BarCampBlock, BarCamp Returns To Its Roots

BarCampBlock, the second anniversary of BarCamp, takes place August 18th & 19th at the SocialText offices in Palo Alto, the original location of the first BarCamp. This time around, the organizers of BarCamp (Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Tantek Çelik, Ross Mayfield and Liz Henry) are taking over the entire block and expanding the event to local Palo Alto companies like Facebook, iMeem, IDEO, Edgeio and others.

Almost two years ago, a group of 6 San Francisco geeks in 7 days, using blogs, wikis and IRC slapped together a weekend conference with wifi, food and amazing presentations in Palo Alto, California. This was a different kind of conference, though. There were no superstar keynote speakers. There were no pre-programmed agendas. There was a brilliant agenda filled with content by and for the attendees. Everyone, including the sponsors, the organizers, the speakers and the audience were involved in making the event happen equally and were often one and the same. Over the weekend, more than 200 people showed up and people watched remotely from all over the world. This event was BarCamp.

Here are some of the proposed sessions. For more info, check out the BarCampBlock wiki page.

The original BarCamp was a historic event, leading to BarCamps around the world. The first public demos of Flock and Pandora took place there and it where I first met many of the people that I know really well now, like TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and several others. Also that first BarCamp was one of early tech events that I started documenting with a DSLR (back then it was with a Canon 20D). For the sake of nostalgia, here are my photos from the first BarCamp.

Just like the original BarCamp, Laughing Squid is once again proud to be one of the sponsors. They are still looking for a few more sponsors if you know of any companies that might be interested.