There apparently will be a BarCamp in the Washington, DC, area next month. It is being organized not by the BARCampDC group I've participated in but rather by a different group, BarCampWashingtonDC. Confusing, eh? It's not clear whether the latter is a splinter group that was very quiet about its dissatisfaction with "our" group, or whether it's a group of people who were unaware of the existing BARCampDC group. Either way, I wish them well and plan to come to the event if I can. Their not yet having secured a venue is a bit troubling, a month out, but at least they're giving it a try.

Last night was the DC area's first DemoCamp. Although I'd never been to the UMD College Park campus before, getting there and finding parking was no problem. There were about a dozen attendees, I think, though I was sitting in the front and didn't get a good look at everyone. I'd meant to bring my camera, but I'd forgotten to throw it in my car that morning, so no pictures. Most of the attendees seemed to be UMD undergraduate students in the acquaintance of fellow organizer nikolasco. I may well have been the oldest attendee, at 28 (!).

The demos started fifteen minutes late and ran an hour overtime, due—as I saw it—to a hesitation by any of the organizers (myself included) to step forward and really "run the show", schedule-wise. There were no computer glitches, though, thankfully.

First up was nikolasco on Greasemonkey and user-side web scripts in general. I'd never played with them before, and it was a good introduction. Others in the audience were clearly more familiar with this domain, and the questions they asked were pretty well over my head, involving XUL and chrome.

Next was Michael Wasser with his Firefox plugin called Social Browsing. Still in development, it doesn't appear to have a web presence that I can find, but the idea is that it'll annotate any socially linkable information on web pages you load. So far it recognizes links to IMDb and provides mouseovers that show movie posters and related information grabbed from FilmTrust. The audience treated it pretty skeptically because of its reliance on a server-side API instead of a client-side one.

The most energetic (and only non-UMD-student) presenter was James Robey, who gave the first public showing of Blooms/Zlope, a "labour of love project that fuses the ZODB and mod_python into a fascinating glue language with persistence, security, and an extremely unique approach to making XML a first class language component". Although his demo went way overtime, I'd describe it as dizzying, in that it was fascinating and frenetic and clever and largely over my head.

At the tail end came Mike Bentley with some computer games he's developed over the years in Visual Basic. The games seemed largely to be take-offs on older commercial titles.

In future DemoCamps, it would be nice to see wider diversity in the types of demos and in the attendees. All of the demos were on software projects, and all but one was Web 2.0-y. And, as I mentioned, the attendee demographics were as though we'd just scooped up an undergraduate computer science lab from somewhere on campus. It makes me appreciate Dorkbot all the more for what it achieves in bringing different types of geeks together. Outside of the organizers' circles of friends, this DemoCamp was only publicized via mailing list postings to a handful of DC-area geeky groups. We'll need to go way beyond that if we want to reach people who bring a broader range of "geeky stuff" to demonstrate.

You're invited to the DC area's first DemoCamp!



What: a gathering where people come to share interesting geeky stuff; like BarCamp but only an hour or two long instead of a day or two
When: tonight, Wednesday, 28 February 2007 beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Where: University of Maryland, College Park CSIC 2117 (see the DemoCamp DC wiki for precise directions)
Cost: free

You're encouraged to add yourself to the attendees list if you're coming or to the absentees list if you're interested but not able to come.

I'm taking a Japanese class again, starting last night. I don't recognize the instructor or any of the students from the class I took there last summer, but they seem nice. We're going to cover the second half of the first Genki textbook. My classmates range from a high-school student to policy wonks to a young woman who's Japanese and can speak the language comfortably but who grew up all over the place and can't yet read kanji.

The first DemoCamp DC has been scheduled for February 28. It's supposed to be a warm-up to organizing a full-fledged BarCamp DC. My enthusiasm for organizing a BarCamp has been waning, though, since I found the local dorkbot group and since I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of finding a venue and sponsors. I'm good at complaining about poorly-organized events, but putting on a good one would take more energy than I want to expend right now.

Every so often, Tornado Kitty receives e-mail from a random admirer. She's quite the popular cat. I've been toying with the idea of having a Tornado Kitty Fan Club with, I dunno, membership cards or buttons or something? Maybe that'd be a good excuse to order some Flickr Mini-Cards.

In fabric arts news, now that she has received them, I can show you the set of placemats I made for aitai for Valentine's day; they feature characters from the Naruto series. It was an idea that came to me in that half-awake state as I was lying in bed before the alarm sounded (or was it as I was falling asleep?), and it seems it wasn't too crazy after all. Now I'm into some other sewing projects (which I won't disclose yet because they'll be gifts too), but on the subject of making placemats, I'd love to make something along the lines of Syuzi Pakhchyan's (sparsely-documented) Technoplay placemat. It's a placemat with some LEDs sewn into it and some sort of pressure-activated switch that turns them on when a plate is on the placemat. Looking through the components at Digikey, I'm guessing what I'd want is a low-profile, non-momentary tactile switch—as opposed to what they call a "pressure switch". If you know anything about this stuff, I'd welcome your input.

All the cool kids go to BarCamp, but alas, there appear to be no active plans for one in my area. (The effort at BARCampDC seems to have fizzled.) Despite never having attended one, I'd be interested in helping put one together. I've read several collections of advice on organizing a BarCamp, and it seems to me that finding a venue would be the most difficult part by far. If the event were merely a daytime gathering (and some BarCamps have been), that'd be one thing, but it is meant to be a camp in the sense that attendees are expected to sleep and—to a lesser extent—eat there over the course of two days or so, and I speculate that the resulting sense of camaraderie is important to participants' experiences there.

So, those of you who've attended a BarCamp or other unconference, do you have any advice for me? Have you slept over at one? What would you like the organizers to have done differently? What did you like or dislike about the venue?

And those of you with any connections in the DC area, can you think of any venues that meet these specs?

• at least 3-4 medium-sized rooms appropriate for discussions or presentations
  
• one or two large gathering spaces
  
• bathrooms
  
• the ability to house 80 people during the day, and 30 people (bearing sleeping bags) overnight
  
• internet access
  
• free or cheap use of the site for an entire weekend
  
• ideally, metro-accessible
  

An office space could work well; the business would of course be considered a major sponsor of the event.

Anyone else interested in joining the BarCampDC team?

Update: I've created a BarCamp DC Google Group for planning and discussion. Anyone who's interested in helping out is welcome to join.