All the World's a Wiki: How BarCamp was Planned in 6 Days Using a Wiki, IM, IRC, Blogs and Word of Mouth

BarCamp is the wiki of events. Organized by the participants themselves, each camp reflects the flavor of local community and gives an equal voice to all those who attend. Indeed, the model demands that all attendees present or help someone else present. In that way, BarCamps represent the best of traditional knowledge-transfer conferences while focusing on the oftentimes more interesting and rewarding social aspect of "hallway conversations".

In this presentation, I would like to discuss how the BarCamp wiki was used to organize the original BarCamp and how it has since then been used to fuel an international movement of camps, traveling from Palo Alto to Ireland to Amsterdam and hitting India, Korea and over 30 other locations in its brief existence. BarCamp represents a radical shift in event organizing models, the power of open and transparent systems for learning and sharing knowledge as well as a tool for galvanizing both on and offline communities.