Hop on board the BarCamp Tour!

• Posted April 13th, 2011
• By tsondermann (bio)
• Filed under: Barcamp, Community, Events/Presentation, Technology

Some of us spent last weekend overlooking the Charles River from the beautiful offices of the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge, MA.

The occasion? BarCamp Boston. We’re big fans of Camps in general. WordCamp, NewbCamp, PodCamp, Summer Camp.

What’s BarCamp? “… an international network of user-generated conferences (or unconferences). They are open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.” According to Wikipedia. To us, they’re a great opportunity to spend a day or two with some of the smartest and most creative people we’ve ever met.

Like most unconferences, BarCamps start with a bunch folks putting up post-it notes on topics they’d like to present or discuss. The crowd votes with some checkmarks on the post-its and the topics with the most votes get moved the schedule. Easy peasy. The topics this past weekend included nuclear fission, BBQ, the US Educational System and how to run your business like Genghis Khan ran his empire. You never know what you’re going to get, but you can rest assured that it will be awesome.

BarCamps take place all over the world and if you ever have the chance to attend, you should hop on it.

This year, BatchBlue is taking our love for BarCamps on the road as a sponsor of the 2011 BarCamp Tour. We’ve joined our friends from Wufoo, MailChimp, Grasshopper and Shopify to help sponsor 10 BarCamps over the next twelve months. We have stops planned thus far in Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, OR. (We’re also looking for more cities to visit.)

In addition to bringing some interesting minds and ideas to participate in each city, we’re also bringing our love of lawn games. Particularly cornhole, the startup recreation sensation that’s sweeping the nation!

We’re also bringing beer.

Why is BatchBlue a sponsor? We love smart, creative, dynamic, DIY people! BatchBlue software was built on the philosophy that having lots of different interests outside of work creates a more interesting and therefore fruitful workplace. Getting a bunch of cool people in a room to work on and think about interesting things is something we’ll always get behind.

So keep an eye out for announcements as we add more cities to the Tour, and let us know if you’re going, we might even let you win at cornhole.