On Saturday May 2nd I attended a rather unconventional conference at the Innovation Depot. BarCampBirmingham is in its third year and by all accounts is hitting its stride. I estimate there were over one hundred attendees and more than twenty sponsors.

What makes the conference unusual is that the presentation schedule is made up on the day by attendees requesting a presentation on a given subject and others offering to present what they know. This necessitates that the presentations themselves are short and somewhat improvised. The essential idea is to provide a forum for the local tech community to meet and share information from the bleeding edge of new technology and innovation. As an admitted noob, I had been curious to see one of these unconferences in action, wondering if it would actually work or descend into chaos. But what really drew me to attend was the preconference discussion indicating there would be presentations on various Open Source web content management systems (CMS). Although I am very happy with Joomla, I wanted to get more information on other alternatives and a validation that I was using the most appropriate tool.

What became very quickly clear were the exceptional facilitation skills of the organizers of the event and I congratulate them. At the venue, registration was a breeze and the idea of ‘just enough’ marshaling of an essentially unstructured event was applied consistently throughout the day and was exactly right for the shorts and sandaled crowd. Topics for the morning session were soon posted and I was happy to see ‘Drupal for Beginners’ by Jeff Vreeland but before that I got into an unexpectedly spirited discussion on ‘Does Agile work‘, chaired by Brian Rabon of Braintrust Software, for which I did my bit to fuel the debate and had a great chat with Brian afterward.

Feeling suitably inspired I joined Jeff’s presentation and learned a couple of interesting things. It was stated that the Drupal community is more active than Joomla’s and that Joomla will hit serious performance issues when scaling to sites with a very large number of visitors. A quick poll of the dozen or so audience members indicated that far more people currently use Joomla than Drupal. The presentation and subsequent discussion lead me to conclude that Dupal and Joomla share a good deal of common functionality as such that there is no significant value in moving from one to the other. I would sum up what heard about the three major Open Source blogging platforms as; Joomla is the most popular, Drupal is the best supported and Wordpress is for, well beginners.

Of course with the presentations being 30 minutes in length and reduced to twenty minutes in the afternoon due to overruns, clearly no topic was discussed in depth although interesting opinion was voiced and good experiences shared. The point of the presentations was not to be the sole basis to alter business course but to act as conversation starters and identify individuals who would like to continue that conversation in the hallways and lobbies afterward. My lasting enjoyment from the day was not so much about what was presented or concluded but that there were enough people gathered together in one place to actually have a meaningful conversation on the subject. It was great to meet so many enthusiastic and well informed folk and to bump into some old friends too. Specifically Robert Cain who was on the team of the very first project I worked on in this country and whose blog I can highly recommend. Robert gave a great think-piece on making yourself more marketable as an IT professional.

It was also great to take the temperature of the tech community with my bon mot du jour ‘yeah twitter, I don’t get it’. For this crowd the statement was inciting enough to always elicit a personal proclamation on the service. Although some were not yet convinced that the service is yet truly compelling, most were vehemently in favor of twitter and the positive impact it has had on the quality of their lives. I think I have been persuaded by the ‘Ayes’, moreover I was left with the feeling that I was the only one in the room not signed up, yet.  

So, some reassurance, some new contacts, some homework and a new service to join; what a valuable return for my time. Post conference discussion suggested that we should not wait a year for the next BarCamp, whenever it is convened, I intend to be there.

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