The NetCircle

We may proudly announce that we`ll host our second barcamp Shanghai here at the NetCircle on June 12th 2010.

What: BarCamp Shanghai 2010
When: Saturday, June 12, 9:30am – 06:00pm + afterparty @wkshanghai
Where: The NetCircle HQ

Sign up here for barcamp Shanghai

What is a Barcamp? (Short Version: A 24-hour ad-hoc, all-play unconference where everyone who attends participates by presenting or helping out.)

I am also very glad to be one of the organizers of this barcamp Shanghai as organizing these unconferences is one of my passions. Back in Germany I Co-founded the communitycamp and artcamp, co-organised barcamp Hamburg & wordcamp and helped out at many other camps.

I’m very excited as this barcamp also will be my first one outside of Europe and am looking forward to many interesting people, sessions and conversations – hope to see you there :-)

Last week was held in Paris the second Symfony Live conference. Over 2 days, 350 (!!!) participants listened to 20 sessions; covering different subjects like usage of Symfony events, introduction to GIT and the first presentation/release of Symfony 2. It was a great gathering of the framework users but also of PHP and Open Source enthusiasts. We could exchange our experience with other developers, prepare some future collaboration and enjoy some french food.

This was also the first presentation of our work to the outside world thanks to the session of one of our coworker, Alvaro Videla. His talk was about “Debugging and Profiling Symfony applications” presenting the tools developed and/or used in the company to run our main project. It also introduced some performance issue we had to deal with during our deployment of symfony 1.0 and 1.2. This was the first time the company’s work is publicized openly, due to its “special” nature, and the feedback is quite good so far, encouraging us to share more about our work.

The highlight of the conference was the first preview release of Symfony 2 (note the upper case S). This new version focused on speed and flexibility. By getting rid of the magic (magic methods, calls…) and using a few patterns (like dependency injection), the framework matures to a totally new level. Doctrine 2 was also revealed and follows the same path of speed/quality focus as well; this is very encouraging and I hope it will push for an increase of quality and reconnaissance in the PHP world. The final release is still far ahead, planned for late 2010, (beta available on github) but this already sounds very promising.

Another important point was the choice of using some Zend Framework components (logger, cache) instead of reinventing them; showing that collaboration, and not competition, is possible between the different frameworks. This is also quite interesting for the community; let’s see how it develops.

Stay tuned!

As we hear the question “what is a Barcamp?” pretty often, here’s a quick explanation:

Wikipedia says: BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

Barcamp Logos

Tantek Çelik provided the rules (source barcamp.org) based on the

For me that’s the most important part: be an interactive participant! as in interaction, dialog, involvement, question and answer, transfer. A Barcamp is what you make it! If people don’t interact we will end up sitting in a room quietly. If everybody is an proactive participant though we will spend a fun time, sharing our knowlede, learning together, discussing, meeting new friend, having new ideas, …

Sessionplan at UXCamp Berlin

What are the topics?

Whatever the participants are interested in. Traditionally geeky stuff, but if people keep asking you about your famous chicken pie recipe why not give a session about that. Or the other way around: You are very interested in a certain topic let’s say “optimizing Propel queries” just suggest a session about that, most likely somebody might stand up and say “Hey I know that stuff pretty well, I can give a session where you can ask questions, if enough people are interested, otherwise just chat with me lateron”. There are Barcamps with special topics UXCamp for example. UX stands for User Experience and it’s basically a Barcamp for User Experience, but also here it would be no problem to have a session about chicken pie, if you find your audience.

Where can I suggest my session? What will the schedule be?

A Barcamp day starts with the suggestion of the sessions. So everybody describes the kind of session the can do in about 30 seconds than the people who are interested just raise their hands. This way you know how many people might attend and which room to choose, if there are rooms with different sizes and equipment. Then the session gets pinned on the board for a certain time slot. After the planning – voila – there is a schedule and the sessions start.

Any more questions? Feel free to ask at any time. I’ll just update this post with what you’d like to know in addition. This way this post might become a nice FAQ about Barcamps. Thanks for being a interactive participant!

More Barcamp Logo Collections

We’re proud to announce that we’ll be hosting BarCamp Shanghai 2009. This year, BarCamp is part of the geeks on a plane tour, which is co-organized by our friends over at Web2Asia.

What: BarCamp Shanghai 2009
When: Sunday, June 14, 11:00am – 05:00pm
Where: The NetCircle HQ

What is a Barcamp?

The days when you could know everything over. But the will remains, as there are more sources of knowledge as the amount of data grows. We’ve learned to multitask and work on several monitors at the same time while listening to a podcast and watching a video on Youtube and our elbows rest on an open book. We can read more, faster, more personal and from different angles. We use our Feedreader to organize the never ending flood of blogposts. I’m depressed realizing it was months ago my google reader said anything different than the 1000+. IMHO there’s a trend towards multi author blogs who give you the overview of what’s going on and only if you show more interest in details you might need another specialized blog.

Better organization and predigested information doesn’t completely solve the problem. We need to realize that really important things show up on a regular basis. You might miss it on Twitter, but if it’s important enough somebody else will twitter it too, or pick it up and write a blogpost or maybe you hear your friends or colleagues talk about it or you see it on TV.

If it’s really important you won’t miss it, but you can’t always be the first one to find it. Especially if you have other thing to work on than being up to date. So we go to conferences every now an then to get updated, but here we have the same problem, everybody has a different knowledge level. I will run away screaming if anybody explains Twitter to me again, but there are people who don’t know it, who have the right to know it and even have the right to have it explained during the same conference were somewhere else people talk about the next big thing after Twitter or discuss different Twitter tools or whatever.

I don’t want to talk about the conference itself, but about one crucial problem I experience pretty often at conferences, barcamps, meetups, workshops. We have to pay attention to different knowledge levels and stick to them. I appreciate that speakers explain a lot in order to make sure the whole audience understands them, but IMHO this lowers the general standard of a session

Not everybody loved school but it made sense to have different classes, so the students have the same basis and can move forward faster without going back first. I’d love to have the same thing for the re:publica. They managed to make it quite popular and therefor it didn’t only attract the averyge nerd, which is absolutely great. And for those who want to learn about the basics of social media we need sessions like: Get started with Twitter. Second grade: Twitter tools for journalists. 3rd grade: Twitters impact on Massmedia. Fungrade: Twitterreading

This year was an inbetween state with both the hip, well informed Techcrowed as well as Newbies. In order to please both groups next year and let the conference grow we need diversificaion to add value to the event for everybody. Besides that thanks to everybody how was involved in the organisation!!!

oh! And internet connection would be nice next time…