For the uninitiated, Barcamp is an “unconference” which means its a place where people meet, but all the usual rules of a conference do not apply (hence the ‘un’). The best part about any conference is usually the hallway crowds where people say hi and end up engaging in some of the most passionate discussions. Imagine if a conference had only hallway discussions as an agenda – You want to discuss something? Great, go write the topic on a post-it and stick it on the wall in the available time slots. That’s what Barcamp is.

Barcamp actually started off as a response to the FOOcamp i.e. Friends of O’Reilly Camp to which only the crème de la crème were invited and others had to stay out. So people like Tantek and Messina got together and decided to make a new “for the people, by the people” format which was the exact opposite of FOOcamp. And since programming has had “foo” and “bar” as standard variable names in examples, they called it “barcamp”. That’s right, it’s got nothing to do with alcohol. Now, Barcamps have become a worldwide phenomenon.

Day 1 of Barcamp Bangalore #6 (Apr 19 Sat) started with an introduction session where everyone stands up and explains what sessions they’ll be initiating at which room or “dari” and at what time. This itself was an indicator of how the next 2 days were going to be.

Since we techies are traditionally not used to getting up early on time, the sessions started half an hour late. In any case, the whole crowd started mingling.

The first actual session I attended was Kaashif demonstrating self-defence. Seriously. He explained that he has had unsavoury experiences at places like Marathahalli at night and its important to know how to defend yourself, not that you should go looking for trouble. He explained things well right from what are your opponents weak points regardless of their size to the three basic steps – do the defend action, do the ‘shout/cry’ that happens when you hit with force, and then run.

For step 3, people had to come to our running discussion. That went better than I would have expected.

The rest of the day was of two parts for me – fleeting in and out of discussions and meeting people.

One thing about Barcamp is the no-holds-barred discussions. Diplomacy has no place here, let’s talk what you are really thinking. For example, there are many startups showcasing their products and taking feedback. One such startup that I witnessed was LifeInLines. The crowd, sorry to say this, literally murdered them. They were like “This is just twitter minus rss plus privacy controls. Is there anything else?” and the guys had a hard time convincing them of the value in their website. It reminded me of the recent discussion on Aren’t There Real Problems To Solve? Any way, I think this is the perfect reason why startups should showcase at Barcamp – you’re not going to get more brutal and more honest feedback than here.

Then I met a lot of interesting people. For example, Anand Bora who has an interesting passion called “mathematical art”. Wow, I didn’t even know such stuff existed. While we were talking, he scribbled something on a box and showed me, it was my name ‘Swaroop’. Then he turned the box around, it still read ‘Swaroop’! Wow again. Apparently, they’re called ambigrams and he’s done many of these. We had a long discussion about life and thoughts and where we’ll be in 5 years. And a few hours before that, I didn’t even know him.

Then bumped into people like Vid Ayer, Arun and a guy from Cisco, and they asked me about my ‘startup’ experiences. This topic was a story by itself, so I’ll write about it separately. What was interesting, was putting faces to names. I’ve seen the name ‘Vid Ayer’ on mailing lists and blogs, but now I get to actually meet the person. This trend continued in the twitter meetup as well.

I think the ‘dari’ idea was awesome – just a bunch of carpets where people can sit and gather around. The discussions varied from “The Great Dating Session” to “Lessons from Kamasutra, not that kind” to writing Mozilla applications. Heck, even the sessions varied from raising awareness of the girl child issue to asynchronous i/o.

The only problem is that sometimes there were no topics of interest to me and sometimes there were 3 things happening in parallel and I wanted to attend all of them. But, yeah, that’s a problem that can’t be solved.

The whole day was fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to Day 2.

One fine day, I was running by myself. It was a few weeks before Barcamp Bangalore 5. I got an idea that I should talk about a non-techie topic at Barcamp since I’ve been giving tech talks for the past few years and I wanted a change of pace. I brainstormed many ideas on the reason for the talk, what to say and how to explain, etc. all during that one run.

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend BCB5. But I stored the notes in a safe place. And when BCB6 was announced, I wanted to be sure to talk this time around.

A few weeks back, Ramjee called me and asked whether we can talk about running. I smiled and thought to myself “Great minds think alike”. Or at least “Runners think alike”.

So I made a ppt and we landed at Barcamp on Saturday morning. We had never discussed the presentation. And we were going to give a session on it. Truly unconference style.

Note: The slides below have been modified to make it useful for a web audience. It has a lot more text now.

| Download

Barcamp crowds are very inquisitive and so we didn’t actually go past half the slides, which is actually a good thing. Instead, we discussed a wide range of things about running right from finding good places to run to trouble with dogs.

In spite of the delays causing us to start at 12:45 (which means almost lunch time) the discussion went on till 1:45 and 90% of the 30-40 odd crowd were present till the end. When we went to grab what was left of lunch, lot of people asked us questions including how to avoid knee pain (tip: it’s the shoes). Since questions are always a good sign, I think it was a successful discussion.

We both still consider ourselves amateurs at running but at the end of the day its an activity we like and Barcamp is a perfect platform to talk about our passions.

Oh, and if you’re still not a believer, I’ll end with a quote:

Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it’s because they aren’t willing to understand, not because they’re stronger. Running is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you’ll never understand, so just accept.

– Jessica Propst

Update: SlideShare decided to make it a Barcamp spotlight presentation:

The online slides has had 1274 views and 116 downloads as of this writing (2008-05-04 Sun 10:04 PM).

It’s Ravana.

Watch the trailer if you don’t believe me.

Ashok Banker is on a roll:

… But their (Rohit Vaid and Abhimanyu Singh, of Contiloe Pictures) enthusiasm, love, and passion for the project hooked me. I signed on, despite myself. Surprising myself, my family, friends. And so Mahayoddha Rama was born, an animated film for viewers of all ages (it’s not just for kids, trust me) that aspired to match the quality of any international animated film, while aiming for a photo-realistic 3D animation style that hasn’t even been attempted yet here let alone achieved, and overall storytelling and production qualities that would make all of us proud–would make every Indian proud, in fact.

The script was gruelling. Yes, the film was based on the Ramayana of Valmiki. (Not on my Ramayana books–those are being adapted separately to live-action films by a Hollywood studio.)

… What we were trying was to reinvent the Ramayana for Indian filmgoing audiences, through the grammar of all-ages animation. Now that may seem simple at first, but it’s not. For one thing, there’s never been an Indian animation film that truly uses the grammar of animation. Sure, there have been the Hanumans and Bal Ganeshs, and the like, and they may even have done reasonably well, but they’ve essentially been compromises between low budgets and a dearth of creative courage.

Our attempt was much bolder: It was to create a film experience that wouldn’t simply retell Ramayana, but would reinvent it for a new generation.

Ashok Banker is a perfect example of how pure passion for a subject can show in amazing (literary) accomplishments and suddenly the world is a better place. At least, I am grateful to him for making Ramayana approachable, captivating and delightful to novel-readers like me. And now they’re bringing the Ramayana to audiences of this generation in a movie format. That is terrific news.

I hope I can stop being envious about Lord of The Rings. I hope we can claim that we too have our own amazing depictions of our traditional stories. And yes, the movie is in Hindi and is meant for an Indian audience.

After watching the trailer, I think it’s true that Indian animators can rock.

The movie is scheduled to be released nationwide in October-November 2008. Looking forward to it!

P.S. How can one resist such a movie if Gulshan Grover is the voice of Ravana and Sameera Reddy is the voice of Sita?

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs:

“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”

Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something to the ‘system’.

There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work in different areas. For example, at Kluster, the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting is the story behind Kluster:

Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.

And from the June 2006 Wired magazine article:

Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive. The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.

“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t Colgate thought of it? “They’re probably test tube guys without any training in physics.” Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount – if they even solved it at all.

More examples are:

• Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next – this is how Dell’s

  recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
  

• Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”
• Intel asking the crowd on what is the next Google
• MicroPledge and co fund os where people pledge their money for software ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someone takes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes it successfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the software they want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
• Sell-a-Band where people pledge their money on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets to record an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, the band and the SellaBand website share the profit.
• Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
• Wesabe for personal finance.
• CrowdSpirit for electronics.
• Threadless for T-shirts.
• Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
• Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcing a book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
• We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
• And many many more.

Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ (which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).

The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites in the world.

The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British crown succession (via IndiaUncut) - this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!

But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people contribute to Wikipedia?

The best research on this topic that I found was the article What Motivates Wikipedians? in the CACM monthly magazine:

I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping into some of these motivations.

The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole article, it’s a good piece of research.

Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia which traces how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become a member of the community, and how the social structure and technological aspects enable this.

I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same question:

Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it’s a very very important part of what holds our project together.

I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We’re doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.

…

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same applies to the other examples above. For example, consider Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?

Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.

Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like Amazon/eBay, etc.

Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced anything in an India-specific way?

Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.

Remember the Lex tool that we used in college days?

Ever wondered who wrote it? It was Eric Schmidt, along with Mike Lesk.

That’s right, the CEO of Google.

I can imagine the CTO of a company to have such a background, but I never would have expected the CEO.

But then again, it’s Google. They can do anything.

I hear you brother. I hear you.

It was a crazy 4 day trip. Crazy because it was 8 related families going together, that’s a total of 23 people. 23. It should be easy to imagine the cacophony that followed…

The highlights of the trip was something like this: sultry mumbai atmosphere, hare krishna mandir, watching dabbawallas, mouth watering vada pav, fantastic four part 2, running on the beach and wide mumbai roads at 4.30 am, mumbai darshan, planetarium, aquarium, museum, marine drive, catching two buses and a local train and a boat to reach essel world, water rides in the rain in water kingdom, rain dance to bollywood songs, finding ice skating easy, jostling for life in local trains, lonavala, famous lonavala chikki, disappointed by khandala, air deccan flights, two days of sleep after coming back home.

I read the iCon book recently and have been wondering what makes people (like me) so fascinated about Steve Jobs?

• He didn’t create any great technology or product, it was people who worked with him who did all that, for example, Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter.
• He was a leader, a manager, that was his role. He’s an inspiring leader, is that why he’s admired?
• Or is it because he’s ruthless in executing his visions and ideas?
• Or is it because he gives such enrapturing keynote speeches that they are now called “Stevenotes”?

I guess it just goes to show that he’s a man of many contradictions.

The best example that I’ve come across of how he can inspire people is his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (the official video is available for download using iTunes). This speech was so powerful that I know of one friend who quit his job after hearing that speech and decided to go chase his dreams. That was a huge risk but guess what, he’s doing much better than before now.

The book has some interesting accounts of how Steve came to India in search of “truth”, wore a lungi, went travelling in cities and deserts, and even meeting a baba in the Himalayas (which itself is quite a story). Another story was how he hung out with his New Age buddies at an apple farm in Oregon, which is eventually how the company was named Apple. Then there are the accounts of how Steve demanded absolute loyalty from his friends to accounts of his taste in the kind of ads that Apple made and so on. It was a good read.

The bottom line is that he led Apple and Pixar and collectively changed three major industries for the better – the computer industry, the animated movies industry and the music industry. And he has battled cancer and survived. All this in a single lifetime. And he’s only fifty. That’s why I admire him so much.

Shreyas, Gaurav and the gang have relaunched RadioVeRVe and it now rocks even more than before!

Things they haven’t changed:

• They play music by independent bands from India. That’s right, these are all Indian bands.

Things I liked:

• The new look feels good and is intuitive. How’d he do that? Hats off to Ganesh Rao.
• Amazing list of channels – from Rock, Metal, Easy to Classical (carnatic!) and Konkani
• We can now play the radio from within the browser.
• Each song is accompanied with info about the band on the right side, the importance of this cannot be understated. We get to know more about the band like who’s on the vocals, the drums, the bass, as well as the history of the band.

Things that I would like to see or improve:

• Some of the RadioVeRVe audio ads are not very comfortable to listen to… sorry guys, but the harsh voices in the metal-style ads are a little jarring in the midst of listening to songs.
• A ‘Buy this song’ option so that I can purchase and download the song and play it on my iPod eventually – for example, I want to listen to “Shadow of the Sun” by Leminsk8 again, but can’t .

So, go ahead and listen to the best of Indi Indie music.

“When a friend moves away, they leave behind silence.”