Trumbo
There is a feeling of loyalty to her which seems to compel me to indulge in mournful thoughts. Do not mistake. Relief is coming. I am more like myself—more hopeful. – Rutherford Birchard Hayes
Who’ll be chief mourner?
I, said the dove,
I’ll mourn for my love,
I’ll be chief mourner. – Mother GooseNo longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe. – William ShakespeareNow rest in peace, our patriot band;
Though far from nature’s limits thrown,
We trust they find a happier land,
A brighter sunshine of their own. – Philip FreneauI went into the kitchen and got halfway to the phone before I realized that I couldn’t call her…. A lot of people who lost a mother or father or husband or wife will tell you that they find themselves almost talking out loud. I do that a lot. – Bill ClintonAlthough I could lament in the language and feelings of David for Absalom, I am constrained to say, peace to his manes. Let us weep for the living, and not for the dead. – Andrew Jackson
Mourning is not forgetting… It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.- Margery Allingham
For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms. – William Gibson
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own. – Antonio Porchia
After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now? – Ernst Toller
. . . A widow bird sat mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below. – Percy Bysshe ShelleyIt’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses. – ColetteMan, when he does not grieve, hardly exists. – Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
Sorrow makes us all children again – destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up. – E.M. Cioran
Grief is a species of idleness. – Samuel Johnson
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. – Kenji Miyazawa
Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. – From the television show The Wonder Years
If you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill
Time is a physician that heals every grief. – Diphilus
The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost. – Arthur Schopenhauer
Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow. – Dan Rather
You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present. – Jan Glidewell
Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal. – Anonymous
There are things that we don’t want to happen but have to accept, things we don’t want to know but have to learn, and people we can’t live without but have to let go. – Anonymous
If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble. – Moliere
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There’s nothing serious in mortality.
All is but toys; renown and grace is dead,
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of. – William Shakespeare , in Macbeth, act 2, sc. 3, l. 91-6. “Chance” means mischance, meaning the killing of Duncan; life (”mortality”) from henceforth is trivial (”toys”); the “vault” is the sky covering the earth.Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it. – Jacques Prévert
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep. – Henry Maudsley
Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway. – Mary C. Crowley
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharper in her thoughts. – George Eliot
Fear no more the frown o’ th’ great,
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat,
To thee the reed is as the oak.
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust. – William Shakespeare
… I just got this as a forward and I couldn’t stop smiling!
Whenever – I am in a soul searching mood, I log onto my flickr archives and dig deep. Its a visual diary I keep and enjoy going back to. this month being July I went back to July of 2006 and 2005 and somehow found 2005 more lively to think back.
Summer in NY with Friends:
Cheap return travel:
Memorable dates with the mysterious Trisha
Awesome roomates at Berkeley: Pritish and Abhay boozing and
and Rahul geeking:
and yeah the eternal sunshine at Berkeley and Oakland:
I wanted to write this close to a month back but here it goes out finally: My Friend Dhana along with her colleague launched MizPee and the response has been zimply phenomenal. She was just super duper excited last when I had a skype chat with her before leaving for my himalayan trip. Its the first product at YojoMobile (you can expect more cool ones from them soon!)
Well the main idea about the mobile solution is it does just one thing really really well – finding the closest, cleanest toilet!! {local ads are matched} Read more about it on the MizPee website and reviews here and there. A quick google search give 145k hits! I am like wow … talk about using the mobile for really personal stuff ;P
I am like this has to be blogged – for future retreival I got a bummer of a news in the morning that Tata Indicom the only provider that said will provide Internet to my place is sorry and is looking forward to revitalize our relationship on a later date ;P {I have a bigger post on that soon}!!
So, decided I will call airtel and activate GPRS (Mobile Office) and using internet on the go. Pained that its going to 43 kbps speed but atleast – its going to be always available. But I was really surprised with the activation messages I have to send. The cost is Rs 140/week (they highlight this plan only after you really dig and ask!)
Activate Mobile Office : sms MO to 6123
Deactivate Mobile Office : sms MO CNCL to 222
Check Unbilled Amount : sms UNB to 121
Outstanding amount : sms OT to 121
Can airtel get more intuitive. Talk about customer experience and Usability. I wonder if this is the state everywhere else in the world. Something is really messed up in the corporate structure I think – otherwise who in the hell will say send sms to 6123 to activate and send to 222 to deactive!
I am blogging for my personal reference and hope other people benefit from it!
Came across the article by Marlene (a PhD student in Denmark) at Social Computing titled 35 perspective on Online Social networking. On reading it I felt the enumeration was a tad to big but I felt the grouping in the end was neat. Do check out her blog – I liked her open style of writing and her background seems impressive. I especially liked couple of her post on ethnography. She finally groups the 35 perspectives on Social Networking in the following way :
Based on my – currently 35 – different perspectives I propose the following six overarching categories:
Research perspectives – e.g. the identity perspective, the youth perspective, the language perspective, the genre perspective, the materialistic perspective, the learning perspective, the creative perspective, the Community of Practice perspective and so on. All of those perspectives could (and should) be a way of researching online social networking and youth. (I am on it
User perspectives – e.g. the social perspective, the friendship perspective, the democratic perspective, the love perspective, the reassurance perspective, the sincerity perspective, the public perspective etc. Those perspectives could also be viewed as different motives that the users have for using social networking sites.
Professional or learning perspectives – To this category belongs the perspectives that consider the learning possibilities of social networking or see how it can be used in a (future) professional life. We have here the network perspective, the group work perspective, the source critique perspective, the technological perspective, the creative perspective, the Community of Practice perspective and more.
Adult or parents perspectives – In this category we have the voices from the worried parents or other adults who have a hard time understanding why the youngsters spend so much time in front of the screen. This is for example the time-consuming perspective, the anti-social perspective, the generation gap perspective, the language perspective, the consumer perspective, the public perspective etc.
Moral panic or news media perspectives – Some perspectives emerge out of a public concern or a news media discourse where creating selling headlines comes into play. Thus, we have in this category the paedophile and predator perspective, the bullying perspective, the sex perspective, the network perspective, the youth perspective, the public perspective and so on.
Marketing perspectives – In this category we find the marketing or business perspectives such as the consumer perspective, the materialistic perspective, the branding perspective, the surveillance perspective and the hardcore business perspective.
The various perspectives when grouped make sense. Reading the article couple of time might give you an insight. If you are from India – think about all the news Orkut has made and reflect on the various categories – it will make a lot of sense!!
My phone buzzed this morning with the Kal Ho Na Ho … tune and I heard: Am I talking to Vinukumar? I replied: Yes. He said he was Arun – had met him during Barcamp Chennai and I said ok. He reminded me we had interacted decently then and as that he was the brother of guy behind taazza. I think i kind of remember him now. asked him – what happened to Taazza and he said its up and running. checked it out and I think its cool. Check out Taazza. With that and Justsamachar – I think you can forget rest of the news sites easily!!
Anyway, the main point – Barcamp Bangalore (BCB) is round the corner. Head over to http://barcampbangalore.org – they have a wiki up and also you confirm participation in the wiki or on facebook events.
Arun assured me, as part of the organizers group, everthing is being taken care of. The message seemed to be – ‘get the JUNTA’ . So, if the Q is when and where:
July 28 and 29, 2007 at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB).
This Barcamp is centered around concept of Collectives. A slightly more detailed list of topics for people to hangout around. Check out the Collectives page on the BCB 4 wiki page. I think its a neat idea. The Collectives that have emerged: ( <= my interests )
I have been asked to put some force into the Bloggers Collective and I am keen towards it. Sanjukta and I are meeting at CCD, MG Road this Saturday around 5pm – other do join us. Basically spread the word and join us for the pre-meets if you can?
A post on mobile and India after a really long time. Interest got rekindled after reading the lovely interview on Indian @ Wharton with ISB’s Ravi Bapna (I gotta mail him) and Stern’s Arun Sundarajan on Spectrum revenues and Infrastructure subsidy. Excerpts from the interview:
looks like the infrastructure rollout costs over the next few years to get to that target of a few hundred million subscribers are going to be on the order of a minimum of $20-25 billion. But the flipside is that the revenue opportunity is actually extremely large given the numbers.
You don’t know how these things unfold. The rural segment could well surprise us in terms of the usage. Of course, there is a big market for micro credit, for insurance and for all kinds of services to get out there.
I think the more important issue is that the Defense Ministry and the Telecommunications Ministry need to really sit down together — perhaps under the aegis of the Prime Minister’s office — and take this as a national priority and resolve the issues. I think that is the key issue, and I think once that gets held, the spectrum should get rolled out. The operators are ready. Talking to them, they are just waiting for the regulatory “cholesterol” to sort of disappear and they want to start making money.
As Ravi mentioned, there are at least three layers here. You’ve got device manufacturers. You’ve got infrastructure and service providers. And you’ve got content providers. And unless there is a strong enough belief among the content providers that there’s going to be sufficient infrastructure fast enough, the content is not going to appear. If the content does not appear, the value of the infrastructure as perceived by the consumer is lower.
Nokia has a big manufacturing facility now, and they are trying to look at ethnographically how people in emerging markets would use the phone differently. So, things that they can learn from [India] probably would translate well into other emerging markets all over the world.
Overall, I think the picture looks good on these fronts. But getting these three or four key constituencies aligned in one direction, particularly the content side and fostering innovation …
and then just mentioning a bit about the iPhone – this review from the BBC and Engadget sums it up!! Excerpt from the BBC review:
Apple’s claim that the iPhone is five years ahead of any other mobile is nonsense, in terms of actual tech specifications. In particular, the antiquated data system lets it down badly. However, as a user experience it is probably about 10 years ahead.
Using the iPhone makes you feel quite angry towards other mobile manufacturers. What have they been doing? Fobbing us of with such truly awful interfaces?
However, I am conscious that where we do benefit on other platforms is the wealth of third party applications. If Apple could sort out the camera, data speed and keyboard the iPhone would still not be perfect, but it wouldn’t be far off.
Couple of people are planning blogger’s meet – check out the Bangalore Bloggers Wiki and Sanjukta’s Blog: he is planning a meet for the Barcamp Bangalore 4 this month at IIMB.
Looking forward for a cool meet ahead soon … venue might change I think. Picked some snaps from the Bombay bloggers meet last year
.
So, finally its Bangalore calling – Talk Maadi
Read this quote on my cuz’s facebook profile. I am getting connected with her after couple of hours. Really nice to see her maturing into a lovely creative young adult. She has a Yoruba Proverb to mention, it resonated with me in my current phase of mind a lot:
No matter how far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.
Sada Mama, one of my Mom’s Elder Brother at Bangalore, passed away last week. Its going to take sometime for me to over come the grief. Just made a quick multi-exposure collage in Picasa of his ever smiling face and a picture taken when Navy was giving Honor during his final rites. Will write more later …
