Recently, there has been some discussion of how to solve the ticketing problem for BarCamp. Here's the thing: in London, we have a stonkingly huge number of people competing for a finite number of tickets at BarCamp. We've either got to make more places available which is tough to do even in good economic times. With sponsors less willing to spend money on pizza for hackers, the possibility of having BarCamps that are bigger and more often is going to be quite difficult. 
But the ticket assigning for the next BarCamp has been ridiculous. The first swathe of tickets went in fourteen seconds. And so did the second. This has led to people stating that it is a de facto lottery, and that we should just turn it into a formal lottery. After discussion of a variety of alternatives (most of which were just thrown out of my own head), we settled on doing just that and having a formal lottery system.
Of the possible options on Emma's post, I suggested quite a few: the payment option, the technical challenge option and what Emma has listed as the "Essay Question". All three of these have been criticised for being elitist. I don't buy this.
I think that payment is a possible solution to the problem. BarCamp attendees already pay for it with their attention. If you come along to a BarCamp, the sponsors are vying for your attention. They want you to build apps on their platform or go and work for them or whatever. BarCamp is free-to-attendees, but not non-commercial. If payment were allowed as an option, a very modest contribution of, say, ten to fifteen pounds per person would cover much of the cost of the event. It wouldn't necessarily remove the demand, but it would make BarCamps financially independent, and free from the fluctuations of the technology market. I don't buy that this very modest requirement would have a significant impact on attendees. Go to your average BarCamp, and you'll find that the average attendee is carrying a fairly flash laptop, a top-end mobile device like an iPhone or BlackBerry and works in a field that pays better than average. BarCamp attendees are not for the most part economically disadvantaged. And I think fifteen pounds is not a big sum. There are plenty of people who are happy to pay fifteen pounds on drinks for one evening in a pub, or for one meal in a restaurant.
Now, some people may point to my post on ArbCamp and suggest some kind of inconsistency here. Not at all. There is a huge difference between having a BarCamp that is funded by attendees on a non-commercial basis and something that uses the BarCamp name and bolts on a commercial model with a keynote speaker and so on. That stuff is unacceptable. But the point of my suggestion is that if you have a BarCamp that's exactly the same as what one expects from a BarCamp, except for the fact that when you sign up you have to pay the equivalent of a London chain restaurant meal, that's not enough of a leap to make it problematic.
The technical challenge question was a not-totally-serious idea I threw in because a while back I saw a web site that offered free Java servlet hosting, but to sign up, you had to write a Java class that solved one of a number of pre-defined problems. You had to submit code that compiled and returned the right values for a number of test cases. If the tests don't pass, you don't get an account. This seems like an ideal way to reduce demand. It could be as simple as a bank of multiple choice questions.
The other suggestion I made was actually a peer review process: when signing up for a ticket, you'd be asked why you'd like to attend BarCamp. Then there would be a panel of, say, twelve people, and it would be sent blind to a random three. They would say yea or nay. It would operate broadly in the same way that submitting a paper to an academic journal works. I don't think I ever seriously suggested a Digg-style system for signups. The key to a peer review process is just that: the peer review process. There is a significant difference in the way that Nature judges a biology paper compared to how the fickle reality television audience judges a contestant on Big Brother. With some thought and ingenuity, some solution could be found that is better than chance.
The instant and uniform reaction to this is one of shock, horror and disbelief: it's elitist while BarCamp is supposed to be inclusive. I don't buy that. There are limits to the inclusiveness of BarCamp. If you turn up and want to use your BarCamp talk as a political soapbox to tell everyone why they should become communists or conservatives or support the National Man-Boy Love Association or whatever, that is beyond the scope of the event. It's a technology unconference. There are some people who know more about technology, and others who don't know as much. If you asked the average BarCamp attendee whether they'd prefer to give a BarCamp ticket to Guido van Rossum, the developer of Python, or to a Twitter-spamming social media "expert" - the modern incarnation of the "self-facilitating media node" of Nathan Barley fame, all but the most radically egalitarian would choose the former. Quite right. But this intuition and some kind of radical egalitarianism is, on the face of it, incompatible.
Let me just first disabuse the anti-elitists: there is nothing that is wrong with elites per se. If you go into hospital for an operation, you suddenly become an elitist: you want the best surgeon, with the most experience, with a strong academic background and who is a member of lots of medical societies. If you are trying to hire a programmer, you want to hire the best person for the job. When you take a flight on a commercial airline, you want the guy flying your 747 to be absolutely impeccable at his work. Anti-elitism and egalitarianism ends with the scalpel: the idea of crowdsourcing surgery or piloting of airliners is too ridiculous to seriously contemplate.
I'm not sure that "modestly elitist" forms of distribution should be ruled out without any proper discussion. There is a huge amount of freedom in a meritocratic elitism, which is the reason why I think that something like a blind peer review process or a programming challenge is far preferable to an "invite your mates" model. Some have suggested such a way of doing ticket distribution, and I think that is far more elitist in all the wrong ways than a system where one simply has to meet a certain requirement of being interesting and due a place. Most people rage when they see some idiot who has gotten into some position of power simply because their chums in the Old Boys Network or some kind of family ties has enabled them to get into a role which they never would have without such string-pulling. The social network model is so much more cliquey. I remember when I used to go to conferences and sit there, with everyone else corridor networking, and saying how this was "so much more democratic!" and all the other Web 2.0 cliches. But that's bullshit. If you don't know the people, it's cliquey and highly annoying. That's one thing I absolutely love about BarCamp: it's not at all cliquey. And whatever method we choose, we need to avoid it becoming cliquey. You go along to learn about stuff and meet interesting people, but all the interesting people have decided that speaking to anyone outside the clique is old-fashioned. That isn't my scene.
About the meritocratic elitism, it has one important thing which distinguishes it from non-meritocratic elitism. If you apply for a job and you don't get it because you suck, you can go out, buy a book, read it and improve yourself so you can get the job. If you apply for a job and you don't get it because your father isn't friends with the boss, well, you're snookered.
Now, there are some objections to a peer review process: it wouldn't necessarily allow newbies in. I think this can be solved by asking for vision rather than qualifications or experience. You could quite easily shift the question around to make it easier for newbies to pass if they are interesting. Of course, another significant objection is that such a peer review system would not take into account the full range of abilities. True: I don't think this knocks the idea out of the running. We can imagine that different questions and different peer review processes would get closer or further away from ideal. So, if asked "Do you like strawberries?", almost no response would help the hopefully impartial observer to determine suitability, while something like "What interesting things do you do that would interest others at BarCamp?" might be much better. So long as a question was found that got very close to the ideal, the approach would be fine. What I'm trying to determine here isn't that we absolutely have to do this, but that if we were to find a practical and effective way to do it, it would be acceptable.
As for the lottery system: it seems a fair enough compromise at the moment. But I think it's now a perfect time for us to decide what we want from BarCamps, both individually and as a community. And we shouldn't be worried too much about narrow textualist disputes about The Rules, or about names. If we tweak the BarCamp model enough that it stops being BarCamp, but better fits the need of the community in London, that's fine. We evolve, call it something else and move on. Forking shouldn't be something we worry too much about, so long as we approach it with a hacker attitude - that is, not being egotistical about it, but just wanting to push and pull levers and buttons to see if we can make it be more awesome.
The BarCamp lottery opens on Thursday. Get more information at barcamplondon.org. There is then a live draw on Saturday at "I Can't Believe It's Not SXSW!".
