mengwong - Barcamp Malaysia, Review

I am posting this from the KL-Singapore bus. It is now 9pm; I will arrive at 2am. Yes, the bus has wifi. Isn't the 21st Century great? I am loving it.

It is Geek Month, in Asia and in the US. In Portland, OSCON is winding down. (Apparently Portland is the new Bay Area.) In Sebastopol, Tim O'Reilly just threw another Foo Camp. Not long ago in Singapore E27.sg hosted an unconference titled, oddly enough, "E27 Unconference." And, this weekend past, the hackers of Malaysia put on their first ever Barcamp.

This might just be me, but I have to say: titling an event an "unconference" strikes me as a little weird. It is like Ford naming a car "Sedan", or Universal Studios releasing "Science Fiction Movie". Barcamps are unconferences. Unconferences are conducted according to the principles of Open Space.

My first exposure to Open Space was at Foo: we went around the room, introduced ourselves in three words, and Just-In-Timed the schedule using big sheets of poster paper and some markers. It felt tremendously liberating: see an empty slot? Got something to talk about? Great, grab a pen: guess what, you just became a speaker.

The usual conference castes were abolished: every attendee was a speaker, every audience a panel, every speaker really just a moderator. At these kinds of gatherings, you can expect everyone in the room to know your subject as well as you do. Skip the introduction and go straight to the new. If you've done something original, talk about it. You have a few minutes to say your piece before the polymaths take over.

In Singapore, things are wound a little tighter. "Welcome to the Unconference! The keynote speaker from Microsoft will be talking about some of the exciting new innovations MSNBC will be rolling out in Vista for the Beijing Olympics. Then we'll have some startup pitches. Oh, and here's the schedule. It explains the law of two feet. On the back is the session roster. Don't worry, we've planned everything, and the speakers and sessions are all lined up. Yes, that's right, the session about open standards and open source will be led by a small team from Microsoft."

There is something crassly bourgeious about the total unselfconsciousness with which Singapore puts on Networking Events. At these events, the name of the game is "Are you the next rung on my career ladder?" Singapore's economy is premised on the mercantile-Chinese ambition of "what have I got that you want? What have you got that I want?" Don't get me wrong – I am all in favour of trade. But when the government acts to encourage that model, its events acquire the unapologetic ambience of a slave auction.

There is a fine line between making friends and "networking", and it is the risk of aggressive salesmanship to blur that line. Friends do things together because it's fun: they are joined by common interests. Networkers do things together because they are joined by common greed.

In Kuala Lumpur, they got it right.



Yes, the schedule was put together ahead of time. But the talks weren't all about how to start a dot-com, the virtues of government-funded entrepreneurship, how to get seed financing, yawn, yawn, yawn. Sure, that stuff is important, but it's not why we got into technology in the first place -- it's all just a means to an end.

There are three things worth doing. Things that are new. Things that improve. And things that endure. I have observed that truly talented technologists concentrate their efforts on the first and the third. The evolutionary innovations, the better-faster-cheaper products and companies of the world, will take care of themselves.

At BarcampMalaysia, the "make money fast with Internet marketing!" school of nouveau riche entrepreneurship did show – and I am glad they did, because they paid for the food that I ate – but they were outnumbered by the TEDtalk-watching, boingboing-reading, software-writing livelies. Most of the talks were by technologists about what they loved, and the passion was palpable. We had talks about hacking Firefox, working with Google Gears, advanced coding in Drupal, adventures with FreeBSD. Roni demo'ed realtime videostream object insertion. The opensource guys related the story of ODF versus OOXML; not only that, they whipped out a guitar and in a slightly cheesy but earnest moment we sang "The times, they are a-changing."

And there were lightning talks!

And we played Werewolf! Artur Bergman would have been proud.

The Big Brown Extroverts of Malaysia have made a Barcamp out of the same stuff as YAPC, Foo Camp, Superhappydevhouse, Hackers.

Kamal Fariz, Daniel CerVentus, Fadhil bin Luqman, Roni Mustapha, Khailee Ng, and all the other people who made it happen deserve a very big hand.