Barcamp Pune 5: Freedom to Be

Barcamp Pune 5 is just around the corner. We have been planning this one for a really long time now. I remember having discussion with Rohit about BCP5 in June. Woops it has been a long time and this just reconfirms my faith that, to do a good Barcamp you should start planning just one month in advance. So after a long delay of 5 months and over 500 mails among the group (including Rohit, Priyank, Kiran, Amit and Aditya) and after 5 "almost final" dates later the Fifth edition of Barcamp in Pune is finally happening. The only bad thing is that I will not be able to attend this one :(

Barcamp in Pune has always been an exciting event to attend. The community of tech enthusiasts in and around Pune is vibrant and has a lot of variety in terms of their techincal capabilities. The nice thing is that a lot of geeks in Pune love to turn up for the BCP, I hope it will continue with this edition of Barcamp Pune as well. I am equally excited about the fact that BCP has been a favourite among the young techies and they have always turned up in large numbers in past events. I hope that when they come back this time, they do bring in with their experiences with technology. It is always exciting to hear how youngsters dabble with and challenge the technology.

Barcamp Pune has always been a very focussed Barcamp, never diverting the focus from being a community event and giving more attention to sponsorsor chanting. Well BCP has been lucky to get some really good sponsors in past who were active participants and understood the idea of Barcamps. This is my personal view that more and more camps in India are increasingly becoming a place where sponsors turn up to pitch their products, services or brands and while doing all that they dilute the whole essence of camps. Barcamps were supposed to be place where techies would come and discuss their experiences in an open environment. The essence of the Barcamp was freedom, freedom from rules, freedom to learn, freedom to share... The sponsors also took the freedom to ruin it all. When we started thinking about Barcamp Pune this time we had an idea that BCP5 will be a camp with "Back to Basics" theme. That means we would try to go back to the basics of Barcamp and make the environment coducive for learning and sharing and we made a budget of 1.5Lakhs. We got excellent response from sponsors and atleast 4 of them were ready to send us money. When we made it clear to them that we will not like them to ruin the camp for us but work with us to make it better they were hesitant. In all this while (it lasted around 3 weeks) we came up with an idea why not go for a "Free Camp". A camp that is free of sponsors, a camp that is free of blatant marketing pitches and a camp that is purely a Barcamp to it's core. The idea was accepted unanimously by all the group members. Later on, We had to refuse 3 - 4 sponsors and some of our past sponsors who were ready to give money and work with us. When they heard the idealogy behind Free Barcamp Pune they really appreciated it. So the fifth edition of Barcamp Pune is Free. I hope that a lot more camps in India and in other countries would follow the same way of doing camps and keep the spirit of Barcamps alive.

I always end my Barcamp posts with, "see you at Barcamp, do stop by to say hi". This time I am not going to be around so if you miss me drop by on my blog to say hi :).

Enjoy the Barcamp Pune and enjoy the freedom!

Tarun Chandel
For the love to Barcamps