Barcamp: MinneBar

Though I had another commitment so left a bit early, I attended 60% of today’s Barcamp:Minnebar. Our fearless facilitators are shown at left: Ben Edwards, Dan Grigsby and Luke Francl locally here in Minnesota. This unconference drew >350 signups and I don’t know how many people ended up attending…but it was more than I’ve ever seen at a Minnesota geekfest.

Thankfully there were great sponsors including Dow Jones Online, SplitRock Partners, Electric Pulp, IconNicholson and New Counsel, with reasonably speedy Wifi provided by ipHouse. It made this a seamless event with all needs met and, with our fearless facilitators Luke, Dan and Ben scrambling to ensure it ran smoothly, I was stunned it flowed as well as it did.

The event kicked off with William Gurstelle who I originally saw on TechTV’s The Screen Savers with his backyard potato gun project.  Here he is showing it off:

Read on to see a brief snippet video of the opening introduction by our fearless facilitators and a few more pictures…

Though there will be an official count I'm sure, my back-of-the-envelopecounting showed over 200 people from my point of view.

The people I met, the ideas being kicked around, the energy and enthusiasm in the room was palpable. I couldn’t help but wonder, "What is going to emerge? Who will build the next great ________?"

Minnesota needs to have people who "get it" and people who deeply desire to….have an opportunity to be together around the concepts, tools, approaches and needs of a community already in the game building stuff and those who intend to do so.

NOTE: Here is my Flickr photoset (only 11 photos).