Recaps

Recapping BarCampLA 3

It’s hard to follow up Crystal’s staggering laundry list of people and corporate entities worthy of lauding with praise for making BarCampLA 3 the success that it was, but I still feel like I have to try. So cribbed from our internal postmortem — although edited and extended a bit — I’ve decided to drop my list of personal highlights below…

• Watching Heather and Crystal drumming up the funds as quickly as they did was downright amazing. Not everyone knows this, but most of the money that was donated came down the pipe in one gigantic push. There was a bit of time involved in sending out emails and making calls to both old and new sponsors — but everything had this magical way of lining itself up in a matter of days after that.
• Speaking of Heather, she did a great job making sure event insurance and all the behind the scenes stuff was taken care of. Looking at things from the outside might lead one to believe that events like BarCamp just sort of happen — but food needed to be ordered, chairs and projectors needed to be secured and the organizers butts needed to be covered in case anyone got hurt. She wrangled a lot of the difficult parts of this beast and made it seem easy.
• 140 people signed up on the site?! I’m pretty sure that’s our biggest list of attendees to date, and we couldn’t have done it without the dedication and efforts of our very own Jennifer.
• I don’t know how many late nights were spent on AIM with Crystal bouncing t-shirt design ideas and logo updates back and forth, but all of that stuff turned out great. Most of all, I’m glad to have a logo that feels a bit more LA than the old one did — even if Crystal did think the palm trees were a bit cliche… ;)
  P.S. All of that wiki farming was fantastic of you to do. You made an insurmountable task seem downright easy.
• I was glad to eat something other than pizza for dinner on Saturday. That Thai food was a stroke of genius which seemed to be pretty well received.
• And who was there to wrangle that food and watch over the registration area? Bonnie. Despite the fact that four of us helped put this thing on, Bonnie has always sort of been the other person that makes go as seamlessly as they do. The fifth member of our Voltron force, so to speak.
• Well, there’s actually six members of this team… Jimmy from Little Radio is one of the kindest most helpful people I’ve ever dealt with. He was always more than willing to accommodate us on every front and didn’t even start to freak out when I couldn’t find the clicker for the parking area that I was drunkenly entrusted with.
• Setting up the wireless was a bit of a pain in the neck at first since there were no ethernet jacks in the main warehouse, but a run to Office Depot for a 100 ft. cable fixed that pretty quickly. Since I didn’t hear many complaints about the network, I’ll wager to say that I managed to do a competent enough job.
• Much love to all the folks who dealt with my sometimes overwhelming but other times infrequent Twitter updates on Saturday and Sunday. I would have kept it up if not for the web interface timing out on my phone so frequently.
• Our sponsors were pretty damn amazing. Most of them didn’t stop giving when the checks had been written. I think that’s a real echo of how strong this community is.
• I’m sorry for anyone who had to deal with me singing along to Sweet Child O’ Mine while Bino played along on Guitar Hero 2 — although I’m pretty sure Riz was the devil on my shoulder convincing me it was a good idea. I’ll have to admit that it was pretty fun tho.
• Is it just me, or does anyone else think PowerPoint Karaoke needs to turn into a more regular event? Once every six months might not cut it. Perhaps I need to get Machine Project on the horn and work something out…
• And before I forget, the work of the set up and tear down crews was remarkable. They made sure everything was ready to go on Saturday morning and people could get out of there really quickly come Sunday evening. Mad respect to the whole lot of you!

I know I’m missing a bunch of notable stuff that happened and people I should be thanking, but my mind is failing me now. Methinks I should jot stuff down next time around — because I’m not going to want to forget the folks who helped us make BarCampLA 4 even better than this go.

Seriously, thank you so very much everyone. I can’t wait to run into most of y’all at the dinners and other tech conferences. Cheers!

© 2007 BarCamp LA. Header photo by eecue.