BarCampBirmingham wrapup, part 1

The big list of learning from our third unconference

BarCampBirmingham3 left me speechless. More than 100 attendees, including those from Memphis, Nashville, Montgomery and Atlanta came to downtown Birmingham for one of the best conferences around.

Although not everyone could come by Innovation Depot (or stay for the whole day), our presenters have done an excellent job of sharing their information.

(My three presentations — “Blog Your Way to Vegas … for Free!”, “Market the Right Way with Facebook and Twitter” and “Why Women Will Want Your Blog” — can be found in this earlier post.)

You’re not done learning yet.

The official site:

• BarCampBirmingham (and its RSS feed)

The presentations:

• Slides (from Slideshare.net)
• Videos (from Vimeo)

The blog posts:

• Arcane Code: “My presentation today is titled “Make yourself more marketable as an IT Pro”. It will cover five techniques you can use to become more valuable in todays competitive marketplace.”
• Brandon Eley: “Barcamp Birmingham was awesome. I met a ton of great people and really enjoyed the sessions. I also really enjoyed presenting… it’s always good to get practice and with several speaking engagements coming up I needed it!”
• Chris Collins: “BarCampBirmingham is … by all accounts is hitting its stride. I estimate there were over one hundred attendees and more than twenty sponsors. … I got into an unexpectedly spirited discussion on ‘Does Agile work,’ chaired by Brian Rabon of Braintrust Software, for which I did my bit to fuel the debate and had a great chat with Brian afterward.”
• Inspirageek: A video with a rundown of the sessions attended by the Inspirageeks.
• Nashville SEO: “Here is my ethical SEO presentation  … I did for the informal unconference section of Barcamp Birmingham 2009. Its not pretty, but pretty information rich (aka useful) for the introductory or intermediate SEO.”
• Scott Kitchens: “The day was packed. The sponsors this year were extremely generous and we were all very thankful. The event was free and provided lunch and t-shirts.”
• StudioNashVegas: “The Birmingham tech community is strong, and not just with coders.  There are some great designers, developers, and entrepreneurs in Birmingham.”
• Tammy Hart: “The networking that was going on in the hallways were just as beneficial as the presentations. Business cards and ideas were flying everywhere you turned, and everyone was just having a great time in general.”
• Zero/Love: “One of the best parts was not from the scheduled sessions. It was the sessions in the halls that I found the most interesting. How several very opinionated individuals can get together and discuss everything from the type of music someone listens to, to local Birmingham Politics.”

The group photo:

• From Matt Sheets

What did you learn? And did I forget to add your post or presentation?

[In part 2, I’ll share ideas on how to improve BarCampBirmingham for the next event.]

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