Urban Discoveries Baltimore

This Saturday, June 20, The University of Baltimore in Mount Vernon (1420 N. Charles Street) will host BarCamp Baltimore from 8:30 a.m. until participants run out of ideas. Show up at the university’s Thumel Business Center to get a t-shirt, breakfast, and your bearings. Admission costs nothing, but once you’re in you may be put to work setting up, cleaning up, staffing tables, and being in charge. Essentially, staff get in free, and everyone is staff. No, this is not a conference for bartenders. Yes, participants will be going to a bar afterwards.

The conference, which eschews most defining qualities of a conference, is based on an idea that, by my count, requires four generations of obscure hacker slang to derive, but which, despite its ancestry, is thoroughly attractive. A meeting of (bodies and) minds without any predetermined purpose, the radically democratic gathering is organized around the notion that it’s both possible and worthwhile to consider a form independent of any content. Like social algebra. To get a little more specific, everyone who comes to the BarCamp will be expected and encouraged to contribute a topic to explore. Suggested topics go up on a dry erase board in the morning, those present vote, and discussion sessions to be held in the four available rooms are determined accordingly.

And the democratic ideal is not limited to the conference, or, rather, the conference is not limited to itself. All information discussed or presented at the BarCamp is implicitly on the record, and participants are urged to videotape, photograph, transcribe, and share all aspects of their experience. Unsurprisingly, many people you run into will be wielding laptops, cameras, semaphores, and all manner of communication devices in the Wi-Fi fog sure to enshroud the Thumel Business Center.

Baltimore has been the site of two previous BarCamps: SocialDevCamp East spring and fall, both in 2008 and apparently successful (though such binary evaluation seems foreign to the BarCamp philosophy). For the earnest, the quixotic, and the curious, BarCamp Baltimore 2009 should prove an affair to make comments about on the internet for BarCamps to come.

What’s your take on BarCamp – general or specific?

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