The first ever BarCamp in Hong Kong was beyond my expectations and considered a success!

We had a disappointing show up at the ice breaker event the night before which lowered my expectation, but it was not the case. Note to self, future BarCamps in Hong Kong should not include bars and alcohol.

On the day of, it was a lot better. The crowd rolled in, filled up the lobby area and BarCamp started to shape up. In total, we had around 100 show up, plus/minus, considering we handed out all our shirts and I know some participants who arrived in the afternoon who did not get them. I have an extra shirt, if you were there and didn’t get one, tell me who you are and why you showed up in the afternoon and I’ll get the shirt to you somehow, it’s XL by the way.

Aside from the chaos, there were some great sessions and amazing participation.

• Mobile Web
• How to run a Hong Kong startup
• Ruby on Rails
• Open Social and Facebook
• How to manage online communities
• Agile software development
• Scaling web service
• …and others

The sessions were scheduled for 30 minutes but some overran and felt bad that we had to cut them short, I left the afternoon sessions to run over a bit. That is something that will need to be discussed for the next BarCamp, sessions that can run as long as they like.

It was quite tech oriented even though we tried not to promote that at first, but the result was really exciting, as Daisy had summed up her thoughts and numbers on BarCamp, as did Rebecca MacKinnon and Laihiu.

We had a lot of positive feedback and many inquired about the next BarCamp, which is always a good sign. This is also a motivation for me to continue to look for ways to improve on building a web community.

Again, thanks for the sponsors and participants who made this event happen. Looking forward to setting up the next BarCamp. I also want to thank Staples in Greece, NY for allowing my parents to buy sticker name tags (yes, they aren’t available here). Although I forgot to bring them to BarCamp, the person closing shop there was plenty nice in allowing my parents to buy the stickers even when the shop was literally closed, so my mom can bring them to HK. Talk about customer service.

Possible related posts:

• Barcamp Hong Kong 2008, This Saturday Sept. 06
• BarCamp Hong Kong is on - 12/15/2007
• Harbork - Make Money with this Content Driven Community
• Entrepreneur 27 Singapore Unconference
• Asia Pacific Web Technology Conference