Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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BarCamp Mumbai 4 is around the corner. For the uninitiated, barcamps are “unconferences” that are organized by volunteers and attendants talk about anything and everything under the sun. Since these kinds of events attract people who love experimenting and networking, the kind of audience that attends is skewed towards technologists, programmers, coders, media and Internet enthusiasts.

And like all the other unconferences, these are open to all and anyone can take and/or attend any sessions. There are no rules. There are no formalities. If you like a session, you interject. If you dont like, you walk out. If you are looking for a job, take a session on showing off your skills. If you are looking for clients, showcase your product/service. Its like one large Kumbh ka Mela where everyone is trying to sell and buy at the same time.

Sounds great but honestly I dont really like the concept. With a large audience, more often than not, sessions tend to be unfocused (is this actually a word?), covering really diverse themes, by often not so good speakers (trying to put another bullet point on their CV rather than furthering the cause) and fail to add any real value to the attendants. Please note that I am not implying for a single minute that the quality of speakers is bad or the sessions are shallow, just that the ones I have attended weren’t up to the mark.

And after all the rambling, there has to be a way to make them better and excite the right kind of people. If I was one of the organizers, I would have done the following things to help the cause …

1. Tweak the format. Let is remain an unconference. Just add a theme to it. Something like a codecamp or a markcamp. Where it attracts only a certain kind of audience. Thus at a codecamp, lots of coders with all kinds of experience levels could come in and talk about coding and other things.
2. Pseudo-Workshop. I honestly believe that doing things is a far far better way to learn and experiment than just talking and listening. What if the barcamps were actually workshops? For example someone might take a workshop on Social Media and participants might brainstorm and plan and implement a social media campaign for a product. (Loknath Swain is trying to do the same at BarCamp Mumbai 4). Can there be more sessions like this?
3. Speed Dating. People might argue that BarCamps are a good way to network and meet new people. In my opinion, the meetings are real short and shallow. Although I have seen very very interesting results come out of networking at unconferences but they can be made better. What if in a huge room, all participants are made to meet every other participant for exactly 5 minutes? In these five minutes, both the participants can talk about anything under the sun and if they like each other and want to continue talking post the event, they exchange contact details. That simple.

What do you guys think? Do you have more ideas on how to fix these unconferences? If there are enough good ideas, may be at the next unconference, will put some to fruition.

Coming back to upcoming barcamps at Delhii and Mumbai, although I am not sure if I will attend any of the two but some sessions look really promising. Please attend and do share feedback.

Schedules

• BarCampMumbai 4 is happening at IIT Mumbai on 4th and 5th Oct 2008 (yes its a two day event).
• BarCampDelhi5 is at IIT Delhi on 11th Oct 2008 (they are still debating if its going to be a two day event or not).
• My posts on BarCamp Mumbai and BarCamp Mumbai 2.

P.S.: I had used the word un Conference about five times in the post and everywhere I got the spelling incorrect. Thanks to Shefaly for pointing out. So much so for my language skills :D

Interesting tidbits

• Warren Buffet invested $5bn in Goldman Sachs. Very interesting. Warren Buffet talks about the deal here.
• Anil Ambani sues Mukesh Ambani for Rs. 10,000 crores. Wow. Thats probably the largest law suit ever in the history of Indian Penal System. Though, the reports were later denied.
• F1 gets night vision at Singapore Grand Prix. First ever Grand Prix at night. Although I am not a big F1 fan but I would have loved to see it. :|
• Kapil Dev joined Indian Army as honorary lieutenant colonel. It implies that if you get some accolades at the international level in cricket, you can become a movie star (if you haven’t become one already), commentator, talent manager and now army man.
• Had some free time in office and on youtube saw videos of The Crystal Maze, I Dream of Jeannie, Small Wonder, Different Strokes, Duck Tales, Tale Spin. I absolutely love the TV that we had in the good old 90s. Here is a blog post to remind you of the golden era of television.

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• Got two awesome ideas. iCollect and Discovery of India. Please help spread word and share your thoughts. On second thoughts, I think ideas that are powerful enough don’t really need any advertising/marketing around. They just spread like wild fire.
• Google, HTC and T-Mobile jointly launched G1. The first phone to use much awaited Android. This device will be in a direct competition with “the” iPhone and since Android is an open-source platform, the application development would be much easier and faster. More on this coming soon.
• Prof. Bakshi released Issue # 2 of his already popular BFBV newsletter. This time he speaks about Richard Feynman. As I write this, I have already ordered a Feynman book.
• Removed a virus from my blog. While monitoring stats on my blog, I realized that there lots of exits to a mixlong.cn website. Somehow it was appended to the bottom of index.php file and I had to manually remove it.

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• I am finding myself short of ideas to write on. Considering that I am trying to write a book, short of meat to write on is not really a good thing. Guess need to take a break and not write for few days. Can anyone else give me hints on how to resurrect my writing style?

Guess that’s about it for the day. Later today I am off to a road trip to some place. Really looking forward to it. Will share pictures and videos. At a souvenir, I shot this video with my phone on Wednesday night.

Although I try to avoid comments on anything related to work, but this has caught my attention. Exchange4Media reports that India Post has unveiled a new campaign to try and resurrect the 154 year old organization. As a part of the campaign, O&M Delhi has come up with a new logo and a tagline - “Giving wings to your dreams”, which in my humble opinions looks like a line created with Dilbert Mission Statement Generator

The agency says that the new logo “depicts yellow flourish on a red rectangle, symbolizing an envelope. Yellow represents a rising sun, while red, signifies the dawn of a new era.” I mean all that is fine but it lacks the class and panache of the simple, classic and yet powerful logo. Who would remember the “dawn of a new era” few years from now? I did not even realize that the yellow pseudo-swoosh on the red background is supposed to resemble folds of an envelope.

What about all the people that India post touches? Think for a minute about people who live in semi-urban and rural India? For a lot of them, postmen and post-offices act as sources of information, news, money, access to reading and writing, gossip etc. Would these people be able to adapt to the new logo easily? Would that trust on the postal system stay concrete? Wouldnt there be a disconnect in their minds when all of a sudden they see changes in the colors and imagery?

Agreed that the 150 year old institution is reeling under the pressure from Telephony and Internet (emails substituting letters and postcards), private courier companies (for freight carriage and bulky deliveries) and so and so forth. Agreed that India Post is seen as yet another sarkaari company with bureaucracy, painfully slow work environment, lack of enthusiasm and motivation amongst employees but just a new logo and communication is not the way to go about it.

Project Arrow was an initiative in the right direction - to make post offices more than just delivery and access points for mails (there were talks of setting up Internet kiosks, selling insurance, data collection etc.). The idea was to modernize the postal system and revitalize it. They hired McKinsey to work on the turnaround strategy and with the work so far, I am not very impressed. So much for consults being top preference for management graduates.

Ideally along with a management consult, India Post should be hiring a HR consultant to put some sense in their employees to start with. And then the marketing and branding consultants to help out with communication part. Its always an incremental process and has to be like one baby step as a time.

I am very disappointed with the new logo. And since we live in a democracy, I can not really do anything to stop Mr. Scindhia Junior to actually not use it. And with due course of time we will get used to it. We saw the same with Godrej, Shoppers Stop, Canara Bank, Axis Bank, Union Bank of India and their new logos. There is a huge hue and cry when the new logos are revealed. And with passage of time, people get busy with their lives and forget. The institution losses. The identity is lost. The classic era fades away. Only entity to win is the agency that has created the new logo and has charged pretty bucks for it.

Please also see my Discovery of India. The timing of the new logo and my discovery is purely coincidental!

Just opened my desk drawer and there were hundreds of coins, tens of Diet Coke Pull-Tabs and lots of pencils. I have been collecting these for some time now. And these things are as dear as anything else could be. In fact you can hold these tabs for ransom and I would do anything to get them back.

I am sure people DO collect things - from something as mundane as a stamp to something as interesting as a food bill (or is it the other way round?). Over a period of years, I have collected stamps, coins, matchboxes, postcards, autographs, certificates, marbles, empty boxes, bills, envelopes, tins, sand, songs, books, movies etc. Is it only me who is so engrossed in collecting things or are there more?

Curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know what other people collect. I asked junta on twitter. Within the next two minutes I was told that people collect DVDs, Books, miniature elephants etc.

Logical extension would be a place to aggregate all these things and realized that Flickr and its group is just the right place. Just created this Flickr Group. Please see/share/comment things that people around the world collect. Use the tag “iCollect” in case you decide to upload your pictures.

Don’t you think, its a good way to share what absurd/weird/non-conventional thing do YOU collect?

The thrill of exploring the unknown,

The adventure of going down a road that you dont know,

The mystery behind the tun that you are about to take,

The feeling when you meet new people and you try to come across as interesting,

The realization that you get once you know that you are yet another human being,

are simply too rewarding and too tempting to make you seek travel.