BarCampNYC2 a Success!

I helped put together BarCampNYC2 this past weekend, and by all accounts, it was a huge success. Over 250 attendees signed up, and we had the benefit of a Microsoft’s cavernous office in midtown Manhattan to accommodate them.

People came from as far away as Philly and Toronto for the two-day + sleepover technology un-conference. My friend Nate Warner from Red Bull set up an entire lounge complete with huge lovesacks, sofas, and a 8-player Halo tournament setup. Dave Cohn spent both days and the night covering the event, and wrote an article for Wired about it.

As is par for the course, the event was free and open to all.. with one catch: everyone who attended also had to lead a session. And we had some awesome sessions.

Mike Goelzer, Nick Gray, Kara Canal, and I organized the first BarCampNYC back in January, and we barely got a chance to sit in on sessions because of all the work we needed to do to keep things running smoothly. Well, we learned a bit from last time, and this time around BarCampNYC had an incredible team of organizers. Tons and tons (and tons) of thanks to everyone who pitched in: Eric Skiff, Naveen Selvadurai, Noel Hidalgo, Jesse Chan-Norris, Rachel Clarke, Anders Ramsey, Kelly Lupo, Josh Keay, CKS, Courtney Pulitzer, Abhay Kumar, Sahadeva Hammari, and Peter Laudati*. This wouldn’t have been as great as it was without all of you.

(* Peter deserves special thanks for convincing management to let 250 strangers take over the Microsoft office for a weekend, sleep in it, and pay nothing for the privilege. Peter even got Microsoft to buy us 10 wireless routers to provide open internet access and over $1,000 worth of food.)

If you came, I’d love to get your feedback. I’ll probably be doing a recap on organizing similar to what I did after the last event.