New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

BarCamp Delhi was the most geek fun I have had in a long time! The event was more successful at being an un-conference than we had thought it would be when Amit, Jon and I first met to start planning it. In fact it was only during the day of the camp that the real meaning of an "un-conference" dawned upon me. There were some 80 odd enthusiastic participants planning out the day in real time. Presenters were told when they had to present just an hour or so before their scheduled time. In fact the venue of the talks (we had two conference rooms - thanks Adobe!) were getting decided on the fly. And yet, it was not chaotic. It was like a real world wiki! Collaborative, democratic and yet self organizing.

Quite a few things worked in our favor. Firstly, this was the first ever BarCamp in India. So anybody (and there are many) who had heard of the concept before was eager to be part of it. Secondly, the quality of sessions was extremely impressive. Since the speakers were talking about things close to their heart, they spoke well and with passion. The sessions were also varied in nature. Topics ranged from coding sessions and product demos to web 2.0 and entrepreneurship discussions. This kept the audience engaged throughout the day. Finally, and most importantly, the audience participated very actively in all the sessions. Most of the time, the QA extended into over time we had to request that discussions be taken offline. I think the bottomline is that un-conferences attract a focused but knowledgable audience and speakers who are keen to participate actively.

Few of the lessons we learnt from organizing this BarCamp which might be useful for the next such events are:
1. Try to do a two day event. We had 20+ sessions in a single day so we had to run parallel tracks. That meant that everybody missed half of those wonderful sessions! A two day session will also provide better scope for interaction between participants.
2. Almost everybody who had signed up for presenting a session did turn up and present. Those who couldn't make it informed us before hand. Since its easy to sign up on the wiki, I had some reservations as to how many speakers will actually turn up. I was wrong.
3. Do Podcasts/vlogs if possible. Some sessions were so good I wished we could record them. There was definite value in capturing such events on audio/video.
4. Viral marketing works! The event got really good coverage on the blogosphere and even a few "A-listers" blogged it (we requested most of them but still...). I personally sent only a few emails. Most of the publicity happened through the blogs. In less than 3 weeks, we had over 100 people sign up.
5. It was a good move on our part to set a broad based but yet focused enough topic for the barcamp. It is better than having no agenda at all. This way the audience knew what to expect and that led to lot of meaningful discussion.
6. It might be a good idea to conduct a couple of round table discussions as well. We were planning to do that but then dropped the idea (there were too many sessions scheduled!).

Finally, a HUGE thanks to Adobe for hosting the event. They have an amazing office in Noida and to allow us to use it so liberally was just so not corporate like! My respect for Adobe went up by several notches!

I am hoping that this BarCamp was only the first one and we will get to attend many more in the coming months!