Category: Things I think about

To avoid confusion and any potential trademark issues, I’ve decided to redub my previously monikered Mashup Camp as Mash Pit (naming honors go to the original Bar Camp chaperon himself Ross Mayfield).

This decision was made after a discussion I had today with David Berlind of ZDNet, who is planning the real-deal Mashup Camp sometime later this spring. Details will be forthcoming on his blog.

Anyway, our events are different enough to warrant the name change anyway. Whereas my event is more of a one-day micro-hackathon, David wants there to be many more participants (on the order of 25 times as many!) as well as host a number of mashup based contests with cool prizes and whatnot. So hey, I say, the more the merrier. No one can own the camp meme, so the more it spreads and gives regular folks the opportunity to get involved with all this new fangled techie stuff, the better!

If you’re interested in the Mash Pit, drop me an email at barcamp at gmail dot com or give me a couple days to get a wiki setup. Or feel free to start something on barcamp.org. Whatever floats your ship.

Not surprisingly, my proposed event has some precedents, notably in architecture, called charettes (“a charette is an intense effort to solve any architectural problem within a limited time.”) (via Brad):

There are two main advantages to working in the context of a charette. The first is that a charette operates in a highly collaborative atmosphere. Instead of an architect taking ideas and plans and going away to develop them on his or her own, a charette allows for the participation of everyone involved with the project, resulting in a highly charged and creative atmosphere. The inclusion of many points of view results in well-rounded and realistic proposals, with everyone satisfied that they were able to contribute. Secondly, Charettes are fast, and relatively inexpensive. In the intital stages of a project, the venture is necessarily highly speculative. It is important to keep costs at bay, while also moving forward quickly to take advantage of changing situations and often prohibitory deadlines. Charettes offer the opportunity to work safely and effectively within both of these boundaries.

Not only that, other people have thought hard about this kind of event before (also via Brad):

• Kathy Sierra posts about Building something cool in 24 hours and Creativity on speed,
• Ad Lib Game Development Society is a “fledgeling organization of intrepid game developers who attempt to challenge, amuse, and better ourselves through the frequent practice of spontaneous, rapid game design and development.“
• The former Immersion Composition Society created music with whatever they had on hand
• The Indie Game Jam is a yearly game design and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry.
• And yeah, Yahoo had their own highly successfull Hack Day recently as well.

So it’s clear that we’re tapping into a model that’s already well established. It’s just futzing with the details that makes what we’re doing remotely unique. It brings me back to my ultra geeky days in high school when I was helping to build robots for FIRST: we’d get a bucket of parts, an interdisciplinary team with mentors from local companies and for a couple months we’d get our team prepped for the real competition by building robots collaboratively.

And what was significant about the design of the program were the contraints imposed upon us; we had a box of random metal gadgets and that was it. And yet every year, bigger, badder and more creative solutions would emerge in spite of those limitations. Nay, I daresay, because of them.

And so that’s why I want to limit the coworking event. Yeah, I could get a bigger space, but it wouldn’t be the same. And in the original ethos of creating these events to be repeatable, low-cost and sustainable, I want other people the world over to run their own mashup days…. With their own backchannels. With different communities and projects being represented and brought into the mix. C’mon, the Bay Area chapter of the Brat Pack 2.0 is cool and all, but these events are relevant the world over and we all need more reasons to travel for work. 😉

Whether you’ve got three people or three hundred, you can make an event like this happen. Seriously. And there plenty of people and a litany of historical resources out there ready to help get you started.

Remember the one thing that’s essential to the ongoing life and success of these things (just a little Canterian didacticism): anarchy still reins supreme in the valley of camps.