Had a good time as usual at democamp the other night. It’s fun to watch this thing grow, now with so many camp inspired meetups going on (and more every week) we’re soon going to either the most clued-in and/or the most chronically alcoholic tech community anywhere.
Some feedback though for presenters and organizers at future camp events:
1. Teach us don’t tell us. As always the best presenters don’t just tell us about yet another ruby on rails (YARR) web2.0 they live together in record time for the burgeoning Yak herding enthusiast community of Toronto etc. but rather – teach us about what to learn building it. The Paruba.com folks did this well, they didn’t just show us the application they told us what they learned and what mistakes they made along the way and offered advice for anyone trying to build something similar.
2. Wait until you have users. There’s a temptation to demo as soon as the software is ready, just when you most excited about it. If you are demoing a product and not just pure technology, it’s all still theory until people start using it. there were a bunch of interesting questions last night about how users and communities who are using these new softwares but the answer was always the same – I dunno, we just launched it. Ask us in three months? So my advice, you to wait until you have some users and you’ll have more to teach, or be sure to come back in three months and tell us how it turned out.
3. Acoustics. Again this was a problem for some people in the back. When you have a budgetless organization meeting in ad hoc locations sometimes things like considerations for some systems and acoustics don’t happen. This was one advantage I believe of meeting at MaRS. I seem to recall everyone could hear.
My photos of democamp 7 (John Green took like a thousand)
more photos photos of democamp 7