Or: why we need GeekCamp. 
Yesterday and today, I've been mulling over What do you talk about at BarCamp? by 'viss' on San Diego Metblogs. It seems to repeat the current prevailing wisdom that BarCamp doesn't and shouldn't have much to do with technology.
Let me take these two things slowly and patiently. Firstly, we have the descriptive claim: BarCamp isn't about technology.
This is false but is slowly coming true. BarCamp came out of FOO Camp - Friends of O'Reilly Camp. That's not Bill O'Reilly or O'Reilly the dodgy builder from Fawlty Towers - that's Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Publishing, the company who makes money from selling rather big and nerdy books on Perl, sendmail, regular expressions, MySQL, Apache configuration files and so on. Go into your local bookshop and you'll find O'Reilly books in the "computing" section. O'Reilly also run OSCON and ETCON and so on (they do Web 2.0 Expo too, but we all have our problems). BarCamp is taken from FOO Camp with a more open admissions policy. Just as a point of comparison, here's a sample of the sort of things they talk about at FOO Camp.
I can only speak from my own experience here, but BarCamp quite plainly does have quite a lot to do with technology. And it had even more to do with technology back when BarCamps started. Here is the schedule for day one of the first BarCampLondon at Yahoo! in September 2006. Some of the utterly non-technical topics covered: XML, XSLT, accessibility testing, JavaScript, the DOM and Ajax, Comet, Python, widgets, OpenID, Flash, agile development and APIs. Of the not-so-technical talks, they were still aimed at a technical audience. The same is true of BarCampLondon2 - Django, Rails, Jabber, RSS, microformats, Semantic Web, web standards, screen-scraping, Arduino, Internet Explorer. BarCampLondon3 and BarCampLondon4 follow a similar pattern. That's not to say there weren't non-tech talks at these events - but the event as a whole is technical. The talks about business and marketing and so on are talks that have a focus on the Web - about the marketing or business side of startups or projects that are technical or web-based. There have been talks about other stuff - mixing alcoholic beverages, calling up pesky Twitter spammers and leaving them rude voicemails, windsurfing, knitting and so on. But that was an always-interesting side-serving to the technical bread and butter of BarCamp.
That BarCamp is about tech is undeniable. There is a big tech community who comes along to BarCamp and if you were to take someone who wasn't fairly nerdy and put them in a randomly-selected BarCamp session, they might have a hard time following along. Certainly, if I'm giving a session at BarCamp that's about technology, I don't need to write it for the absolute beginner. I figure that if you are at BarCamp, you have mastered the use of your computer and either are able to or interested in writing in some form of machine-parseable language to get one's computers to do something interesting. I mean, if you are giving a talk at BarCamp and you pop open a bash shell, a programmer's text editor or an IDE, the collective brain stack doesn't suddenly topple in confusion. At BarCamp, I'm among the sort of people to whom I can use words and phrases like "Debian" or "Java Virtual Machine" or "SSH" and not have to patiently explain it.
As for the normative question whether or not BarCamp ought to be technology-centric or not, that is a different question - although for some people, the two questions are irretrievably linked. I cannot understand people who are incapable of making simple descriptive-normative distinctions but, hey, they exist.
One of the most refreshing things about BarCamp (and Geek Dinners and so on) is that you can go along and talk about HTTP status codes or compilers or describe oneself as a "Rubyist" or a "markup dork" or whatever and not get that strange look you get in wider society. As Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it I feel like letting my freak flag fly
. That one can let their nerdy freak flag fly is one of the best things about BarCamp.
The other benefit of the tech focus at BarCamp is that techie people don't get wrapped up in pointless bullshit. I mean, we like to play with stuff like the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator and buzzword bingo. Computers don't bullshit us. I mean, code either compiles or it doesn't; tests either pass or fail. The problems described in viss's post about marketing, SEO and social media just do not apply to tech stuff much.
One great problem we have if we continue to shift away from technology into, well, BarCamp-as-moderately-intense-coffee-morning is sponsorship. BarCamps cost money. That money has to come from somewhere. Currently, it comes from sponsorship. It could feasibly come from charging an entrance fee. But if it's going to continue coming from sponsorship, the sponsors must get value from that sponsorship. We're in financially difficult times. Put yourself in the position of a marketing manager at one of the larger Internet/technology companies: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun (or Oracle as they are now), Facebook, MySpace and so on. The reason these companies sponsor BarCamp is because tech people go there: they use this to curry favour with us, push their developer platforms and APIs, sell us software (and standards) and so on. Why does Yahoo! buy alcohol for me through BarCamp? Because I play around with things like Pipes and FireEagle. Same for Google and SG API, OpenSocial, Android and AppEngine. There's a reason why Google put on Developer Days and Yahoo organises Hack Days.
If we move from BarCamp being tech plus chocolate cookie recipes to being just chocolate cookie recipes, where are we going to find the money to run things the size of BarCampLondon6? Google and friends can cope with stuff that's a bit quirky and off-topic if it's a side-dish for the main event.
The chocolate cookie recipes stuff also gets a little bit sugary and sickly after a time. viss's article suggests that the reason we should move towards chocolate cookie recipes is because unlike talks about tech or marketing/social media etc., this stuff really builds "personal brand" in a way that the latter ought to but doesn't. Does it, though? But some of the best BarCamp sessions I've been to are ones where I've learned actual concrete things I can do as a programmer that make my life easier. What little I know of JavaScript is gleaned from quite a few sessions at BarCamps. Similarly, I've learned about tons of time-saving libraries and tools that mean I can code easier.
BarCamp with significantly less technology doesn't interest me. That doesn't mean I want to ban non-tech stuff from BarCamp. But the reason I'm willing to pay sometimes significant amounts to travel - sometimes overseas - for BarCamp is because I get to meet smart, technical people and absorb their technical smarts by a process of social osmosis. However awesome your chocolate cookies are, I'm not prepared to spend an uncomfortable night on a coach or an even more uncomfortable few hours in the back of a winged tin can to hear about them. The value proposition of spending time with people who want to boost their personal brand through sharing cookie recipes just isn't there. As BarCamp loses the technical side of it, I'm much less likely to turn up.
This would be a shame. I'm completely sold on the BarCamp model - I really don't like paying hundreds of pounds to listen to veiled marketing pitches. I'm glad to see that people both in niche technical communities and in non-technical fields are applying the BarCamp model. But for those of us who are tech dorks, we want events where we can let our freak flag fly - where we can nerd out over technology, collaborate on ideas in a structured way, say bold things about technology without fear that @socialmediatwat will start complaining that it's all a bit too tough for his Twitter-addled brain and so on.
Without a tech focus, BarCamp simply becomes the equivalent of the old IRC #cyberchat or #chitchat channels (or whatever they were called). Yes, it's highly exciting that we are talking to one another. But compared to IRC channels that are specifically about our interests, they are slightly pointless exercises in time-wasting.
The problem with moving away from a solid technology basis and onto more of a 'social media' basis is that it dramatically increases the amount of douchebag-like whoring one has to do in order to enjoy BarCamp. When I go to BarCamp, I'll put up a talk that covers what I'm interested in. I don't have to go around saying "Oh, come to my session on chocolate cookies, it's going to be really awesome!". The more technical BarCamps I've gone to have seemed more immune to fashion and folly, and more able to cope with people who aren't permanently in Grinning Idiot mode. Part of the problem with the social media model is that it's completely immune to dissent. There's a Borg-like mentality. If you tell tech people that either technology as a whole sucks and we should become Luddites or that their particular technology of choice sucks, you can have a proper discussion about it. And if people have loud and dissenting opinions, that's fine. They can still share a drink afterwards. In social media circles, a kind of love-in mentality rules. Twitter can't be anything but interesting and awesome. The fact that there is a strong Nathan Barley feel to social media eludes all but a small minority of people in that community.
And the worst bit is self-promotion. If BarCamp has to become more personal-brand-driven and self-promotional, count me the fuck out. You may all be longing for the day when your Whuffie-meter hovers above your head showing the rest of the world just how hyper-connected and awesome you are. I couldn't give a fuck (despite my complete atheism, I find Matthew 6:5 particularly relevant: And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men
). I just want to sit in the corner and noodle about with technology, throw ideas around in my head and have fun. Us Semantic Web people have been accused of trying to impose the Dewey Decimal System on something that more closely resembles an orgy (a charge I strongly deny - we just want to have better matchmaking tools at the orgy so that one doesn't have to spend one's time looking at the unpleasant sight of people yiffing). Social media people want to take that orgy and turn it into a particularly gaudy awards ceremony.
Now, a question may arise at this point which could be formulated like this: all you freaks who get off on talking about programming and shit should just go to a niche camp on that topic. Okay, that's more of an insult rather than a question, but the question is whether or not that attitude is right. Niche camps are good: I've been to a few and organised one (SemanticCampLondon). The problem with relying on niche camps to fix the technical shortcomings of BarCamp is that niche camps only attract specific communities - there aren't many people who aren't into Rails who go to RailsCamp. The same is true for SemanticCamp or DrupalCamp or JavaCamp or whatever. And technical people have lots to learn from each other. We all use keyboards and mice to interact with hardware and software to try and solve interesting problems in creative ways. That may manifest itself in designing the software for cruise missiles or for CRUDdy accountancy software. There is a shared community of people who can share their knowledge - that's why sites like Slashdot or Stack Overflow exist.
Another objection: surely, if more people turn up to hear about chocolate cookies, that means it's way more important than talking about nerd stuff, because if nerd stuff was important, people would turn up. On the basis of this argument, all gatherings should be about pop music and soap operas. I mean, Britney Spears (or whoever the current pop starlet of the moment is) is way more popular than anything related to technology. On that basis, we should talk only about pop music and celebrities at BarCamp, and then everything else can be a NicheCamp.
A final objection drawn from the linked article: that talking about technology is less creative than talking about non-technical stuff. I don't think that's the case. The technology is part of the creativity. I mean, let's say you build a piece of software - that's a creative act. Telling other people about the challenges you faced while building that software helps them be creative too. Similarly, learning about new technology generally enables you to be creative - solving the "I need a super-fast cheap scalable database" problem may be less exciting than solving the "I want to eat tasty cookies" problem, but to build all the tools that underpin all the social changes that the Internet is bringing about, technology is required. BarCamp lets you exchange technological information which can drive all the creativity you can shake a stick at.
I think the only solution is that we need to have a return to tech-oriented BarCamps. Will that be exclusive? Sure. Is that a bad thing? Fuck no. Is ArtCamp exclusive? I mean, it excludes people who aren't interested in art. PhotoCamp excludes people who aren't interested in photography. And BarCampOriginal or TechCamp or DorkCamp or whatever the hell it ends up being called (I follow David Armstrong in putting semantics last) would exclude some people who aren't particularly interested in geeky stuff. Does it mean that people who don't want to talk in hexadecimal can't have BarCamp events? Of course not. Does the semantics of the name matter? Not at all. Call it whatever you like, but make sure the substance is there. If BarCamp's techiness declines much further, then I'll stay at home.
Let's not deny it: Slashdot types need a new BarCamp home to nerd out about technology, as the Barleyesque newspeak world of social media is taking over our current home.
