Great Explanation of “Bar Camp”

When I tell people I’m helping to plan an “RE Barcamp” it’s often followed by a blank look.    “Rebar? Is there a bar? Are you camping” is not an uncommon response.    In fact, I bet many attendees of RE Barcamp may not know where “BarCamp” comes from.   I came across this short and sweet definition when I was reading Brain Picking’s post on the ”Top 10 Contemporary Cross-Disiplinary Conferences” …for the record, Barcamp came in at second on the list.

Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s famous invite-only hacker summit, Foo Camp, BarCamp borrowed from the hacker slang foobar to create a set of guidelines for an alternative, open-to-all, ad-hoc event around a common topic or theme that anyone can host anywhere. (These user-generated experiences are also sometimes called unconferences or non-conferences, after legendary eccentric curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s experimental non-conference in Jülich, Germany, in the 90’s.)

A self-organizing community of diverse interests, BarCamp participants are also its presenters. Attendees spend the first part of each event brainstorming and voting for session subjects, and can then choose among the various breakout groups. As you might imagine, the quality of a BarCamp can vary considerably depending on who’s present — we’ve had mixed experiences, accordingly. But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for; and BarCamps are typically free.

RE Barcamps are for the most part based off this premise of open sharing and peer to peer learning where the participants are also the presenters with a “real estate theme”.  Topics can be anything real estate related and tend to have had a heavy emphasis on social media in the past.   With all that’s going on in our industry today and considering the Seattle event is following the Pacific Northwest Housing Summit, I won’t be a bit surprised if Seattle’s 2010 REBarCamp participants also decide to have discussions based on the new Good Faith Estimate/RESPA, HVCC or how to market distressed properties.   The great thing about REBC’s, in my opinion, is that we are not limited to any topics–we’re only limited by those attend and participate in the event and out of all of the REBC’s I’ve attended (5 or so?) I’ve always learned plenty! 

I’m really looking forward to this REBC Seattle 2010!