Albuquerque BarCamp 3: Bigger and Better

September 16, 2008

I attended the third Albuquerque BarCamp this past weekend and had a blast. Reid Givens did an excellent job organizing. According to him and others, this was the biggest BarCamp in Albuquerque yet. This may not be San Francisco, but there is a sizable community here, and it is growing. Here are some things I learned from BarCamp.

:EXTENDED:

• Chad Davis came representing the local public television station and described how they are adopting new media technologies. This is exactly why I love Albuquerque. I can’t imagine having access to Chad’s equivalent in San Francisco or Dallas (my previous home towns), and it turns out Chad runs one of the largest new media departments in public television. It sounds like he is doing a great job, and that other stations could learn a lot from him.
• We all got a crash course on modern web design, standards, and programming from Emily Lewis, Mark Casias, and Daniel Lyons. It’s really too bad that more people from large organizations weren’t around; my wife’s team at UNMHSC would have enjoyed these talks, and I’m sure many other companies would have as well.
• Michael Bernstein brings the Python love to his new home state. It’s great to have more Pythonistas and Free Software advocates around. He also put together some of the more interesting round table discussions, which have inspired us to take action on a number of fronts.
• I unfortunately missed Gabriel Ortiz’s talk on his StupidFilter project. His VC-funded startup Rarefied sounds very interesting, and I can’t wait to talk to him more. StupidFilter sounds exactly like the kind of tool one might find useful in a noisy microblogging world.
• David Thomas brought the Ubuntu love like I’ve never seen before. I only caught part of his presentation, but even with that tiny amount I can tell he’s doing great things inside the state government. I feel better just knowing people like him are in there making the right moves for the state’s technology plan. I hope his influence grows. His young son Adam also gave a talk (that I missed) about Squeak which means he must also be doing a great job as a parent.

There was something for everyone on a diverse set of topics. The non-presentation discussions were also excellent, and I really enjoyed meeting more of Albuquerque’s tech community.

So what happens next? Well, instead of waiting until next year’s BarCamp 4, how about participating in the following?

• Software Freedom Day is this Saturday at the UNM Student Union building from noon to 4pm. I’m definitely planning to attend, and David Thomas is organizing. He said there will even be balloons as well as other goodies for people.
• Michael is encouraging all interested parties to join the Refresh Albuquerque group. He’s already started creating some new content there; see the open source page and the startups page.
• Speaking of startups, we have decided to band together and form the NM Startups community. Michael has already bought the domain nmstartups.com where this will be hosted. We want to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, and those who just want to be in or around startups. Thanks to Eric Renz-Whitmore for sharing his abundant knowledge of the little publicized available resources here in the state and offering to help where he can. I’ll definitely be writing more about this as it materializes.