kinshuk sunilit aint no, dessert if therez no caek

OSScamp Delhi March 2009 is finally over. All doubts and concerns about the various experiments have now been resolved. How have my experiments fared? Not good. Not bad, either. So what happened at this OSScamp ?

Participation has fallen to almost 50% of OSScamp Delhi September 2008. I do not understand this completely. The registrations were decent enough – 287, but the turnout was only 76. There must be a reason to it. One reason I can think of is that the number of registered sessions on the website was only 8. That could have been one deterrent to people coming to the camp – their doubts on lack of quality at the camp. This is why I do not appreciate a sessions-oriented unconference. People need to understand that unconferences are successful and have good quality only when people join. So what if only 8 talks have been registered on the site, 1 out of every 20 guys (being very pessimistic) volunteers to give a talk at the camp. so if a 160 people participate, we get a total of 16 talks now. Plus, the informal discussions improve manifold. But then people have the habit of putting themselves before everyone else. Especially in Delhi. Countless people who had been promising pure-awesomeness at the camp but didn’t even participate have been making this excuse to me – we were busy! Yes, that’s an excuse. But never mind you, you coming to the camp would have been a waste in any case.

Next, since the participation was low and camps were thinly spread, I got a plenty of opportunity to test out my social sandbox concept. I have come up with a lot of inputs and challenges for the concept of Social Sandboxes, will be discussing them in detail here soon. Next OSScamp Delhi will see a more focused effort at creating a Social Sandbox though. Long gone are the days of a talk-oriented unconference.

The demographics for the camp was also pretty interesting. Look at the images below:

I am not going to talk about the sessions that took place at the camp, as a lot of other blogs have already covered them. I will simply share the pictures of the camp and my talk.

Pictures from the camp:

My Ignite talk on Social Sandbox at the Camp:

Suggested Reading

• OSScamp Delhi – Towards a Truer Unconference (2)
• OSScamp Pantnagar scheduled for February 2009 (1)
• OSScamp Delhi September 2009 Announcement (0)
• Leaving for Chandigarh – In Retrospect – FOSS Around Me (0)
• Day Two: Here Comes The Sun (2)