barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 3/3

start.up financing and concluding remarks

with my talk about start.up financing i was well in line with the bandwidth of topics. only some barcampers already had some experience with financing topics. therefore common financing language like „venture capital“, „business angels“ and the like were probably as easy to understand for most of the barcampers as some pure lines of C to me. the discussions afterwards gave me the impression thought that i could bring some core financing messages across:

* there are plenty of funding opportunities out there,
* they are challenging though &
* there is a place to look them up.

friendly people, interesting topics and too less time for everything. thanks to the organizers and the sponsor. the barcamp salzburg definitely was worth the journey.

enable2start

the start.up financing mindmap got another entry:
enable2start is a financial times germany supported 5x50.000€ star.up initiative.

linkroll update

four worthy new linktips in the LINKROLL.

barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 2/3

or why barcamps are the consequence of self organization

ever been fascinated by „swarm intelligence“, heavily entertained and slightly afraid by the novel „prey“ or michael crichton?
i definitely was and still am. alex baumgartner outlined the laws and determinants of „self organization“ (see presentation here). then, using the program netlogo he showed live, how the seemingly intelligent behavior of birds, ants or fish occur.
50 to 100 lines of code are sufficient for the simulations. that made me wonder - somewhat of topic - what military research will bring upon us in the near future with swarms of armed drones.

barcamps, per definition un-organized events, also form structures and patterns by themselves (or are a consequence of them). they are somehow a similar phenomena as the elegance of moving swarms of birds. there are simple rulesets which lead to great results.
there are some formal rules like active participation, blogging about the barcamp or voting with ones legs. and there are less formal ones. being open and friendly to each other. share your insights with the others and not use the barcamp as a sales ground.
the results are easy communication with the other barcampers. information flows well and people looking for business are not often seen twice.

there is a tipping point - one of the essential elements of self
organization as well, where the numbers of barcampers reach a certain number, such that more and more people the event. barcamps are now an established elements of the austrian netculture, from salzburg, bodensee, klagenfurt, graz to vienna. and while on a micro level every barcamp appears to be somehow different on the macro level, the show a high degree of similarity.

in following part 3 of the salzburg round up, there will be three core elements of my start.up talk outlined as well as my concluding remarks on the barcamp.

barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 1/3

the scope of the june 2008 barcamp salzburg was wide. from media culture and internet history, right through modern programming approaches. game programming and the laws of self organization where there as well as a slot from me about start.up financing. around 20 people - i will call them barcampers - gathered at the arge kultur „studio“.

read in part 1 about or why presentations including actual programming code should not make one afraid. the upcoming part 2 explains what self organization has to do with barcamps and 3 part finishes off with thougts about the start.up presentation and concluding remarks about the barcamp salzbug 2008.

starting around two o‘ clock in the afternoon and personally having to leave for vienna already at six p.m. it was an intense experience. the „studio“, a regular site for concerts and theater plays is located in the cellar and is all painted in black . that definitely pushed everyone in the topics. the „bunker“ feeling made it easy to not get distracted and a missing wlan connection for the first half of the sessions kept everyone focused on the topics presented.

the wide array of topics made this barcamp interesting and (positively) difficult for non programmers like me. this forces one to think outside of the normal paths which is a worthwhile and fruitful exercise already by itself.

presentation lines like „“ do not make my attention wandering away, neither do details from michael raidel about the open id authentication protocol (presentation found here). on the contrary. besides the sheer beauty of well written code this would have made me missing organizational developments around programming like „scrum“.
scrum forgets about the old heavily specification focused programming towards a result driven approach. thomas r. koll, recently back from working as a developer in london, where they "lived" scrum obviously enjoyed the experience. not only were they more productive as a team but also had more fun on the way. see his presentation here.

the talk of brigtitte jellinek about internet history in salzburg even gained the interest of the ORF. brigitte digged back casual style into the roots widely undocumented past of austrian internet history. it was only around 1991 when the first IP connection was established in salzburg. in these days the then european backbone was powered by a 256kb connections.

start.ups where somewhat missing at this barcamp. martin herfurt was the exception. he planned to present the challenges of his start.up toothr after i headed back to vienna.

read why the barcamp is the consequence of self organization in the upcoming 2nd part of the round up.

barcamp salzburg 2008

looking forward to visit the barcamp salzburg 2008.