SocialDevCamp East has to be one of the best startup community events that I’ve been to this year. It was (well) organized by David Troy, Ann Bernard, and Keith Casey.
The event surprised a lot of people on a lot of different levels. Not only were the discussions interesting and often on new topics to all of us. Another aspect of the event that was different was that despite participation by consultants and people stalking the startup community members (I’ve been guilty of this on occasion), there were a signficant number of principals from startup companies present too. One of them included Clarence Wooten, CEO of CollectiveX.
The best part about this event was that it held true to the Bar Camp ideals - it was democratic and participation happened everywhere (not just in select discussions). And to top things off, there was a good mix of startup, political and non-profit personage in the room.
We sponsored the event and I facilitated a discussion on high impact social media and had the e-campaign director from Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign on one end of the table and people from Seesmic on the other, you can’t beat that in terms of balancing a discussion. Jared Goralnick lead a discussion titled ‘Who Needs VC’s’ that was combined with David Troy’s ‘Amtrack Corridor’ discussion that could have easily been titled ’Startup Community Building 101′. The takeaway from the meeting for me was that you need $1 million in receivables before you ask for a DC area VC to fund you in a social media business. I’d like to think that that isn’t true, but for some that seems to be the case.
The only complaint that I heard (and experienced) was that there wasn’t enough wifi to go around, but that isn’t something unique to this or any other event (I’m hoping that WiMAX will help resolve that).
Go here for event photos on Flickr.
AkshayJava - Trip Report
Alex Hillman - The East Coast Revolution
Ann Bernard - SocialDevCamp Was A Success
Dan York - Calling All Developers
Dave Troy - Awesome People, Awesome Day
Greg Cangialosi - SocialDevCamp and The Baltimore Scene
Harry Chen - so much fun
Jason Thomas - Some Thoughts
Jimmy Gardner - Community Power
Keith Casey - Recap
Kenneth Yeung - SocialDevCamp was neither about development or camping.
Mark Scrimshire - Going beyond throwing sheep
Nick O’ Neil - The Washington Post Rails D.C. Yet Again
Raj Malik - Making of East Coast Silicon Community
Shashi Bellamkonda - SocialDevCamp - A Room Full of CEO’s
Tom Poe - 600block attends, geeks out
Travis J Todd - SocialDevCamp, and oh yeah, LAUNCH!
May 14th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Thanks for the feedback and all the links.
And yes, the wifi was the biggest problem that I’ve heard. The main cause was people live-streaming the sessions. While I appreciated it, I tried to ask them to just record and upload later. Make the network a bit more functional