Well, BarCamp HK 2010 has come and gone.

BarCamp was born in Palo Alto, California in 2005. In just three years, it has become an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by the attendees — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

The popularity of this event is growing by leaps and bounds.  Last year’s session was held at Turner’s office.  This year, almost 1,000 people signed up to attend (it’s free) and it was held on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

This was my first time attending one of these.  It starts off with all the attendees (at least the ones there by 9:30) introducing themselves to the crowd – in three words (though some ran over).  Then people fill out slips with what they want to present, there’s a bit of voting, and then the presentations get started.  Technical, business, marketing, there’s a huge variety.  I was a bit pessimistic about this semi-anarchic event proceeding smoothly, but it does – because everyone is there with a common core purpose and motivated.  I truly enjoyed it.

PASM was one of this year’s sponsors and we had a handful of photographers circulating around the rooms.  I grabbed a few shots here and there.  Perhaps you’ll see some folks you recognize or maybe even yourself.  In the first shot below, you can see event organizer Belle Liu and the guy just above her with the huge smile is Napoleon Biggs of Web Wednesday fame.

Loved the back of this guy’s shirt, wish I’d had a chance to see the front!

All of the scheduled presentations posted on the wall, very low tech.

There were also boards there for posting jobs, notices from people looking for jobs, companies looking for funding, companies looking to give funding.

And that was my downfall.  One of my main purposes in going was to post some of the open positions at my company.  (Yes, we’re hiring – especially looking for people with game development experience, across a variety of positions.  Drop me a note at hongkietown at gmail dot com if you’re interested.)  So I got there early and helped get the boards set up.  And today was so fricking humid that by 10 AM I was just a walking pile of sweat.   So there was that, plus a phone call from a friend informing me of the death of his wife, and I decided to leave at mid day to take care of other things.

But here’s a couple of quick shots of presentations in progress (note that almost all of the presenters I saw were using MacBooks, not PCs, though there was at least one presenter using an iPad).

Perhaps you’ve seen Jason Li’s amazing illustrated notes from Startup Saturday last month.  I was lucky enough to meet him today and catch him creating one of a series for BarCamp.

He’s already got the new set online and you can see the finished version of the above note here.  Nice.

I should also mention that I was quite impressed with Polytechnic’s campus for a number of reasons.

And so, reluctantly, I left and headed home.

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