Monday, March 16, 2009

You Are Standing In A Wiki. What Now?

There's been a great deal of interest in Tokyo barcamp but some people still seem to be confused about what it exactly is and how it differs from regular tech events.

One way of thinking about barcamp is to imagine yourself standing inside a wiki. You want to learn, teach and discuss. Barcamp provides you with a small amount of structure in order to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, skills, opinions and ideas. What makes barcamp so different though is that you can "edit" barcamp in the same way that you can edit a wiki. Think about that for a while...

When a group of enthusiastic, open-minded and knowledgeable people are in a small space together for an extended period of time, amazing things tend to happen. Difficult problems are solved, projects are born, minds are expanded. The whole is far, far greater than the sum of the parts. This is the real-world manifestation of Web 2.0. This is self-organization. This is emergence. This is the most intense thing you will ever experience.

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