Learning Barcamps

High above the clouds covering Europe and thus artificially detached, I reckon this to be the best place from which to look back at the past few days (but maybe we could say weeks), the RitaliaCamp and all.

For the impatient
If you want my impressions in a nutshell, I think the RitaliaCamp was a great success, as it reached all the aims that were planned and so long discussed on the wiki and on the blog. That said, there is of course plenty of room for improvement, under both the organization and flow perspective, and my feeling is that we just started to explore this new media. Moreover, specifically in this occasion, there have clearly been serious problems in conveying the ritaliacamp concept through the blogosphere.

If you want to follow me in a more in-depth rant about the “applied barcamp” idea and lessons learned, keep on reading.
If you’re looking for the most accurate (so far) report about the RitaliaCamp event instead (and if you can read Italian), have a look here at folletto’s (you may also want to have a look at the few links collected by Kurai on Apogeonline).

Once upon a time…
In order to better scope the event and following remarks, I think it will be useful to take a short look back at how did this adventure start (to those who know all the facts, please don’t hesitate to correct me, I’ve poor memory and I know it ;) ).
It all began with me and folletto trying to organize, for the 31st of March, the second BzaarCafé, a likemind-like event that had its first edition in early february in Milan.
Those were the days when the italia.it portal was announced. I couldn’t resist the temptation to experiment the TransitCamp (see also here) model on what seemed like a perfect subject and suggested to turn the BzaarCafe into such an applied barcamp. The Swarm, the skypechat we (as in bzaar and friends) are using to keep conversations going and drag people in replied with so much excitement that we had to create a twin chat just to handle the barcamp-related traffic. Wiki and name came shortly after, together with the first misconceptions about the final aim of the barcamp itself: apparently many interpreted the ritaliacamp (I can’t remember if the name was already chosen) as an event to actually build a shiny new portal instead of just defining the state of the art of the ideal tourism oriented internet application.
I think it was during the first SkypeCast (a one hour long weekly conference call we set up to de-brief past actions, plan next week issues and discuss major ideas) that at least the core organizing team reached an agreement on what exactly the barcamp would have been. That was March 5th. Nevertheless, it seems that most of the blogosphere never got that message, hence much of the disappointment for RitaliaCamp being something different from what they expected.
The question I had here is: why?

Lessons Learned

A case of signal vs. noise
I’m sure there are better explanations of this phenomena, but I like to picture it as a perfect case of the butterfly effect: the signal (that was not totally clear in the beginning), has been released in the wild where it was picked up by the bystanders, who amplified and retransmitted it over and over throughout the blogosphere. Problem is, what got amplified was a slightly different message from the original one. And when you multiply such random errors at scale, you get the legendary tornado.

Lesson learned #1: when you want to broadcast messages, do it in simple statement.

The interesting thing is that a month worth effort from all the core team members in trying to clarify the message wasn’t able to change the general idea and expectations.

Lesson learned #2: you get only one chance to convey a message. Choose wisely.

Why is that? De Bono in one of his books (I think it was lateral thinking) wrote about blindness by openness: if we know a route from A to B and we’re fairly comfortable with it, we won’t notice a new shorter route when it becomes available. So I think something similar happened this time: many people read about the RitaliaCamp experiment as an initiative to rebuild italia.it from scratch, liked the idea, subscribed on the wiki (maybe without reading most of it) and never came back, showing up on the 31st in Milan full of their own idea and expectations.
Here I must say that hyperstructure of the wiki doesn’t help the casual surfer in getting the whole idea of what’s going on…

Lesson learned #3: hide complexity. Let the participants deal with a wiki page, not with an hypertext.

A physics of Bureaucracy
Communication-wise we had troubles in two other directions. One was the hosting structure: while being hosted by a major university has countless advantages (rooms - plenty of -, support material, facilities, usually decent transports, but also visibility and authority for those who are concerned by that), we had to spend a lot of energy in getting through all the bureaucracy.

Lesson learned #4: energy is wasted both in active efforts (talking, moving, fighting) but also in passive stances (waiting)

Eventually, thanks to the super-human commitment of Maurizio, the venue was secured, though we still had to deal with unexpected barriers from subsystems like IT and security.

Lesson learned #5: Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight ahead… but in complex systems the will of the system itself can still be opposed by its single components (again, if the communication within the system is not perfect)

Hence at the last minute we got no network and had to shut down the party one hour earlier than expected. Which brings us to the last comm-oriented problem: lack of connection with the outside world.
Surprisingly enough, this condition that would be almost unacceptable at an ordinary barcamp (whatever that means) was barely noticed this time from the inside: at eleven o’clock out of more than one hundred participants only 20 had laptops with them; in the blogosphere, on the other hand, everybody was waiting in vain for some signals and a mean to interact with the event.

Lesson learned #6: the overlapping of physical and virtual spaces and the fact that a “concept” (identity, enterprise, event) exists in both worlds requires higher/new forms of perception and awareness

Luckily, Robin Good acted as a bridge between meatspace and the net for the whole day, so at least those willing to search found a way to follow the conference through his voice and webcam.

Architecture and participation
As Paolo correctly pointed out, spaces shape social interaction. I must say that my own critic to some previous barcamp experiences was to choose spaces too big to allow that sense of “closeness”, friendlyness and protection so essential to engage the participation dynamics.
Aware of this risk, we chose the big room afraid of not being able to host everybody for the initial and final “global” sessions.
Many of the participants were at their first unconference experience and even some of the usual suspect suffered from the cold space and had the impression of being lectured.
During some sessions this room worked poorly, especially when used as a normal room. A few conversation though used it in a lateral way: using the top gallery as the actual room - and it was perfect for an audience of 20/25 people.

Lesson learned #8: people are smarter than you. So don’t worry too much, it’ll take time, but they’ll find a way

As for the rythm of the day, I think we had this slow start but after the first two sessions participants started distributing themselves among the different rooms and conversations. And in the corridors as well.

Lesson learned #9: put constraints on people and as soon as possible they’ll explode and scatter like would-be stars in the big bang; show them the rainbow and they’ll home on the golden pot.

And talking about nice surprises, the Mind Map, proposed as an additional social/cognitive tool for sharing ideas and aggregating them around the event’s topics worked very well, attracting dozens of post-its.

My RitaliaCamp

My RitaliaCamp was spent in the corridors, in trying to play the timer role, stalking sessions for a few minutes a time and answering interviews.
At some point I just decided that (since my presentation was going to be about barcamps, crowdsourcing and creativity and everybody was asking me about more or less that stuff) interviews were going to be my presentation slot, unless some spot was left uncovered (and it didn’t happen).

If you’re interested, look for example at my contribution to robin good streaming here for an idea of it. If you want the whole thing, let me know and I’ll try to record a video ;)

Bzaar vs. Ritalia
My whole involvement in the Ritalia affair starts from my interest in social interaction design. I, together with a few other friends, are using this virtual non-space that is Bzaar as a garage sor such experiments that so far brought to the Italian scene events like BzaarCamp, BzaarCafe, the concept of the Swarm chat and some more… the most recent being the RitaliaCamp.
The event is now through and what is left are its deliverables: the excitement, a lot of ideas (that will be refactored by the community in the next few days), an open invitation to contribute more ideas and proposals and, last but not least, the evidence that 280 people gathered on a saturday in Italy and spent a whole day sharing their opinions, investing their passion and creating ties in the name of the Ritalia project (and yes, many of them were there only for social networking purposes, so what? It means they believed that was the place where to find skillful and passionate professionals). A thing that many said impossible just a few weeks ago. A thing somebody addressed as the biggest brainstorm in Italy, ever. This means there are no excuses. This means that if there is a kernel of strong willed individuals that wants to try and start to create a true new portal for tourism in Italy, but actually anything, it is clear now that there is the good will, the passion and the skill to do it.

This also means that bzaar is not ritalia and I think that now that its support to ritalia as a social interaction lab is over it should look ahead for the next challenge or formula to experiment.

Lesson learned #10: be yourself, no matter what they say.

Side effects
As a nice side effect from this experience, we got a vibrant, active, enthusiast team/community. We spent so many hours chatting on skype, working on scaffolding the wiki and then physically moving boxes and mind maps last weekend: through highs and lows, we shared the excitements and fears, and eventually I think that’s the most valuable “treasure” I earned from this experience.

Aftermath
London is approaching, better to shut down the laptop. With a naughty smile I start reading Easyjet’s magazine on this Ryanair plane and, surprise surprise, I find an article about crowdsourcing! Hey, the idea took off indeed ;)