:: SachaL ::

Summary of the BarCampRhine Session held at the BarCampCologne2 Saturday August 11.

This summary is in english, so our german friends can read it too

The Concept :
A cross-border, cross-country (Germany, Switzerland, France, Holland) barcamp that aims to connect German, Swiss, Dutsch and French BarCampers and innovators of any field.
We’re hiring a boat on the Rhine from Basel to Rotterdam. BarCamp Sessions will be held at the stops and during the cruise. The cruise should last between 10 and 15 days. People can go on and off the ship when they want to and attend to as many BarCamps as possible.

When ?
Sept/oct 2008 would be great as people are back from holidays and prices for ferrys are lower. But it would be nice to settle the event according to other majors events in the towns visited (ex. : web-conferences, Expos, etc…). These events would already gather some interrested people who could join the BarCamper Crowd.

Pre-schedule :
Make a poll to have a first impression on who would attend. In wich town ? Who would stay on the boat ? For how long ?

Following topics have been discussed :

• Promote coworking : The boat could have a room with shared desktops & webconnection for BarCampers who need to work. It would be interresting to have a debiefing session on how their mission advanced during the trip.
• Handling Visitor Overflow : Experience from past BarCamps shows that, due to its success, the attendee-list for BarCamps is filled up in no time (8 hours after opening for BarCampCologne2). How can we handel the many visitors interrested in BarCampRhine ? One idea could be to split up the attendees and enabling first the core-team to join (ex. : 25 orga-team + 25 sponsors + 25 VIP Speakers) and then leaving the remaing 125 places to the BarCamper crowd. But this looks more like FooCamp than BarCamp. Is this a good idea ?
• Internationalisation : Lets invite foreign BarCamper fom the US, Italy, Poland, Sweden to join. Prepare some pre-scheduled sessions on intercultural topics. Ask the attendes to add the languages they speak (eg. : Mother language / Language I have learned / Language I would like to hear) on the attendee list. Add language icons on the name badges.
• Organisation : Step 1 : Get a nice wiki or a blog to communicate. It should not be too messy as the orga is somewhat more difficult than common barcamps. Step 2 : Get the ship ! Once you have the ship, shedule the event around the ship. Step 3 : Prepare Some text blocs and some additional infos for potential Sponsors to referr to. Step 4 : Get the sponsors & the wlan. Step 5 : Spread the word & shedule the BarCamps on & off the boat.
• The ship : First thing to settle is the ship. Some of them need to be hired 6 or 12 month in advance. What is the equipement aboard ? Conference boats have beamers, paperboards, screens but are very expensive. What about looking for a more unusual ship, (ex. : a barge) and add polystyrene walls. It can take 2-3 days to equip the vessel but it could be far less expensive.

As far as I remember, the people at the sessions were : Delphine Ménard, Oliver Ueberholz, Oliver Steiner, Wilfried Rütten, Sebastian Grünwaldt… did I forget someone ?

To go to the BarCampRhine wiki on BarCamp.org, it’s over here.

The Powerpoint of the BarCampRhine Session can be seen on Slideshare

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