"There were a whole lot of people who didn't feel like they had a community to plug into and that changed overnight," said Bryant, chair of the planning crew for this year's BarCamp and chief operating officer of e-commerce startup BorderJump LLC.
Today, the technology "unconference" is expected to draw up to 600 people to Cadillac Ranch bar and grill off Broadway, a doubling of the first year's attendance that Bryant considers one sign of Nashville's making strides in rising from a second to first-tier technology city.
Programmers, social marketers, bloggers, and Web and graphics designers, among others, will participate in a day of mingling and making speeches and presentations to others about their latest projects — including new Internet applications and various topics of interests.
BarCamp is touted as an "unconference" because the free event is user-generated or self-organized. Participants, including those who want to make presentations, had to sign up online in advance. Sessions are assigned gathering rooms at BarCamp based on levels of interest, with one room set aside for unscheduled sessions.
The brainstorming falls into categories such as: content, code (programming), marketing, social media/networks, gear (hardware), and Nashvegas, which relates to this city's tech community.
An addition this year is the Nashville debut of Ignite, basically five-minute speed presentations featuring 20 slides that automatically rotate after a few seconds. It's actually a post-BarCamp event, beginning at 4:30 p.m. at The Big Bang bar off Broadway.
Between each BarCamp, the community stays in touch through social networking sites including Twitter and a monthly Geek Breakfast Nashville, where topics might be podcasting, blogging or open source technology.
Business opportunitiesRelationships forged at BarCamp sometimes lead to business opportunities. Consider Tim Choate, CEO of Murfreesboro Web software technology company Bondware Inc., who attended last year's BarCamp.
Choate recalls chatting with a handful of programmers and has since done business with some of the Web-hosting companies he met.
"It's pretty effective in attracting the people involved in new technology, Web technology and Internet-type businesses and in engaging people that are working in those areas," Choate said of BarCamp. Sponsors this year include The Tennessean , e-mail marketing firm Emma and CentreSource Interactive Agency.
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