Yesterday Reinier, Simon and I made the track to attend Barcamp Uganda which, for clarification sake we had no part in organizing. It’s a bit confusing for some people because only two weeks ago, the three of us did help organize and launch Campala2008 (a.k.a Barcamp Kampala). I’ll admit, I was excited to see a Ugandan group taking the idea and running with it.
There were some cool things about Barcamp Uganda. The group that organized printed out a massive sign, using the Barcamp logo and font that they hung from the side of the room. There was a lot of student attendance. They also gave out food during the lectures.
There were also some not so cool things. After about five minutes someone turned off the wifi connection and it never came back on. If I had been live-blogging it, which I decided not to, this would have killed my feed. I’m not sure what happened to the connection but I assume it was turned off purposely as soon as people began to speak. That was just a minor annoyance but there were three major things that went wrong here…
1) No interactivity
The idea of what a ‘Barcamp’ is was totally lost in translation. Instead of an interactive forum for everyone to share ideas, discuss concerns and share advice (an un-conference), Barcamp Uganda was a typical conference where people in the audience were talked at for several hours. Attempts from Reinier to participate were met with a firm, “Please hold your questions and comments to the end” from the emcee. To be honest there was no interaction with the audience at all, and that’s a real shame.
2) Selling to the Audience
The other problem was that nearly every single presenter there was there to ’sell’ something…a product or service. One presenter even handed out flyers that could double as order forms for his product! Instead of making the focus technology, the focus was a series of products that were pitched to the audience, by definition this is the antithesis of Barcamp. This doesn’t mean the information wasn’t relevant, it just means it wasn’t a Barcamp. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia Wikipedia:
BarCamps are organized and evangelized largely through the web, harnessing what might be called a Web 2.0 communications toolkit. Anyone can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki. The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall.
While loosely structured, there are rules at BarCamp. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing, and IRC. This open encouragement to share everything about the event is in deliberate contrast to the “off the record by default” and “no recordings” rules at many private invite-only participant driven conferences.
Barcamp shouldn’t be about developer sales pitches. The people who created Barcamp anticipated some people might prefer that which is why they also created Democamp.
3) Bait and Switch
But the biggest problem (and this is the one I have the real problem with) was that this wasn’t a ‘Barcamp’ at all. It was the launch of the Uganda ‘ICT Software Cluster Initiative’, something that was going to occur anyways and was only rescheduled after Barcamp Kampala. Simply put, it was a bait-and-swich. “We’re going to do this, but let’s call it this.” I’m not sure why this was even necessary, people would have attended the launch of the ICT Cluster Initiative anyways. I wrote about it with a great deal of anticipation back in August. If this was meant to be a ‘barcamp’ then I can’t help but call them out on a few things. There was no audience participation, no aspects of it were organized by the community and no one even mentioned the previous Barcamp that took place two weeks before….at the same university!
Drama Between Schools
It became apparent very early on that the reason this event was occurring was because of some pre-existing tensions between the Faculty of Computing and IT and the Faculty of Technology at Makerere University. Because FCIT had sponsored and facilitated the first Barcamp, it seems the FoT was simply trying to show that they were just as progressive and forward thinking. Unfortunately, they missed some major details.
In fact, the most productive moment of the entire thing was when a student stood up and asked, “Why can’t students from the different faculties collaborate? I have friends at FoT who are working on projects similar to the ones I am but we can’t collaborate.” He was referring to the fact that students from FCIT and FoT operate completely independent of each other despite being very closely related. The response he got was from FoT Dean Tickodri-Togboa. I’m paraphrasing but essentially this was essentially his statement…
“It may require the old guard to leave the University. The most ideal thing would have been to have the engineers (FoT) focus on the hardware and the developers (FCIT) focus on the software. You must have heard stories that in 2003 that a project of this nature was being worked on by both groups. That was before FCIT got funding for computers that they didn’t want to share with our school.”
In other words, there’s some bad blood between the faculty of the two schools and it’s no secret that it’s directly affecting students. I don’t know how true any of what he said was but the egos of administrators should not ever effect the education of their students.
Does Any of It Matter to Uganda?
At one point Reinier offered, “Perhaps this is the Ugandan take on Barcamp.” Barcamp Kampala was organized by myself (an American), a Dutch person, a Brit and a New Zealander with help from three Ugandan students. Thus it definitely had tons of Western influences. Alternatively, Barcamp Uganda was organized for and by Ugandans. Maybe the idea of Barcamp is a western thing that isn’t relevant to Ugandans?
This argument doesn’t work for me. What was most incredible about Barcamp Kampala was the feedback we got from the participants. People were really excited about a chance have their say with professionals and peers in the same room. They got to talk about Google, with Joseph Mucheru (Google East Africa)! The room split in half passionately when the topic switched to open source versus closed source software. It was this excitement that proved to me that that people simply weren’t reacting…they had been waiting for the opportunity to share their opinions.
Whatever the case, I’m excited to see what the Ugandan ITC Cluster Initiative actually does now that it’s launched. However, it’s unfortunate that they decided to use the name ‘Barcamp’ (in the way that they did) to do it.
About the author: Jonathan Gosier is a software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he incubates and invests in East African entrepreneurs as the CEO of Appfrica Labs. He's also a TED Fellow.
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Barcamp Uganda: Lost in Translation
Yesterday Reinier, Simon and I made the track to attend Barcamp Uganda which, for clarification sake we had no part in organizing. It’s a bit confusing for some people because only two weeks ago, the three of us did help organize and launch Campala2008 (a.k.a Barcamp Kampala). I’ll admit, I was excited to see a Ugandan group taking the idea and running with it.
There were some cool things about Barcamp Uganda. The group that organized printed out a massive sign, using the Barcamp logo and font that they hung from the side of the room. There was a lot of student attendance. They also gave out food during the lectures.
There were also some not so cool things. After about five minutes someone turned off the wifi connection and it never came back on. If I had been live-blogging it, which I decided not to, this would have killed my feed. I’m not sure what happened to the connection but I assume it was turned off purposely as soon as people began to speak. That was just a minor annoyance but there were three major things that went wrong here…
1) No interactivity
The idea of what a ‘Barcamp’ is was totally lost in translation. Instead of an interactive forum for everyone to share ideas, discuss concerns and share advice (an un-conference), Barcamp Uganda was a typical conference where people in the audience were talked at for several hours. Attempts from Reinier to participate were met with a firm, “Please hold your questions and comments to the end” from the emcee. To be honest there was no interaction with the audience at all, and that’s a real shame.
2) Selling to the Audience
The other problem was that nearly every single presenter there was there to ’sell’ something…a product or service. One presenter even handed out flyers that could double as order forms for his product! Instead of making the focus technology, the focus was a series of products that were pitched to the audience, by definition this is the antithesis of Barcamp. This doesn’t mean the information wasn’t relevant, it just means it wasn’t a Barcamp. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia Wikipedia:
Barcamp shouldn’t be about developer sales pitches. The people who created Barcamp anticipated some people might prefer that which is why they also created Democamp.
3) Bait and Switch
But the biggest problem (and this is the one I have the real problem with) was that this wasn’t a ‘Barcamp’ at all. It was the launch of the Uganda ‘ICT Software Cluster Initiative’, something that was going to occur anyways and was only rescheduled after Barcamp Kampala. Simply put, it was a bait-and-swich. “We’re going to do this, but let’s call it this.” I’m not sure why this was even necessary, people would have attended the launch of the ICT Cluster Initiative anyways. I wrote about it with a great deal of anticipation back in August. If this was meant to be a ‘barcamp’ then I can’t help but call them out on a few things. There was no audience participation, no aspects of it were organized by the community and no one even mentioned the previous Barcamp that took place two weeks before….at the same university!
Drama Between Schools
It became apparent very early on that the reason this event was occurring was because of some pre-existing tensions between the Faculty of Computing and IT and the Faculty of Technology at Makerere University. Because FCIT had sponsored and facilitated the first Barcamp, it seems the FoT was simply trying to show that they were just as progressive and forward thinking. Unfortunately, they missed some major details.
In fact, the most productive moment of the entire thing was when a student stood up and asked, “Why can’t students from the different faculties collaborate? I have friends at FoT who are working on projects similar to the ones I am but we can’t collaborate.” He was referring to the fact that students from FCIT and FoT operate completely independent of each other despite being very closely related. The response he got was from FoT Dean Tickodri-Togboa. I’m paraphrasing but essentially this was essentially his statement…
“It may require the old guard to leave the University. The most ideal thing would have been to have the engineers (FoT) focus on the hardware and the developers (FCIT) focus on the software. You must have heard stories that in 2003 that a project of this nature was being worked on by both groups. That was before FCIT got funding for computers that they didn’t want to share with our school.”
In other words, there’s some bad blood between the faculty of the two schools and it’s no secret that it’s directly affecting students. I don’t know how true any of what he said was but the egos of administrators should not ever effect the education of their students.
Does Any of It Matter to Uganda?
At one point Reinier offered, “Perhaps this is the Ugandan take on Barcamp.” Barcamp Kampala was organized by myself (an American), a Dutch person, a Brit and a New Zealander with help from three Ugandan students. Thus it definitely had tons of Western influences. Alternatively, Barcamp Uganda was organized for and by Ugandans. Maybe the idea of Barcamp is a western thing that isn’t relevant to Ugandans?
This argument doesn’t work for me. What was most incredible about Barcamp Kampala was the feedback we got from the participants. People were really excited about a chance have their say with professionals and peers in the same room. They got to talk about Google, with Joseph Mucheru (Google East Africa)! The room split in half passionately when the topic switched to open source versus closed source software. It was this excitement that proved to me that that people simply weren’t reacting…they had been waiting for the opportunity to share their opinions.
Whatever the case, I’m excited to see what the Ugandan ITC Cluster Initiative actually does now that it’s launched. However, it’s unfortunate that they decided to use the name ‘Barcamp’ (in the way that they did) to do it.