Location

Malaho/Causecast HQ
902 Colorado Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90401 [Google Maps]

Our fantastic venue sponsors at Mahalo and Causecast have given us a really great space — and it couldn’t be easier to reach.  Take the 10, get off at Lincoln Blvd., make a right on Colorado Ave. and you’re there!  Seriously, we’re a cinch to get to.  There’ll be plenty of parking in both the lot and on the surrounding streets as well — so that’s a bonus.

Checking In/Registration

Once you’ve parked, you’ll need to swing by the table we’ve put out front and fill out a name badge.  Didn’t register on the wiki?  No problem!  Well, okay, minor problem.  To be 100% honest, we’d prefer it if you did.  Knowing who is showing up will give us a better idea on how much food and drink we need to have.  Nothing’s worse than a thirsty/hungry BarCamper.  As somebody who has done these before, I speak from experience here.

Since we have a few extra bucks in our food budget, we can afford to buy more grub — but we have to get a bit of a heads up.  So go register if you haven’t.  It’ll only take a minute, honest.

rent a car bulgariaSchedule

Saturday
We said 11 AM, and we seriously mean 11 AM. There are loads of reasons that will make you want to get out of bed early and come to see us. We’ll have plenty of delicious Peets coffee and some breakfast type things. If you’re just getting your day started — and let’s face it most of us probably will be — it’ll be good to get something with caffeine (and other essential nutrients) in you.

Of course, you could show up at 9 AM to help set up.  In fact, if you did that, we’d love you forever.  And I’m talking about the sort of love where we write your name and ours together in our notebooks with little hearts around them.  So as long as you’re cool with that, you might want to consider lending a hand.

But if you decide to show up at 11 AM instead, it’s a great chance to hang out and mingle before the talks start. Slots for sessions (45 minute talks with a 15 minute passing period) will be open to fill then, and we want you to get to know where everything is laid out in the space. Also, we have a crazy delicious (and totally free) lunch planned for Saturday. We’re planning to eat and do intros (no talking with your mouth full, please) as people finish getting their grub on then roll promptly into sessions. So please get there early, enjoy the food and the company and help us get started on time.

We’re going to try to keep intros short. If that means the return of the gong, so be it.

Saturday Evening
We’ve got a delicious dinner (recent BarCampLA meals have had carnivore, vegetarian, and vegan options — this one will be no different), an awesome keg of beer, acoustic music jams, video games, ice cream and great company. It’s worth sticking around for, so we hope to have you do so.

BarCamp After Hours
Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to sleep at the venue this time around.  What does this mean if you’re coming to BarCamp from out of town and you haven’t lined up a hotel?  Actually, we’ve got you covered with our Satellite Campgrounds.  Okay, so that’s just a fancy term for couch/floor space.  But hey, at least you’re not high and dry.

Sunday
Breakfast is served at 10am. More yummy coffee will be provided. Breakfast foods will also nourish the famished. Come early to nurse your hangovers with possible leftover beer.

Oh, and please try to plan to hang around for a little while after the closing ceremony to help clean up. With 30-40 people helping, it’s a whirling dervish of cleaning and we end up getting done in no time.

General Tips

• Bring surge protectors and extension cords if you’ve got them laying around. Keep them in your car unless we need them, but it’s always good to have extras.
• Rehearse your talks and leave room for questions. Your audience will thank you for it.
• Don’t plan on having wi-fi for your talk. You probably will — but always plan for Murphy and his blasted law. If it’s really crucial to show things to people, take screenshots and do screencasts just in case.
• Be kind on the wi-fi. No torrenting or crazy 12-megapixel full-size HDR Flickr uploads, please. Share the bandwidth, share the love.  If you don’t, we have ways of finding you.  We are computer nerds, after all.
• Speaking of sharing, share and be helpful.  We’ll get into this more down in the conduct section below.
• Shirts are free, but please don’t take more than one for yourself.
• Please don’t bring anything illegal. It’s not that we care, necessarily, but we would like to not get shut down over anything silly.
• No, you don’t have to speak, but we’d hope, if you’re there, that you have something to share. This is a good place to come out of your shell.
• Follow BarCampLA on Twitter for updates. Our own Andy Sternberg has also set up BCLA on Twitter.  It looks for any mention of BarCampLA or BCLA on Twitter and reposts it.  Since Twitter’s track feature is currently off, it’s the best way to keep your fingers on the pulse of BarCamp without following everyone there.  The only downside is you may see an occasional repeat.
• Any and all photos uploaded to Flickr should be tagged with ”barcampla” and ”barcampla6″. Try your best to do this as we’ll be dusting off the Flickr Wall for an encore performance.

Conduct

As always, the best thing people can do is to just set to doing whatever you see that needs to be done. No one is going to mind if somebody up and takes out the trash or steps in to help set up lunch. Just make sure to wash your hands in between, okay? There are a million tiny things that have to happen at an event like this and it’s impossible to schedule out all of them. It’s honestly best for our sanity (and logistics) if we don’t even try to. Larger cons have event staff for this stuff, but we have BarCampers. Just be active participants (which is the BarCamp way, after all) and help out wherever you see. If you do, we should all have a good time.

Oh, there’s also a copy of our “Code of Conduct” you ought to read over. Nothing surprising there, but it’s been linked for reference.

Take it easy on this fine Friday, BarCampers! We’ve got a lot in store for you, so plenty of rest — and maybe some light stretching — is strongly suggested.

On behalf of my other BarCamp Counselors (Chris, Bronwyn and Kitchen), we’ll see y’all really soon.

-jason!

BarCamp LA is in need of a few helping hands Saturday morning before things get started to help us set up chairs and prep a few things before the festivities begin! We also have a limited number of Barcamp LA shirts this year, so early helpers will get first dibs on their shirts. :-) If you’d like to lend a hand, Please meet us at Mahalo / Causecast HQ, 902 Colorado Ave. Santa Monica, CA 90401 , Saturday Morning, at 9am!

Cant wait to see y’all there!!

-Chris, Jason, Kitchen, & Bronwyn

Our pals over at Oddica put us in touch with a printer who cut us a really sweet deal — so there’ll be plenty of shirts for everyone.  Still, we’re expecting quite a few folks over the course of the weekend.  If you want to guarantee you get your size, show up early and help us set up next Saturday. ;)

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone!  And don’t forget to sign up on the wiki if you’re planning on attending.

See y’all in a week!
Jason, Chris, Kitchen and Bronwyn

Since we won’t be able to camp at our awesome BCLA-6 venue, but we do love our out of town guests, we’ve added a section to the wiki (right under Registration) for volunteering accommodations for out of town BarCampers.

If you are able to provide space for people to crash, or are seeking a place to crash while visiting BCLA from out of town, please be sure to check out the wiki.

Only a few more weeks till we get our geek on! See you all soon!

-Bronwyn, Jason, Chris, & Kitchen

Camp Counselor Chris here. Just wanted to bring you some exciting venue news!
After much planning and deliberation, we’re proud to announce that BarCampLA-6 will
be held at….

Mahalo / Causecast!

That’s right, October 25th and 26th we will be at the Mahalo / Causecast offices in sunny Santa Monica!

We’re pretty stoked about this venue, and glad the gracious folks at Mahalo and Causecast could host us! We won’t be able to stay overnight saturday night, but myself and Jason and others should be able to host all of you who are coming from out of town, check the wiki for info! For those wanting to get a sneak peek at the venue, we’ll be bringing you photos and possibly video, soon. Until then, feel free to get an idea of where they are at by
e-stalking their offices here, on google maps!

So what are you waiting for!?! Go sign up on the wiki, on upcoming, or on facebook!

And remember, we’re still looking for sponsor’s, mail us at sponsors [at] barcampla [dot] org if you’re interested in reaching out to the LA tech community!
Happy Camping,

-Chris, Jason, Kitchen, & Bronwyn.

Just a few quick updates on BarCampLA 6:

• Venue news coming very soon.
• We’re still looking for sponsors. Mail sponsors [at] barcampla [dot] org if you’re interested in reaching out to the LA tech community.

More video updates are on the way… Stay tuned!

I’m sure quite a few of you got the event invite on Facebook or saw the Upcoming link on Twitter last night.  If you did, that’s awesome - but make sure you get your name put down on the wiki above all else.

There are a bunch of really awesome updates on the horizon. If you want to keep up to date with every minute detail as it happens, you might want to follow us on Twitter.  We’ll do what we can to make sure major announcements are cross-posted here as well tho.

Hopefully we’ll be able to talk about the venue really soon. In the meantime, go get your name on that wiki and think about how you’re going help to make this BarCamp, the best one ever!

- Jason, Chris, Kitchen & Bronwyn.

The number of ways that Crystal has helped the Los Angeles tech scene grow are a little hard for me to recap.  That’s mostly due to sheer numbers tho.  I also don’t feel like I can really begin to do them justice.   Everybody who has been in the BarCampLA community the past couple years tho should already have a pretty good idea.  She has been seriously passionate about bringing great events to great people — and I think that shows.

It should also say a lot that three people are stepping in to help plan the next BarCampLA.  And even tho they’re newcomers to BarCamp planning, Chris Darbro, Bronwyn Lewis and ландшафтJeremy Kitchen are tentatively ready to rock your faces off.  Like you guys have no idea the stuff we have percolating for BarCampLA-6.  But we’ll have to get a little closer to September/October before we can talk about that.

Still, Crystal is seriously going to be missed around these parts — and by more than just me, I’m sure.  So go give her some love and say your goodbyes, LA.

This past weekend, about 220 of you joined us at the AOL offices in Beverly Hills for the fifth BarCamp in Los Angeles. We talked about Wordpress, hacking, the Internet Backbone, Computers that may/will take over the world, Ninjas, Zombies, and sandwiches. We played fake guitars (and real ones). We danced with inflatable robots. We rickrolled each other. We ate, we laughed, we talked, and hopefully, we learned some cool stuff in the process.

One of the best feelings I get at these events is when I’ve poked my head into the room to give a 5 minute time warning, and I get a dozen people shooing me away. That happened more than a few times this past weekend, and I can think of no better validation that we’re doing something right here. So thanks, everyone, for showing up, sharing what you know, and soaking up the knowledge and ideas of your peers. It’s always amazing to see what people bring to this.

Ok, enough with the sap, let’s start thanking people.

Travis Savo and Marie Maxey, our in-house hosts from AOL went above and beyond the call of HALP!. When we decided to abandon our potential downtown LA venue because of complications from the LA Marathon (it would have been ugly, folks), Mike Macadaan from AOL answered the call and got this space arranged in under a week. Since Mike couldn’t join us for the weekend, Travis and Marie, veteran BarCampers, volunteered to be our hosts. We couldn’t ask for two nicer people in the world, and much of the credit for the event running as smoothly as it did goes to these guys. Thanks again!

Geoff Emery (Dude, what’s your url?) also jumped into the fray of organizing this time by handling all of our food arrangements, catering orders, etc. If you enjoyed eating, you should thank this man. We did! (Thanks!)

James Cooper was there before I was on Saturday and already had half the chairs moved into rooms. Much, much thanks. We’ll work on that hat, ok? :-)

Jane Lee once again swooped in and picked up the monster load of Saturday’s lunch and the lion’s share of the sodas. The necessary Saturday morning Costco run is one of the biggest logistics “can’t be in two places at once” problems, and twice in a row now, Jane has made that a non-issue. Thank you!

Chris Darbro ensured we all had coffee. Both days. Deserves a medal in some cultures, but isn’t coffee its own reward? (thanks, good sir!)

Eric Hammond - Somewhere a few weeks back, I just started getting a flood of people interested in giving us money to do this. It turns out, Eric sent them our way. Funding these things is always one of the hardest parts. (It’s a what-camp? Bar-what?) I don’t know what you did, man, but thanks! It worked!

Chef JoAnna continues to guide our fooding, even when the catering orders come in looking a little too small to feed the mob outside the kitchen. That woman can wield a knife better than I hope to in a hundred years. Thank you!

A shout-out to the incomparable C.Nelson for bringing you the SMS and flickr projection walls (written on-site!) and the DJ/sound gear. Mucho entertainment. Props to Substandard!

Big thanks to Woody Pewitt, Andy Sternberg, and Mr. Michael Lambie for the kegs, without which, Rock Band would have been better performed and far less popular.

And to Vaughn Hannon, Michael Dorausch, Bronwyn Lewis, and Chris Gagne for just being darn helpful with a bunch of various things. If I’ve forgotten you, please ping me. No slights intended, all help greatly appreciated, and no notes taken (by me). :-)

And finally, there’s this “Jason” character I keep hearing about. Dude… It doesn’t feel right to thank you here, because this is equal sweat, blood, and lolcats. (ok, the LOLcats are *all* Cosper. Actually, if it was spontaneous and glinting of awesome, it was almost surely Cosper) But holyFSM, we did it. Again! BarCampLA-5 was sustained awesome, and I’m so glad we’re on the same team. (psst, folks, the Scoops Ice Cream on Sunday? That was ALL Jason - go mob him with your thanks).

But wait, there’s more!

Sponsors!

A Giant thanks to all of you. You make this event happen!

Venue

AOL - Again, thank you! You guys really came through for us last minute, and it was fantastic.

Sponsors ++

• 3Jane IndieClick
• SpeakTECH
• Qtask zomg.. Cupcakes! Thanks again!
• CyberCoders
• Yahoo Developer Network
• MatchCraft
• Planet Chiropractic
• Oddica
• Ticketmaster
• Streamy

Sponsors

• Hulu
• ::search.labs
• Startup Schwag
• BlueString
• LAtwiist

Party Sponsor

• Thursday Lunch

Media Circus

I am totally going to cheat right now and just post in the slideshow of all photos from the camp here:

photos tagged barcampla5 in flickr
I’ll put up some personal faves soon. Go check out the main page of BarCampLA-5 for links to talk notes, PPTs, audio, video, etc. And add your’s if you’ve got ‘em!

Looking Forward

Yes, we’ll be doing another one of these. Yes, we’re open to new faces getting involved (and old ones taking on bigger roles. We’ve already started some great discussions on the google group about that and also started a Suggestions Page while the ideas are fresh. Lots of good points there already.

Ok, As the pig says, That’s All, Folks. This community continues to impress me as it grows. Tag your photos, keep up the conversation, go out and learn more cool stuff to share, and we’ll see you for the next time.

Anyhow, after seeing a few people drop feedback to the list and such, I’ve gone ahead and started a page on the wiki for ideas and suggestions. This should give everybody a central, open place to let us know how we can make BarCampLA better for everyone.

So please, get your ideas up there! And feel free to add your name and a +1 to the ones on the list that you like. The more popular ones should hopefully be a snap to implement and will (*fingers crossed*) make things better for everyone involved.

Thanks again for another great BarCamp, folks!