Happening in the Southern state of the Malay Peninsula, Johore, is another state-level BarCamp "spin off" just in time for Christmas! It should be scheduled for the first weekend in December! Jointly organised by the Singapore BarCamp group.
Hello JB folks and thank you for volunteering in one way or another to be part of BarCamp Johore Bahru.
I would like to take this opportunity to share my personal experience of the event in the hope of giving you a better idea of what to expect.
I first heard about Barcamp while attending an entrepreneur gathering in Kuala Lumpur Sentral. A very fine chap called Kamal wanted to bring Barcamp to Malaysia after experiencing it in the US and he presented the very same slides I am attaching with this email. I think a lot of people did not fully understand what BarCamp was at that point but it sounded real cool and in true community spirit almost everyone present at that gathering ended up volunteering.
Everyone was given selected tasks and I volunteered along with Josh Lim of Advertlets to help obtain sponsors (http://barcamp.my/blog/sponsors/ ). I was travelling a lot during those months so I wasn't able to attend regular volunteer meetings but securing sponsorship did not require a lot of my time so that worked well for me.
Other volunteers included: Well Kamal from Zoecity of course, who acted like the General Manager of the whole event and focused a lot on the communications aspects of Barcamp. He set up the BarcampMalaysia wiki (http://barcamp.org/BarCampMalaysia), (which can be edited by the volunteers), the blog (http://barcamp.my/blog/), twitter(http://twitter.com/barcampmalaysia), google groups (http://groups.google.com/group/barcamp-malaysia), and the skype chat. It was really cool communicating using these tools as I was not familiar with twitter and wikis prior to the event.
Daniel from Entrepreneur Malaysia helped a lot with getting speakers for the event and also help with the overall coordination of the other volunteers. We had some really cool speakers who talked about stuff ranging from Google Android, Drupal, Blogging, entrepreneurship, funding for Malaysian and Singapore start-ups and a whole lot more. There was a great mix of local as well as international speakers which was cool given that this was a free event and all these experts in the field volunteered their time to be there to share.
Roni from Urekalab (http://urekalabs.com/) was in charge of catering the food and at the same time volunteered to speak about his start up.
Daniel our logistic dude (who helped ensure projectors and whiteboard markers where in place) and Vico of itrain (the venue sponsor) volunteered as speakers too and their session on recruitment and social networking reminds us all that what we put on our facebook, friendster, and blogs are being monitored and mined by recruitment consultants and potential employers.
We had the wonderfully eccentric Khai Lee of youthsays.com and thecicak.comas our MC and he too gave a us a gang bang session on entrepreneurship, freelancing and co-location along with Azumy and Kris Khaira
A whole lot of other great people helped to spread the word by blogging, twittering and through word of mouth. We had people who helped with the T-shirt design, name tags, registration, rubbish collection, lost and found….
I was a little afraid of getting involved in Barcamp at first because I wouldn't classify myself as a technie but Barcamp was so much more than a gathering of geeks. It was fun, informative and the spirit of sharing was ever present. I remember walking in a session called "Ligthning talk" where everyone had to talk about anything for 5 minutes . It was very informal and people where really just chilling out, talking and sharing stuff which interest them. Some of the topics ranged from hardware hacking, open source,
individuals sharing their experience of Barcamp, and a call for hackers and developers to assist and educate social workers on the use of IT in promoting their cause. There was even an impromptu session on pole dancing at the end of day one!
I summarized what Barcamp meant to me in 6 pictures: http://www.cherylgoh.com/2008/07/27/barcamp-malaysia-in-6-pictures/
Do check it out along with the rest of my barcamp posts.
Moving on, we would like you to help organize BarCampJb and we are happy that you want to be a part of it. We are planning to have over one weekend in mid November and our first volunteer meeting will be on the 16th of September in JB probably at around 7.00 in the evening. Please come and bring your friends. More details will be available via the facebook group so please if you haven't already please join our facebook group http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32692959088 , and add me on skype: elisations. We are in the midst of setting up the wiki and google groups and you'll get an invite soon. Please also help spread the word. We need more people like you, a whole lot more.
Looking forward to meeting you great people soon.
Happy camper,
Cheryl
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