BarCamp Boston 4 was a great time. Being my first barcamp, I was amazed at how thoroughly the event was self-organized and how smoothly it ran. If a conference could be implemented as a wiki, it would be a barcamp. Truly an eye-opening experience. This image is the schedule board at the end of the event. It shows both Saturday and Sunday with a column for each of the rooms (holding between 60 and 120 people each) and a row for each of the half-hour time slots.

For the uninitiated, here’s how it works:

• Upon arrival you register, get a name tag (in a literal sense, it has your name and three “tags”). My tags were EditMe, wiki, and web publishing. Everyone wearing a name tag is really helpful in meeting folks and remembering their names.
• An opening session with everyone attending gives intros to sponsors, describes how the event works, and has everyone in the room stand up and state their name and three tags.
• If you want to give a talk or host a discussion, you write a title and your name on a big post-it and put it in the ideas area of the board. About half the talks are open discussions with a facilitator, while the other half are more formal presentations. In both cases, there’s a lot of participation from the whole group.
• Attendees frequently review the ideas board and check sessions they’re interested in. This gives a would-be session-holder feedback as to whether there’s interest in their idea before they schedule the session.
• Session-holders (anyone there can be a session-holder by choice) place their post-its on the schedule. Session-holders can move their own cards around, but not others’ cards.
• Organizers open up the schedule in half-day chunks. Pre-lunch sessions are open in the morning, afternoon sessions open up at lunch time.

I gave two sessions. On Saturday, I gave a talk on EditMe’s implementation of server-side JavaScript. It was very well received. The site I used to present with is here: http://barcamp.editme.com. I’ll leave it up for at least  a few months.

On Sunday, I gave a talk on my experiences moving from dedicated servers to Amazon’s EC2 service. I made a presentation for this, but since it offered little more than the words I would be saying, I just talked with the group from notes rather than dimming the lights for a presentation. You can download the presentation here - it’s an outline of what I talked about.