The first ever BarCampESM has come and gone, and I have waited till now to post anything about it.

Part of that is that this was my first BarCamp ever of any kind. I have been thinking and mentally digesting what happened at the BarCampESM even, and trying to classify it.

Part of what I have been thinking about was “What part of what happened was 'BarCamp' and what part of it was ESM vendors / providers at any given technical conference”.

After some more thought I have decided one BarCamp does not give me enough context to actually know the answer to that one. I'll have to go to a few more BarCamps to know the answer to that one.

Why I was puzzling on that was to ask “Why would someone come to a BarCamp instead of a regular conference?”. Is there an advantage of some sort to the “Un-Conference”. I think the answer to that is easy, and is “Yes”. Here is why.

I have been to tons of technical conferences. SHARE, CMG, LinuxWorld, IT/360, BMC UserWorld, etc. The formal presentations are almost always useful, and the ability to mix up the tracks to create a customized education experience is valuable. But more valuable that that has always been th 'downtime' or 'whitespace' or whatever you want to call it around the sessions. The Q&A at the end. The talks in the halls. The talks over lunch or dinner with like-minded people. The opening up and sharing at a level one can not attain during a formal session.

BarCamp is that “down” time, except it is almost ALL that time. What takes some getting used to is that one has to be good on their feet. Impromptu presentations are the norm it would seem. By the end of the day, Heath Newburn got up to talk, and said that he had thrown away what he meant to talk about and instead wanted to talk about something else... and he had a brand new set of slides he had typed up while listening to others to go

with it.

This talk in turn developed into everyone sitting in a circle, and really “letting their hair down”. Part gripe session, part experience sharing, even Cote, who said at the beginning that he was there to observe ended up doing a fair amount of talking about what he had seen. For once, I was the quietest person in the room. No mean feat.

You can see the projects that this BarCamp kicked off elsewhere here on the OMC wiki. In his blog John Willis (http://www.johnmwillis.com/wp/barcamp/barcampesm-photos/) said that attendence was lower than he expected, but that it was a “can't miss event”

BarCampESM II should be very interesting indeed.