Buy Viagra - HQ Pharmacy

BarCamp Baltics, the preparations for which have taken a great deal of my time in the last 3 months -- took place Feb8-10th in Riga, Latvia and gathered around 500 people, from places as distant as the US and Tajikistan, Germany and Azerbaijan, to name just a few from more than 20 represented.

Funnily enough, I almost missed it as my flight got held up in Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. I had to make that connection as I was returning from the Harvard cyberactivism event that was taking place in Istanbul last week (Ethan blogged a few good talks from there as usual, but the rest of the event was pretty much off the record, so no blogging here).

All I missed was just the opening ceremony of the (un)conference where I was supposed to give a long and boring speech. Fortunately, that didn't happen and they had a very fun opening. Turns out sometimes it's good to humbly miss the openings of your own conferences; this also helps to put a check on one's ego!

The BarCamp culture is a very recent phenomenon in the former post-Soviet region and, without unnecessary modesty, I am quite honored to have played a key role in popularizing this movement. In my personal opinion, this was, by far, the most significant contribution I've made to the state of new media in the region in the last 12 months.

...When 4 months ago I and a bunch of Ukrainian colleagues produced BlogCamp CIS and Central Asia in October 2007, we barely expected a whole wave of BarCamps springing up all over the map. Yet, that gathering in Kyiv "gave birth" to BarCamp Baltics, which, in turn, is now giving birth to 5-6 other BarCamps expected this year. It's easy to see the signs of an emerging cross-border movement in a region that needs it so much.

For many of our participants attending BarCamp Baltics was the first time they ever saw what young people from other ex-Soviet countries look like: think Ukrainians meeting Latvians, or the Kazakhs meeting Lithuanians, or the Azeris meeting Belarusians -- it is thanks to BarCamps that many of them finally heard about the problems of each other for the first time. I still remember the  puzzled faces of many young Latvians when they heard about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the Azeris -- obviously,  a subject they barely hear about on their national TV or radio. While I am saying this without even a pinch of nostalgia for the Soviet times, I still find it a bit sad that nowadays the actual social and cultural connections between all these countries -- some of them already in EU, having so much to teach their neighbors -- are kept at minimum. It was good to see us somehow trying to address that, and, I believe, quite successfully.

Of course, not everything went smoothly. Hosting BarCamp Baltics in Latvia produced more challenges than I expected. The foremost of them was the language issue: Latvia has a long and difficult history of Russians co-existing with Latvians, and the language issue is still one of the most controversial ones facing the country.

Holding an international (un)conference in Russian as one of the two main languages (English was the other one) presented a great challenge and required a lot of explanatory work on our behalf to Latvians who are not totally happy about another instance of "Russification". In the end, we've successfully overcome the language barrier: at least, nobody dubbed us Russian spies or Kremlin's agents after the conference  (funnily enough, when organizing BlogCamp in Kyiv we were often perceived as "agents of Washington", due to the funding we received from the Open Society Institute and some support from Internews Ukraine).

Securing Latvian visas for our foreign participants just a few weeks after Latvia joined the Schengen zone was nightmare: to discuss this painful experience,  we should definitely organize a Kafkacamp,.. At some point I thought that complicating the procedure for obtaining Latvian visas was the country's isolationist but ultimately impotent response to the growing authoritarianism in its neighboring countries; as if shutting itself off from the region it's responsible for is going to absolve it from responsibility for promoting democracy (which, surprise-surprise, often happens via cultural exchanges to the West) in the East...

Problems aside, the best thing about the novelty of BarCamps to the region is that it has allowed us  to experiment quite a bit with what 500 people can do in an unconference format, lots of space in Reval Hotel (one of our sponsors) and 3 days (BarCamp Baltics also had Day Zero, slated for excursions, schmoozing, and partying, which proved great for ice-breaking). We decided to emphasize the fact that BarCamp Baltics is a platform and not a conference, and that the smartest of us would learn in corridors, not in the presentation rooms.

Some observations:

1. Content doesn't matter, but context does: focus on the latter. While working on BarCamp Baltics I got fully convinced that no modern conference (not to mention an un-conference) can compete  entirely on content. Thinking that smart talks by smart people will be solely responsible for your conference's success is entirely naive. If I want to hear smart people give a talk, there are always better video talks from TED, Pop!Tech, New Yorker's conferences, and even the talks given by people visiting GooglePlex. Trying to outsmart the deep intellectual potential of those talks is futile, no matter whether one goes for the traditional conference or the less traditional (yet) unconference format.

Also, given the ubiquity of video/audio recording equipment, almost all talks end up being recorded -- even at unconferences -- thus, there is very little point to show up at these talks anyway: if they are really good, one can always watch them later. But what people do in the corridors, how easy it is for them to meet and strike a conversation, how formal/informal they feel talking to each other -- all those are factors that have to be taken care of.

"A tough choice": a BarCamp participant looking at the unconference schedule. Photo credit: Nuakin

One advantage of unconferences is that it actually helps you make the atmosphere less formal; this also has a very positive impact on the quantity and quality of conversations one strikes in the corridors. When everyone can present (i.e. be a keynote speaker), there are no more border lines between the arrogant keynote speakers and the timid audience. At BarCamps everyone is a keynote speaker, thus, people feel much less scared to talk/meet each other. Presentations are for anti-social people; everybody else is not supposed to inside at all.

2. Don't gather 500 people in one hall just to see presentations or talk such a narrow focus is a waste of resources. Although some may argue with me on this, but spending entire two or three days of a BarCamp on presentations is not very effective, given the diversity of the audience and their collective knowledge/creativity. At BarCamp Baltics, we invented something we dubbed "Innovation Incubator". Although we had to change its rules as our thinking on it evolved over time (when we started, it was a very RAW concept, which, surprisingly, became very tangible and real by the time we started), we are still quite proud of results. The ideas was solicit project applications from our participants, show them to potential investors that we know, and see what happens.

I was surprised that we received around 70 applications for ideas in all fields, from journalism to tourism. More than half of the applications were non-commercial projects, which I think is a very good sign. In the end, we decided to devote a few hours for meetings between the applicants and the investors -- we spent most of Sunday on this. I think this was one of the most productive sessions at BarCamp Baltics -- those who didn't get funding got TONS of feedback, both from investors and other participants. We have definitely created more good with these 3 hours than we could ever have with 3 hours of presentations...

It's also important to remember that most of the people who applied for Innovation Incubator were very young and completely in the dark about their funding options: many of them have no access to either commercial or non-commercial donors (it would be as accurate to say that the same is true of the donors-- not many of them would take an effort to get to know applicants who are applying for the micro-grants of a few hundred Euros). We helped to bridge that gap and I am positive that many new things will come out of this meeting.

Photos: Innovation Incubator participants talking to funders

Filling the program with such innovative elements is crucial to the success of the overall effort: meetings (or presentations) for the sake of meetings (or presentations) are not that interesting; there has to be a larger social theme in the background (in our case, fostering innovation, promoting the idea of micro-grants as opposed to big grants, and improving communication between funders and potential grantees)

3. From the global movement perspective, it's important to have participants publicly announce plans for future BarCamps and commit to the dates during the event. This worked really well in Kyiv: the idea to organize BarCamp Baltics was born in one of the late-hour drinking sessions at BlogCamp in Kyiv. Luckily, it was captured on video and properly announced the following morning to the bigger audience. In 4 months, BarCamp Riga took place! At BarCamp Baltics we had announcements about 5 different BarCamps -- and this is excellent news. It's also important to realize that there is a network effect already in place: the organizers of the event in Latvia had the Ukranians at their side, whenever they needed help or advice. Now, the guys who are organizing BarCamp Central Asia this summer have the Ukrainians and the Latvians to rely on -- and they are actively seeking advice of both (in fact, the first planning meeting for BarCamp Central Asia was organized less than 12 hours after BarCamp Baltics was over (we were lucky to have so many Central Asians in Riga -- they wouldn't have met to plan it otherwise).

A photo from our "How to organize a BarCamp session"; photo credit: Nuakin

Another key lesson from both BlogCamp in Kyiv and BarCamp in Riga is that the central session of the whole conference is the one on how to organize an unconference. It has to be approached seriously, as it will help to solidify the experiences and systemize the attitudes  of the attendees towards the unconference. By all means, it will also tremendously help (and excite!) the organizers of the future BarCamps, many of whom are likely to be in the audience. Building a movement -- and I think talking about the emerging BarCamp culture in the former Soviet space deserves nothing less -- turns out to be a very complex and sophisticated task, full of rituals and to-dos.

Ensuring that all parties involved (particularly your key allies in places that may give an extra boost to the movement soon (e.g. by organizing future BarCamps)) learn all they need to know about organizing a BarCamp is a very complicated but very rewarding task. It also helps to bring up enough experts who can run the movement in a decentralized manner without any third-part involvement (thus, I am entirely sure that the Ukrainians won't need me again for BlogCamp 2008 -- they've learnt enough to do it).

Building allies is a crucial objective. With BarCamp Baltics we devised a new system of "ambassadorships", where we had dedicated key volunteers in each country from which we had BarCamp participants. Thus, we ensured that the "ambassadors" on the ground were dealing with logistics, mobilization, visas, etc -- decentralizing it as much as possible. This proved very useful in the end; these people are also among the most qualified ones to organize the next BarCamp, since they are more involved in what the organizers are doing also.

4. Provide a good communications platform for people to meet each other before the conference. We did something very different with BarCamp Baltics by launching a social network for its participants good two-three months before the event. By the time BarCamp Baltics started, we had MORE members signed up to the social network than total participants in the BarCamp. Although we could have been much more effective at facilitating conversation inside the network, we still did a good job: the network available at network.barcamp.lv had hundreds of posts, photos, videos, profile pages, groups, and forum threads before we all met in Riga. This helped participants to meet each other virtually before meeting in person – given how geeky our audience is, this was a very helpful development. We went for a ready-made solution from ning.com and although it was never quite as fast as we wanted it to be, it was generally quite okay: at least now we know for sure what we should expect from a social network for participants.

However, a social network was not our only invention. We also launched a mini-Twitter for everybody at the conference, still available at : buzz.barcamp.lv. This is the new WordPress offering: a WP theme which works very well for micro-blogging (except for sending SMS messages, it's almost like Twitter – and I think even messaging is a matter of time). This was a popular channel immediately, before, and after the conference – people sharing thoughts, tips, etc . Extremely helpful. We had many other cool inventions – including BarCamp Radio which was broadcasting the music suggested/brought by our participants. Everybody could tune to it on FM!

My favorite bit of the conference was our unofficial “cartoonist” who tried to capture the mood of BarCamp with his always insightful cartoons. Some of them are below – for more check his blog. A very talented (and young guy) who would be an excellent add-on to any conference (I saw a professional painter at Pop!Tech, but I still think cartoons are a way cooler option).

To my taste, BarCamp Baltics was very close to the notion of “a perfect conference”: largely user-generated, with enough time for networking/meeting new people, with its own charming atmosphere, produced by a volunteer team working for free and aiming at spurring a whole new movement in the region. And not to forget: also, extremely cheap to produce (while we ran something around USD 50k in overall costs, we spent at least 20k on travel scholarships to ensure people from the Caucasus and Central Asia, Ukraine and Belarus, are able to come).

There were surely a few things that could have gone better – we were a bit too expire mental with the format and had to pay the price for that – but I would still give it 8 out of 10. I am particularly happy that the team behind BarCamp Baltics will continue (and probably step up) its work as an NGO and that there are about 5 more BarCamps in the pipeline this year. Well done! And see you at many other BarCamps this year!