Double Booked
Sep 25th, 2010 by Jinja
After arriving early at BarCamp Phnom Penh and jockeying for a decent slot for my two presentations, I returned from lunch to find myself speaking against … yours truly.
Since both of my talks required a projector, after some discussion this was quickly bumped to the next day. For Sunday I’d planned a follow-up presentation on ‘Digital Comics’ and a fun one on ‘KhmEnglish’ but FOUR presentations would be pretty exhausting. (Plus squeeze out other aspiring speakers.)
At Cambodian universities, to ensure lecture halls are at capacity when a founder or donor comes, classes may be canceled to fill seats. It seems an impromptu scheduling of a panel presentation by varied large scale sponsors has created a quite similar situation, and resulted in the rejigging of the schedule.
BarCamps are generally fluid unconference environments, but given the overall topics on day one, it strikes me as pretty heavily weighted on coding or business. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times; 2010 is the year BarCampPP became BusinessCamp. It’s probably a good sign that there’s such enthusiasm and professionalization in the IT industry here, that means more of my friends are getting paid.
I don’t envy the event staff who have to balance this out; during Cambodia’s first BarCamp Microsoft insisted on a static speaking slot in exchange for their participation.
When all is said and done, I think most will concur BarCamp Phnom Penh is still more dynamic and interesting than most tech gatherings in developed countries, with the biggest turnout yet. For a more uplifting overview, check out Thomas Wanhoff‘s enthusiastic audio summation. (He’ll be speaking tomorrow, he was rescheduled as well.)
