Barcamp Brussels
Only 8 days left… better start working on my presentation. It’s not going to be something huge and groundbreaking. I’m just going to talk about my graduation project I’ve been working on. I’ve created an internal knowledge network, an open platform in a closed network that makes ideas managable. I’ll give you an example: somebody sees something somewhere, a cool ad, a nice poster a video clip… anything he thinks is worth archiving. So he/she writes an entry about it on the internal blog, then tags the entry from a built in tag slug in the writing interface of the blog. The tag search is in AJaX and also displays relating tags. In the tags he/she includes categories or brand names of existing clients or relations. Other people can rate the idea/blogpost so that a popularity meter is shown for ‘most rated’ and ‘highest rated’ ideas. So next time a clients asks for a creation, the creative dude/dudette on duty can go through the archive of ideas and look for ideas that other people tagged with that client name, or just look at the most popular ideas and see if he/she can do something with it.
There’s a lot more functions included, but it would take too long to sum them up here, so this is the brief version. The basic thought behind it is that you can have an idea that would fit great for a certain customer, but if there’s no order at the time, the idea might get lost and forgotten when it’s actually needed. It’s really important for creatives to have a channel where they can launch ideas as well, requesting immediate feedback from their fellow employees, so I’ve integrated a lot of ways to stay in touch and follow up on ideas you post. The internal knowledge management tool is in fact a tool to fall back on, filled with thoughts and possible implementations of input, it’s an archive but it can serve as a point of direct feedback as well. It can replace those urgent lunch meetings or creative brainstorms if everyone’s too busy, so that people can come and see and add input at their own pace. After the Barcamp, I’ll put my presentation online so if you’re really interested, you can check it out.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Barcamp Brussels is a free conference where all attendees must also contribute. Topics concern the influence of technology upon daily life. All attendees should list their names here. A (non-exhaustive) list of topics is constructed here.
SPEAKING
- speaking slots will be 30 minutes each. So a presentation should last between 20-25 minutes. We’ll probably start around 10h till 12h and again from 14h to 18h. (10 slots per room)
- speaking style can be: regular presentation (Powerpoint/Keynote style), demo (on-line or off-line), moderated discussion (topic is suggested and crowd can join in)
- everyone should do a presentation, help with someone else’s presentation, do a audio/video podcast of presentations or participate in some other way
- you do not have to be the world’s authority to speak about something. It can be an unusual hobby, an positive experience or just a crazy idea. If you don’t like to talk, do something with videos (”Computers in 20 years of Hollywood movies”), music (”Feminism in the MTV era”) or images (”Famous newspaper images you thought were real”).
