BarCampNola for the Tech Savvy and Wannabes Too

This post by Blackstone Content Correspondent Summer Suleiman originally appeared on ideavillage.org.

If you’re looking for a place where you can be your self and indulge in all things tech, BarCampNola is it.

It’s is a two day self-proclaimed, “unconference” that takes place at Tulane every year. This past year was the eighth annual BarCampNola, but it was the first one I made it out to.

So what’s an “unconference”?

It’s the antithesis of a conference. It’s a place where people can openly talk, exchange ideas and shared interests.

And just hang out.

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I talked to Barrett Conrad, co-organizer of BarCampNola to find out where the name came from. Conrad says it it’s a nod to an old concept originally started by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Tim O’Reilly.

“In 2003, O’ Reilly kicked off a series of conferences, mischievously called “Foo Camps” (the name is a tribute both to programmers, for whom “foo” is a placeholder word like “whatchamacallit”). The camps were purposely meant to NOT be about business plans and marketing proposals.” (Forbes, 2006) They were a place where people could casually hang out and exchange ideas.

And that’s exactly what BarCampNOLA is, and why it’s so cool.

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For starters, organizers of BarCampNola introduced a session by having one of their teammates dressed up in a villain costume attack the presenter.

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If you’re one of those folks who feels awkward at formal networking situations (raises hand eagerly!), but love to meet new people and make authentic one-on-one connections, BarCampNola is a good start.

I pulled up a chair next to Quinton Jason, a front end developer, who presented on SVGs, a file format, and a few other folks, they happily invited me into the conversation about a cool project they were working on, a code they were trying to crack, or a cool new 3D game they were perfecting.

And when I asked Jason if he liked the SVG format better than other formats like jpeg and gif, he casually said, “Shit yeah”.

Then, Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene, a software developer, who Quentin was talking with before I joined the conversation, gave me an example.

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“Imagine if you had an American Express photo and you want to blow it up into a billboard. If the photo is in SVG format, you can do that automatically and you don’t have to worry about the quality of the image,” Rainbolt-Greene said.

Do you get that experience at a conference?

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Justin Kray, was playing a 3D block game he developed called Interrupt, a multi-player game which creates connections in 3D space, when I started asking him questions about why he was at BarCampNola. He offered up some interesting insight on board games, explaining that how they are re-emerging in our tech consumed culture.

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Meanwhile, Jason dived into another conversation about coding and completely lost me. He was gushing about a program called Codepen. Do you know anything about code? (Surely, I appeared to be dazed and confused.)

“Not a thing, but I want to learn,” I said.

“Codepen is like Facebook for developers,” he told me.

“Aha!” I exclaimed.

My second lightbulb moment of the day. The first was when I walked into room, and realized there is a very cool, laid back community of tech junkies in New Orleans, and it turns out they convene at thisthing called BarCampNola. And even the tech UN-savvy are welcome.