March 23, 2009

Live from PresentationCamp SF

by Cliff Atkinson

I decided to take a little last-minute trip Saturday to San Francisco to visit the PresentationCamp SF, and was I ever glad I did!

Based on the “foo camp” and “bar camp” style of un-conferences, 100 people registered for the event for $10 per person, gathering in the morning to describe topics they wanted to learn, to offer topics they wanted to teach, and to collaboratively decide on a schedule for the day.

Like PresentationCamps in other cities, the event was completely grassroots and peer-led, with decisions about session topics, length and schedule based on consensus.

The participants represented a wide cross-section of professions and interests, and included such luminaries as Michael Deutch of MindJet, Nat Robinson of SlideRocket, Scott Schwertly of Ethos3, Rick Altman of PowerPoint Live and Ric Bretschneider of Microsoft.

The event took place at the offices of SlideShare in SoMa – CEO Rashmi Sinha and her team were gracious and generous hosts, even offering participants extra-cool t-shirts as mementos of our great time at the camp.

Was all of this top-quality content for free??!  Yes, the entire ethos of the day was one of freely giving of information and empowering one another to present ourselves more effectively – with no strings attached, no obligations and no pressure to buy anything at all.

To get a flavor of the event, read the free flow of participants’ Twitter posts at this link.

I did a little original reporting, photography and commentary throughout the day – you can read my micro blog posts at this Twitter link (I’m @cliffatkinson on Twitter – all photos were taken by iPhone and directly uploaded via Tweetie, an iPhone application).

I was so inspired by the event, I thought we should get a little BarCamp going on down in my ‘hood – Hollywood and Los Angeles- where they know a little something about storytelling with words and pictures.

I’ve put down some preliminary thoughts in a Bar Camp wiki at PresentationCamp LA . The way this works is that you can edit the page, suggest ideas, edit proposals and volunteer for any part of organizing the event – this is very much a hands-on, volunteer, grassroots project – we’ll make it a fantastic success because we all are in it together! I hope you’ll join me in LA….

Twitter tags: #presocampsf  #prescampLA  #bbp