Michael Mealling has taken over the task of organizing this year’s Barcamp Atlanta given my recent move to Mountain View, California.

Registration is now open.

The event will be held on October 17-18, 2008 in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia Tech ATDC. This is the same location as we had last year.

If you’ve never attended a barcamp or missed last year, you should consider coming. It’s not only for pure technical folks, I would especially encourage others in different areas to attend (like marketing, sales, business development, etc). Barcamp is a very fun and mind-expanding experience and it’s a great place to network with other people.

Barcamp Atlanta ended around 5pm tonight after a nice day and half of intense sessions, discussions and great one-on-one interactions with some really cool people.

Thanks to everyone that came and contributed. We had some awesome sessions and I really wished there was a better way to be able to see everyone’s presentations. There were so many good presentations happening at the same time I feel like I missed a lot of great content.

For all those who think Atlanta is hosed – well, whatever…. I think we continue to prove that Atlanta has a place in the startup ecosystem and that we have a great social network built-in right here in town. We even had 2 people from Jacksonville, Florida attend – as well as from Alabama. I’m going to save my perspective on this topic to another post dedicated to that.

Thanks are in order for a number of people that helped – here are just a few off the top off my head that really pitched in: Lance Weatherby, Michael Mealing, Stephen Fleming, Glen Gordon, Lee Hadsock and Nick Ali. But, it wouldn’t have been an event if we didn’t have everyone that attended and all the great contributions by each of the presenters. I had a blast!

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I had planned on blogging yesterday evening during the event but couldn’t get much of a chance – too much offline discussion that was interactive, engaging and darn interesting.

We kicked off around 6pm with registration. Around 90 people or so showed up and we had dinner at the top parking level deck next door. The sky was incredible and the weather was absolutely perfect.

After dinner, around 8pm-ish, we kicked off sessions that ran until around 10pm. The most interesting talk I think I attended was Stephen Fleming and Michael Mealing’s “Space 101″ talk. I don’t remember the exact title – but it was essentially a lesson in things like gravity in space, low earth orbit and a lot of other space-geek stuff. Amazing how much I thought I understand but really didn’t about “the basics”.

After sessions, we had a lot of engaging group discussions – for a long time we talked about ideas for Startup Weekend Atlanta. We also talked about a lot of bigger idea issues like debating the semantic web, portable reputations and fun stuff like that. I went to bed around 3:00am and 7:30am came quickly. People are just starting to get up and arrive now and breakfast from Justix is very sweet. Off to get some more food…and get the sessions going.

Check out the picture pool on Flickr. Thanks for Stephen Fleming for the picture to the right.

barcampatl barcampatl07 barcamp atlanta

We’re less than 24 hours from the kick off of Barcamp Atlanta and I wanted to drop you one last email before the event kickoff to give you some finals details.

We’ll kickoff registration tomorrow at 6PM at the Georgia Tech ATDC which is located on 5th street at Tech Square. Parking is available in the parking deck adjacent to the Centergy building. Unfortunately, parking is not free for this event.

For a map to the location, please see: http://tinyurl.com/yurkx3

Dinner will be served at 6:30PM. We are planning on having dinner and social time on the top level of the parking deck. In case of inclement weather, we will move dinner indoors in the ATDC space. If you arrive before 6:30PM, please first visit the 3rd floor (signs with directions will be visible in the main lobby of the building) to register and get your badge and more information. If you arrive between 6:30-7:30PM, please come to the parking deck. If you plan on arriving after 7:30PM, please join us in the ATDC space.

We will post the open schedule for session before 6:00PM tomorrow. We are planning on starting the Friday night sessions at 8:00PM. Saturday sessions are planned to start at 9:30AMPM. We will serve breakfast from 8:00AM-9:00AM Saturday and lunch will be served at noon.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our key financial supporters for this event:

> Appcelerator – http://www.appcelerator.com
> ATDC – http://www.atdc.org
> Convergence Acceleration Group – http://www.casgroup.biz
> Georgia Tech Venture Lab – http://www.venturelab.gatech.edu
> Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com
> Peer 1 – http://www.peer1.com

If you have not filled out the event details form, please do so now! http://www.barcampatlanta.com/details.html

Official tags for Barcamp Atlanta are: barcampatl, barcampatl07

Thanks for Amber Rhea for setting up the Flickr group at: http://flickr.com/groups/barcampatlanta

Also, if you use IRC, you can join us at #barcampatl on http://irc.freenode.net

See you tomorrow!

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I’ve received a few questions from people inquiring with the following question: “Why would I actually want to camp out at Barcamp?”

This is a good question and let me attempt to give my perspective. First, Barcamp is about sharing, collaborating and and learning. It was initially created as a spin-off from Tim O’Reilly invitation-only FooCamp, which I had the privilege of being invited to this year.

One of the advantages of a true camp out is that it helps create an environment for bonding in a different level than you get at normal conferences or meet up events – it’s part of the off-line experience. One of the best parts of FooCamp was the camping itself – the middle-of-the-night conversations and the game playing that took place after the sessions ended and the real work of getting to know each other started.

Now we’re not talking about camping like you might have done if you were in the Boy Scouts like I was growing up. We’re not doing marsh mellows around the camp fire and telling ghost stories. And if you pitch a tent, it’s likely next to a chair or desk in an office. This is all-out urban camping – where tents are optional and pillows are needed for the concrete floors covered with thin carpeting. This is an urban experience – not home on the range.

I would encourage you to think about being part of the total experience – at least for one night – rather than skipping home and returning in the morning. Will you get out of your normal routine and venture into an unfamiliar territory? yes. Will it be a little awkward to wake up in a building after not much sleep and have to try and brush your teeth in the bathroom of an office complex? Absolutely. Will you have a better time and get a little deeper with some people you may know and others you won’t? Darn straight...

Camping is optional. If you can’t or aren’t interested in hanging out overnight with a bunch of geeks – that’s cool… we won’t care too much. But if you’d like to experience something a little more raw and people centric – consider staying overnight and hanging out.

And as a closing note for all of those out there that have children and spouses (like myself, I have 3 kids)… take this an opportunity to have a “night out”.

barcampatlanta urbancamping

Tonight, I pushed out a registration details form to collect a few more bits of information from registered attendees. If you didn’t get the form but you signed up – you might not be on the official list. Please email me if you didn’t receive the email invitation to complete the form. You might also want to check your spam folder in your email inbox.

As a technical note, I used WuFoo to create the form. If you haven’t played with WuFoo, it’s awesome. It will allow you to create nice, web2.0 looking, forms. There are some simple tools to design the forms, manage the responses and run reports and export your data.

barcampatlanta atlanta wufoo

Yesterday morning we reached our 100th signup on Barcamp Atlanta and registration is now officially closed. If you’d like to get on the standby list – in case anyone cancels – please send me an email at jhaynie [at] gmail.com.

More information about the event itself will be coming out in the next 2 weeks. Please stay tuned here and at http://www.barcampatlanta.com and http://barcampatlanta.pbwiki.com

technorati tags: barcamp, atlanta

Lance Weatherby is bringing Startup Weekend to Atlanta on November 9th, 2007.

In Lance’s own words:

Essentially the idea is to get a bunch of smart people in a room over a weekend and build some type of Internet app. I think there are enough people here in Atlanta to make this a success. My goal in putting this together is to improve the Atlanta startup community. I hope that you will seriously consider joining in. I think it will be an enriching and immersive experience where you will learn by doing and meet a lot of interesting people with common interests and skills.

Startup Weekend was created by Andrew Hyde and they’ve had a past event in Boulder, Colorado and have a number of upcoming events in Toronto, NYC, Hamburg, Germany, Houston, Boston and D.C. (and now, Atlanta). The basic premise is to bring people together and attempt to incubate a concept to a company – all in 3 days. This is the ultimate expression of “let’s do this”. While it takes more than 3 days to get a company off the ground, no doubt, with the right combination of experience and passion – you can get a long way in the process when you concentrate effort.

I like it. I’m going to attend. Are you?

Quick update on Barcamp Atlanta. It’s been almost 7 days since I first launched the official sign-up page and we have only 10 slots remaining. If you would like to attend or know someone who is planning on attending and have not signed up, please do so now. It looks like we’ll be closing registration in the next few days. I’m impressed how fast we spread the word and got the group set. We’re going to have a lot of fun, learn a lot from each other and forge new relationships. I love forward to meeting you and spending time with you.

technorati tags: startupweekend, atlanta, barcamp, startup

I had intended to blog when we reached 50 signups. However, that happened so fast and I’m traveling this week I didn’t have a chance to do a post. We’re now at 39 slots open and it’s only been ~96 hours since we launched the signup page.

If you would like to attend or know some who is planning on attending, please let me know they should sign-up now if they haven’t yet. Once we reach 100, we’ll be closing off registration. Unfortunately, our space will only accommodate 100 comfortably.

technorati tags: barcamp, atlanta

Barcamp Atlanta is coming to town on October 12-13, 2007. The official sign up page is now available at http://www.barcampatlanta.com.

Because we have limited space, we can only accommodate 100 people on a first come, first serve basis. If you’d like to attend, please sign up now. If you’d like to bring someone with you, make sure you sign them up as well.

We also have a couple of other resources currently that might be helpful:

Barcamp Atlanta Facebook Group

Barcamp Atlanta Wiki

If you would like to volunteer to help, please email me at jhaynie AT gmail dot com.

We have 2 sponsorship slots left, if you are interested in sponsoring this event, please email me at jhaynie AT gmail dot com.

technorati tags: barcamp, atlanta, georgia, unconference