Barcamp Malaysia, Social Media meets Real World.

Malaysia’s 1st Barcamp has come and gone. Thanks to everyone who volunteered to pull it off, great job. Daniel worked damn hard and never stopped, thanks man. Also, thanks to all for showing up and sharing their ideas, thoughts and energy. Always cool to see people you’ve connected with online in person. Social networking totally changes the dynamics in these situations.

There were several times I or the other party were immediately recognized though we had not actually met nor had we really corresponded before other than initially connecting on a social network. For myself, most of these connections were from LinkedIn like Joshua from JumboPlay and Alex at Maranas. Sadly, Alex and I never got to pitch our Ycombinator mock startup project, Vidapedia. Great to meet others like Jerry Ong, Kugan, Lim , Mohan and Amir. The list goes on, nice to meet all. Also, I hope to see Roni’s video demo evolve into a sentient object recognition enabled online video advertising platform soon!

Thanks to Prem for coming and helping out as a sponsor. I spotted and chatted with Charles Moreira whom I’d not seen in years. I finally got to meet Jan who I’ve been talking to since he started blogging about Skype / VOIP but had never actually met until Barcamp. We both laughed that we chat so often on Skype that each of us is known to kids in our respective families.

This was my second Barcamp. I was over in New Zealand for the holidays and managed to make it to and demo at Auckland’s 1st Barcamp. I just heard from Simon that they just had their second.

Overall I was impressed with the event. There were a great mix of people. I found a nice balance of dev, geek, biz, marketing, bloggers and press attending. Having said that.. there is always room for improvement right ?

So here are some ideas and constructive criticism in the hope of making the next BarcampMalaysia even better.

• Venue: Thanks to iTrain for providing the space. It’s way too small however. There is no common area for people to hang out other than the reception space out front – way too small. Toilets were a mess, come on.. Smokers right outside the hallway with all their smoke going right into the reception / eating area. Go downstairs and smoke.. better yet, quit!
• Wireless: There was none to speak of. I joked a few times that the longest I’d been offline all week was at Barcamp. This is serious however because one of the coolest things about Barcamps is the live blogging and twittering that goes on during the event. Thanks to Jan for hooking us up towards the tail end with his Izzi wireless via shared router but connectivity is crucial.
• Time management: Some speakers had their talks moved without any consultation and some sessions were allowed to run up to 30 minutes overtime. Both of these happened to me for my session, Social Media Optimization. Thanks to all that attended and I’m sorry we only had 30 minutes.
• Less Complaining: You don’t really have room to complain if you did not help out organizing the event which I should have and did not. In my defense, I live an hour away and have a kid, wife, job, dog and several fish that depend on me for sustenance. I suck for not being there before hand though and sharing my thoughts on what I had seen that worked so well in NZ. Just to rub it in.. the bulk of organization for Auckland’s 1st Barcamp was done by a sole 16 year old kid.

And like anything you can bitch about in Malaysia, you always end with, “but the food is good”. Thanks again to the sponsors for the snacks and feeding us all with good stuff.

Most of these things can be ironed out by changing the venue. I suggest a space that is on the ground floor with a central area and at least 6 session rooms that radiate out from the common area. You can’t manage what you can’t see. The next Kl Barcamp will likely have upwards of 300 people. Schools make great venues. I look forward to being at the next one and promise to contribute ideas beforehand rather than bitch about it later..

BarcampMalaysia 09, see you there!

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