There's a fair bit of controversy at the moment over an event called ArbCamp, which was originally put together as a kind of BarCamp taking place in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Only they are charging admission and having a keynote. Some of the reactions have been interesting:
Chris Messina: "Since when do *camps have a keynote, title, lead & partner sponsors AND charge for admission?! Did I hear bullshit?"
Mark Maynard: "I'm not a techie, so I should probably just shut the fuck up, but the criticism in this case seems valid. Marketing a for-profit event as "BarCamp-esque" and suggesting that it needed to be done in such a way because Ann Arbor, for whatever reason, can't support a legitimate BarCamp, seems to me to be weak in the extreme."
Alex Rudloff: "This is, quite blatantly, a commercial rip off of whats intended to be a free event model. They're taking advantage of the incredible amount of hard work folks from the community have put into creating the barcamp brand, repackaging it, aligning themselves with the brand by suggesting they have something in common with it, and then selling it for their own purposes. Loosely based on barcamp? Psh. It's the conference equivalent of a gpl violation."
Jeremy Harrington: "ArbCamp has: keynote speakers, high dollar sponsors, admission and a rigid session schedule (at 2pm everyone sits apparently) are of which are contrary to the overall barcamp model. The Ann Arbor folks can certainly run their own conference, but they need to reevaluate the name at a minimum and review the barcamp model if they want to be good citizens."
There are comments attached to these posts, and some more comments on the wiki.
One of the attendees of ArbCamp, Bill Tozier, has a blog post responding, using a fairly off-the-wall analogy to describe his perception of those reacting against what's going on with ArbCamp.
Here's my perspective. I've been to four BarCamps (two in London, one in Brighton and one in Cork, Ireland) and one PodCamp (the original one in Boston). What is interesting about them is that they exist by and for the geek community. They are one of the few places that geeks can be unfathomably geeky. Take a look at the schedule from the second London BarCamp - it's a geeky schedule.
There is space for non-geeky things within a geeky schedule - the schedule included talks about corporate communication, "Education 2.0", SEO and blue-sky talks about, say, the future of music. At the first London BarCamp, we had a wide-ranging chat about "Web 2.0" (whatever that is). A fair few BarCamps have talks about things like VCs and investment (certainly, BarCampLondon2 and the Cork BarCamp had talk about venture capital). At BarCamp Brighton, we had a great session about teenagers and technology - not so much from a descriptive "Are they using MySpace or Facebook this week?" but a normative "What should we do to help nurture the next generation of geeks?"
The reason that geeks have BarCamps is the same reason gay bars exist - because it's supposed to be a welcome atmosphere for a community that's not necessarily seen as acceptable elsewhere. When I'm at a BarCamp (or HackDay, or Geek Dinner), I feel comfortable in being geeky. At an ordinary conference, it often feels a little bit like you need to force yourself to be a bit more normal. If you have a whole group of people who do quite geeky things for work, or just because it's fun - BarCamp is where they can let their hair down, learn new things and show off ideas and technology they are working on. Adding a formal layer of 'conference' on top won't help with this goal.
Having an atmosphere where certain things are seen as acceptable allows people to come out of their shell. That is part of the point of BarCamp - it serves as a community home for geeks. And with that role as community home, certain values come with it.
That's not to say that I don't think that other people should do Camp like events. For instance, I've seen that the banking and finance industry have been organising BarCampBank - there's one in London currently being planned. Cool. I want my bank statements and credit card bills as GPG-encrypted XML files and I want to sign into my bank using an open-source version of RSA SecurID. I want my bank to stop wasting paper telling me stuff that they could e-mail instead. That's the kind of discussion I want to have, and a banking BarCamp seems like a good place to do it.
The problem I have is not that the business people want to join in the conversation, but that often by talking about how important "conversations" are, they dominate the conversation with something that's not very interesting at all - namely, the fact that we are indeed having a conversation about how important having conversations is. Conversation is overrated - building cool shit is where it's at.
As for ArbCamp? I probably would not attend. I hope the geeks in Ann Arbor can run a BarCamp - I see from the wiki that this year was a BarCamp in Grand Rapids. From a bit of Googling, I see ArbCamp was originally planned to be a BarCamp.
We've seen all this before too...
