After a over a year of expounding on BarCamps and unconferences I finally attended one — BarCamp MU3 at the KJ Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology at Sion.
So what does a BarCamp at the university level look like? A bunch of maybe forty guys and girls, not all of them students, sitting at their desks and taking in the presentation going on up front. The mood was nice. Speakers took questions or opinions from other participants at regular intervals, some became extended conversations and I finally saw first hand how an unconference actually works. The big one — BarCamp Mumbai3 — comes up on March 29 at IIT Bombay.
I chatted a bit with the guys who put the show together — Saumil Parekh (front row third from left in the photo) is a final year student and alongwith friend Maulik Shah, has set up a web design company called Cafe Infotech which he says is an interim thing before he joins his family business. This was Mumbai’s third university-level BarCamp.