Informal ‘unconferences’ offer a flexible, low-cost and effective networking and learning platform for young entrepreneurs
It’s a lazy December Saturday afternoon and the brown-coloured office of Impetus Technologies in NOIDA wore a deserted look. Inside, one level below the ground,
Himanshu Baweja and his two friends waited near the door of one of the many large rooms of the software company. Through the glass doors of the rooms, you could see groups of 20 or 30 youngsters, nearly all with laptops, sitting on plastic chairs with their eyes fixed on projector screens.
If you strained your eyes, you could also catch the drop-outs in each room, away from the bright projector screen and seemingly completely caught up in their own hushed conversations. Himanshu and his friends sat through some of the presentations by other start-ups like theirs in the social networking arena. They also gave a presentation on what they were doing. Himanshu is fresh out of college and one of the 30 developers globally to be invited by Google to test out its Open Social platform earlier this year. Having sat through some presentations, Himanshu is now trying to catch up with some of the people they saw in the projector-lit room. There is excited chatter when they discuss ideas with other fellow start-ups. “I really didn’t know what to expect,” says Himanshu, who passed out of the IIT Kharagpur last year, “the website wasn’t of much use.”
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Himanshu and his friends are attending their first BarCamp, a kind of user-generated-event where there are no fixed schedules, speakers or invitees. Mostly confined to technology professionals, the camp and its variations, like the Open Coffee Club (OCC) and Mobile Monday (MoMo), provides an opportunity for budding tech-entrepreneurs to keep themselves abreast of the latest changes and make business connections. Since the organizers do not have to bother with inviting speakers and attendees, or thrashing out a schedule, such events are open by nature. Anyone can walk in, sit through and even give their own presentations and talks.
BarCamps, the first such ‘unconference’ event to become popular was inspired by the FOO Camps, itself a spin-off of the dot-com meltdown of 2000. The FOO (Friends of O’Reilly) Camps are organized by technology publisher O’Reilly Media of the US every year. The first FOO Camp of 2003 adopted the rather adventurous strategy of letting the attendees erase and rewrite the schedule of the presentations and talks on a white-board, even as the event was going on.
BarCamps, started in 2005 as an open alternative to FOO Camps by one of the attendees, retains many features of the original open format. “Everyone is encouraged to present or talk. For that, you book a slot on the wall in the morning. Schedules are thrashed out on the same morning and are not pre-planned,” explains Arpit Agarwal, one of the converts of Bangalore’s first BarCamp, held in April 2006. Arpit was among the ten or so young professionals who stepped in to save the Bangalore BarCamp from flagging when the organizers of the first event backed out in mid-2006.
“I had attended the first event out of curiousity, it was free and it said there were no rules,” remembers Arpit. The software programmer, working with the Bangalore-based Ittiam Systems at the time, was looking forward to attending even more such events. “Then one day, a few weeks after the first event, there was a message on the BarCamp Yahoo group that there are no plans for a second BarCamp. That led to more people coming forward to organize the second event and soon, a group of around 10 or 12 of us met in a Cafe Coffee Day in Indiranagar,” he says. The Bangalore group has since swollen to around 20 core-enthusiasts, with five BarCamps, the last one in November, under their belt. Having moved to IIT Bombay for a post graduate management course, Agarwal is nowadays busy with the Bombay group.
Though Bangalore BarCamp has become the biggest such event in India with attendance ranging from 500-600 people, the credit for organizing the first camp goes to around half a dozen people in Delhi. One of them is Amit Ranjan, the India representative for Uzanto Consulting, which specializes in Web software. Sitting at the third Delhi BarCamp at Impetus, Amit explains the funda behind the camps.
“A lot of it has to do with the democratizing effect of the Web... the fact that two people could start out in a garage ten years ago and become Google as we know it today.. It’s about the dream, and the need to get feedback from the community. How do you make sure that the products that are put out, whether on the Web or mobile or anywhere else connect with your audience? There cannot be a better way than to get together a bunch of early adopters of such services,” says Amit.
Through the three camps held in Delhi so far, starting from February 2006 (six months after it originated in the Silicon Valley), people like Arpit and Amit have invested their time and energy in finding sponsors for food, venue and of course, WiFi for the attendees. “It was a struggle during the early days,” says Arpit, “but now, at least for the established ones like in Bangalore, there are lots of companies willing to pitch in as sponsors.”
Yet, the phenomenon has remained true to its original mandate of being open and free and none of the organizers seem to take lightly to any suggestions of taking it commercial and charging the attendees. “I will have nothing to do with a BarCamp that charges the participants,” says Amit, “even when we were organizing this camp, we said no to two sponsors because we felt they did not understand the spirit of the event... It’s not for someone who comes with a fixed agenda that I give this much and I must get this much in return.”
BarCamps have grown in popularity nearly all the major cities after they started off in early 2006 and have even spread out to smaller cities like Trivandrum and Coimbatore. “The biggest strength of a BarCamp is that, unlike a normal conference, everybody here is just like you, going through the same problems as you are,” says Kesava Reddy, a software professional from Bangalore who was one of the dozen people who met in the Indiranagar cafe in Bangalore to organize the second Bangalore BarCamp.
“In a normal event, there are speakers and there are listeners. There are also fixed schedules. So you end up imbibing a lot of gyan from those chosen to be the speakers and you also do limited networking during the breaks. But BarCamps address the other strong need for a young entrepreneur – the need for peer support. In a BarCamp, a young entrepreneur finds out what his peers think of his business and his product, how they are dealing with the challenges that he is facing now. It goes beyond the usual gyan and leads to collaborations, partnerships and support networks of peers,” he explains.
Indeed, true to its open principles, such events are organized with the help of a editable-webpage or wiki. Attendees are expected to edit and add themselves onto the page. But with attendance reaching 600 and showing no signs of slowing down in growth, how do the camp veterans see such events evolving?
Aditya Mishra, entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), whose job is to think up and execute new business opportunities for the company, is one of the most ubiquitous camper and organizer, having attended or organized '8 or 9' such events. “We expect Bangalore and Mumbai to grow to be the biggest in the country,” he looks into his crystal ball. “As we have been trying to do in Bangalore, the camps will form within them collectives, sub-groups around specific topics of interest like mobile software or social networking.”
Right now, it’s sacrilege to make frequent mention of words like money (and ‘profit’ is definitely out.) Misra, for example, believes BarCamps will always be a volunteer effort. “It is a given that there is a general need for more open events, both in terms of who can participate and what the participants can do at the event. Interestingly, money has never been a problem for us, due to sponsorship offers. There have even been suggestions to shift the venue to a hotel or a resort, but most of us are not in favour of raising more money than we need or moving to exotic locales,” he says. “Of course, if someone else wants to make a business out of such events by taking advantage of the high sponsor-interest, that may also be possible, but it has to remain free for the participant,” he adds.
Finally, Himanshu, disappointed that the Delhi camp was not a two-day event like the Bangalore one, says he will come back the next time even if he has to pay. “But it should always be free.. if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have felt like checking this one out,” he says.
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