Brief report on BarCamp Bangalore

Last Friday and Saturday were a complete whirlwind, but absolutely exhilirating. After traveling for just over 30 hours and arriving in Bangalore at 3pm local time (2:30am back in California), I went to my hotel to get some rest before reporting to Yahoo! Bangalore for our first international Hack Day the next morning. Then, after a fun night out with Yahoo! Bangalore hackers, it was up relatively early the next morning and back to the other Yahoo! office in Bangalore (yes, there are two) for BarCamp Bangalore.

And this is where the story ends. . . for now. As Tara mentions at the end of her excellent post about BarCamp Bangalore, I’m trying to write something a little more substantial and lengthy about the Bangalore experience, and if I’m lucky, it will put everything into a larger context that will be useful to someone besides me — but it’s going to take longer than a blog post and involve some research, fact-checking, follow-up interviews, and some wordsmithing.

As I was thinking about the form to drive what I wanted to write, I decided that a blog post just didn’t feel right, then Chris took care of helping me out in my thinking without really knowing it (I’m quoting out of context here, so you should read the rest):

. . . blogs are a great mechanism for communities to talk amongst themselves or for independent voices to gain an audience, but they are not entirely a substitute for a unified perspective that can connect the pieces and reassemble a complete story. The role journalists traditionally played was to tell stories that interwove diverse and contradicting views in the interest of keeping the public informed.

For all of the blogging greatness that surrounds us, sometimes the form simply falls short. While I’m digesting the Bangalore experience for the longer piece, I did want to point out the excellent stream of photos shot by Alex Muse with the faces and names of BarCamp Bangalore attendees. Most of the time, the talk in the media about countries and economies and outsourcing and GDP de-personalizes everyone involved. Scrolling through the faces of BarCamp Bangalore, I see passion, creativity, and the kind of geeky excitement that gets me up every morning. I see partners in making the world a better place through technology. I’m glad Alex took those photos.

(Note: the photo is of Kaustubh Srikanth with his mega-geeky-cool PHP shirt. Kaustubh is a new friend from Bangalore who — along with his girlfriend Tripti and fellow hacker Shreyas Srinivasan — showed Tara, Chris, and me around Bangalore last Sunday. Thanks, guys. You made me feel very welcome in Bangalore and I hope to return the favor soon.)