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Assessing Barcamps: Incentives for Participation in Ad-Hoc Conferences and the Role of Social Media

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Assessing Barcamps: Incentives for Participation in Ad-Hoc Conferences and the Role of Social Media Assessing Barcamps: Incentives for Participation in Ad-hoc Conferences and the Role of Social Media Sebastian Dennerlein Robert Gutounig Peter Kraker Graz University of Technology Medical University of Graz Know-Center Inffeldgasse 13 Auenbruggerplatz 2 Inffeldgasse 13 8010 Graz, Austria 8036 Graz, Austria 8010 Graz, Austria [email protected] robert.gutounig [email protected] @medunigraz.at Rene Kaiser Romana Rauter Julian Ausserhofer Joanneum Research University of Graz FH Joanneum Steyrergasse 17 Merangasse 18 Alte Poststraße 152 8010 Graz, Austria 8010 Graz, Austria 8020 Graz, Austria [email protected] romana.rauter julian.ausserhofer @uni-graz.at @fh-joanneum.at ABSTRACT Keywords Barcamps are informal conferences whose content is not de- Barcamp, Social Media, Motivation, Self Organization, fined in advance, often referred to as ad-hoc conferences or Knowledge Exchange, Communities of Practice un-conferences. Therefore, the outcomes of a barcamp are largely unknown before the event. This raises the question of the participants' motivations to attend and contribute. To 1. INTRODUCTION answer this question, we conducted an exploratory empirical Barcamps are informal conferences whose content is not study at Barcamp Graz 2012. We applied a mixed-method defined in advance. They are often referred to as ad-hoc con- approach: first we used a socio-demographic questionnaire ferences or un-conferences. They aim at an open and demo- (n=99) which allowed us to characterize the 'typical barcam- cratic way of communication, and unconstrained exchange per'. Second, we conducted qualitative interviews (n=10) to of knowledge and information. Unlike traditional confer- get a deeper understanding of the participants' motivations ences, there is no strict distinction between the audience to attend, expectations, and the use of social media in that and the presenters, as everyone is encouraged to participate context. We identified three concepts, which could be de- and contribute. ducted from the interviews: people, format and topics. We The first barcamp was organized in 2005 as an alternative found that the motivation to attend and even a common to the invitation-only Foo Camp (Friends Of O'Reilly). The identity is quite strongly based on these three factors. Fur- obvious name chosen for similar events open to the public thermore, the results indicate that participants share a set of was Bar Camps, since both foo and bar are popular place- activities and methods by following the barcamp's inherent holders for variables in computer science, much like the John rules and make extensive use of social media. Doe persona. The name 'barcamp' is therefore a playful al- lusion to its origin in the technically-minded Web 2.0 com- Categories and Subject Descriptors munity. Barcamps are typically held over a weekend, i.e. they H.4.3 [Information Systems Applications]: Miscella- last 2-3 days. Participants do not pay a conference fee, neous; I.2.6 [Learning]: Knowledge acquisition as expenses are mostly covered by sponsors, and the event is (self-)organized by convinced barcampers, committees or General Terms non-profit organizations. The program emerges out of a get- Human Factors, Theory together in the beginning of each day: participants introduce themselves, typically using three hashtags, briefly declaring their interests and expectations, and proposing topics that they want to talk or hear about. This allows for identify- ing other participants with related interests and for merging overlapping session proposals. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for Still, more session proposals than session slots may arise. personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are Those of most interest to the audience are assigned to a not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies slot in the session raster by voting. After session planning, bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to the participants spread into sessions. If there are multiple republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific parallel tracks, they may switch whenever they want. The permission and/or a fee. i-Know ’13 September 04 - 06 2013, Graz, Austria complete group only convenes for refreshments, concluding Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2300-0/13/09 ...$15.00. sessions, and feedback to the organizers at the end of the 1st Rule: You do talk about BarCamp. are usually attended within leisure time. But why would 2nd Rule: You do blog about BarCamp. anyone sacrifice his or her spare time to attend an event for 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your which the outcomes are completely unknown? Even bar- topic and name in a presentation slot. camp veterans sometimes struggle to come up with a con- 4th Rule: Only three word intros. vincing answer to this question. 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities This paper is addressing exactly these motivational incen- allow for. tives. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study during 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists. and after a large barcamp in 2012, present its results and 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have discuss them. Alongside this investigation, we examine the to or until they run into another presenta- characteristics of the participants of Barcamp Graz 2012. tion slot. As a second focus, we aim to shed more light on the role 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you social media play in this context, and how exactly they are HAVE to present. (Ok, you don't really used. Finally, we give an outlook and compare barcamps HAVE to, but try to find someone to present based on the achieved insights to other similar theoretical with, or at least ask questions and be an in- frameworks such as Communities of Practice (CoP) [9]. To teractive participant.) the best of our knowledge, this is the first exploratory study that empirically analyzes motivations of barcamp attendees. Table 1: Rules of Barcamp. Through our study, we were able to infer the following three motivational aspects or concepts, respectively, with respect to motivation for attending barcamps: barcamp. Extended breaks between session slots guarantee opportunities for follow-up conversations and networking. • People: Meeting and networking with interesting and The sessions' format is not restricted to a certain struc- heterogeneous people of the barcamp community is ture, other than the maximum duration as allocated in the crucial session plan. Those who have proposed the session usu- • Format: The very open structure of the barcamp dri- ally act as moderators, and often incite the participants' ves the motivation to attend interest with an introductory presentation using prepared slides. But there are no strict limitations to how a session • Topic: The common subject area of the (sub-)camps can evolve. Participants are encouraged to actively take part implies shared interest between participants and de- in that process. Hence a session can for example have the termines the emerging topics to be discussed format of a presentation, a discussion, or a participant can even ask for a certain question to be answered by other par- The rest of this paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, ticipants. Since barcamps do not require any material to be related literature on the barcamp concept is discussed. Sec- submitted in advance, participants are encouraged to share tion 3 presents the object of our study, Barcamp Graz, and the results collaboratively via social media. our methodology regarding the development and realization Barcamps are mostly self-organized and characterized by of questionnaires and interviews. Results are reported in openness. There is a widely accepted set of rules1, see Ta- Section 4. Section 5 discusses the three inductively inferred ble 1. However, there are no restrictions regarding the adap- concepts in detail. Finally, we present a future research tion and evolution of the barcamp idea. One such develop- roadmap with respect to similar theories, constructs and ment is the emergence of barcamps with a special focus. movements. An example for this is the IndiaCamp2 which aims at in- formal exchange of experiences and knowledge about India, 2. RELATED WORK connecting like-minded European and Indian citizens in a Although the occurrence of barcamps and other forms of familiar context and inspiring new collaborative projects. un-conferences has increased noticeably in the past years in Barcamps may also consist of multiple sub-camps with spe- many countries, few scholars have investigated these new cific topics. Other forms offer workspaces for more practical event formats. This lack of research interest is quite sur- collaboration, often with charitable intentions. Such events prising given the increasing number of academic conferences are usually referred to as a CreateCamp. that add barcamp-style sessions to their program (cp. WWW Barcamps can be considered a success story. Since their 2012, WebSci 2013). At the same time, the corpus of practi- beginning, the idea has spread worldwide. The website cally oriented, non-academic texts has grown considerably. barcamp.org lists events on all continents. In Austria, there Most publications in this tone are freely available on the 3 were 27 events in 2012 alone , and the number has been in- Web and aim at promoting the idea of barcamps by provid- creasing in the last few years. Aspects of the history of the ing case studies and learnings from completed events. Quite barcamp movement have been documented by Bernhardt a few texts contain manuals and step-by-step-tutorials for and Kirchner [1]. future barcamps | cp. Ernesto and Leal [5], Lapointe [8], For people not familiar with the concept, the appeal of Louie et al. [11], and Bernhardt and Kirchner [1]. barcamps may not be clear.
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