Ask YC: Been going to BarCamps? (BarCampBoston3 is May 17th & 18th!)

Is the Hacker News community aware of the free unconference phenomena, like BarCamp/PodCamp/MacCamp, etc.? They're community-organized conferences for hackers, geeks, techies, webheads, and entrepreneurs.

There's a huge list of BarCamps at: http://barcamp.org/

For those of you in the Boston area, I hope you'll come to BarCampBoston3 May 17th & 18th, and give a talk or otherwise participate: http://www.barcampboston.org/

Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software, startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking, robotics,mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software, programming languages, and the future of technology.

I've been going to the local ones (DemoCamp, StartupCamp, FacebookCamp) for the last little while and they're definitely worth it. You learn a few interesting things, see a cool demo or two, meet some people etc.

Depending on when the next democamptoronto is and how much work I put into my project, I was hoping to demo it and launch it then. Realistically, it'd probably have to be the other afterwards though.

I went to last year's Boston BarCamp and it was a great event overall. Some workshops were a little "eh", but others were really good. I'm thinking about doing a session on "Graphic Design for Coders" - anybody here have any thoughts on whether that would be a good topic?

A neat thing I saw at last year's BarCamp was an early demo of Dropbox by Drew Huston who went on to be part of YC Summer '07. I think Reddit demoed at the Boston BarCamp the year before that too, before they went into YC Summer '06.

I helped throw BarCampRochester3 - largest one in upstate NY! RITers represent! Gathering quality people who want to give something of interest to each other truly does cull the best and the brightest in an area.

Both :-) -- graphic design for non-graphic designers who know HTML and CSS, but aren't quite sure what to do with it.

Here's a blurb I wrote up for the Sessions wiki page (http://2008.barcampboston.org/index.php?title=Sessions):

Do you have your web app backend coding skills down pat, but don't know where to start to give your front end that nice clean look? It's not as hard as you might think. We're no experts, but we'd love to help get people started by sharing what we've learned from going through the process of designing a site as coders.