On Saturday I went along to BarCamp Singapore. This was my first experience of a bar camp which is essentially an adhoc IT conference where anyone can come along. The days is split into multiple 30 minutes sessions with up to five running concurrently. Anyone is free to host a session, they just put the topic they would like to talk on on a board and attendees vote for which ones should go ahead.
There was a good selection of people mostly young technical people with some early stage investors thrown in for good measure. The thing I noticed about the demographic is that the male bias was not anywhere near as strong as you would expect for a similar event in the UK. Mac users were out in force and probably the majority of laptops people had bought along were Macbooks.
The sessions generally were about up to the minute “cool” subject as you would expect when IT people talk about things that are interesting to them. There was a lot on mobile devices especially location based services. I also noticed that blogging and social networking was also a popular subject which is not surprising as I was told Singapore is the blogging capital of the world. More surprising there was quite a lot of mention of social entrepreneurship which seems to have come from the open source movement.
In all I found it a very positive event. There were lots of people with ideas and enthusiasm and I look forward to attending the next one. For anyone interested in exactly what happened there is a good writeup here.
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Hello Dan, looking forward to meet you at the next barcamp. Glad that you like the writeup of the event Gwen and I did.