The Fun in Grand Geekery
Registration for Mindcamp 2.0 opened up this morning. It certainly isn't for everyone, but the event does have a wide range of appeal. The first Mindcamp was overwhelming, exhilirating, frustrating, and wonderful all at the same time, and ever since then Seattlest has been looking forward to the next one.
The general idea behind Mindcamp is to have an "unconference." Most tech conferences are arranged around a series of speakers, with small breaks in between. In a lot of cases, those small breaks are where the most interesting discussions happen. Rather than work against that nature, Mindcamp is entirely free-form. There's only the slightest amount of discussion pre-planning, and for the most part discussions are ad-hoc, ranging from the serious ("information overload") to the not-quite-so ("coffee hacks"). If a topic runs short, that's fine, if it runs long, then it can move to another space, but the general idea is to foster a real sense of community over the course of 24 hours. A consensus was reached among many attendees that more than the geek community needed to be represented, and the word of mouth campaign would seem to go a long way to making sure that that's the case.
If you're interested, you might want to jump on registration. The first one sold out over the course of a few weeks, but this one will probably fill up much faster, even with the $25 fee.
