Bar Camp Bangkok Returns: BarCamp Bangkok 3 (Rise of the Geeks!)

For anyone who read the first few posts in this blog last year, you might remember that in August I wrote about the first BarCamp Bangkok. It was a two-day event, held on the (beautiful) campus of Chulalongkorn University. I actually posted a second blog entry from my phone, via email, where I gave a mini-wrap-up of my experiences on day one.

BarCamp is actually a user-generated content symposium, not a camp to learn how to make drinks, despite the name! Many of the people who show up come with a prepared presentation on their favorite I.T.-related topic, and at the beginning of the day, they post their topic on a wall. The topics with the most votes are get a room to present. There were upwards of eight or ten presentations going simultaneously last year, which sometimes meant choosing between hearing Google's team discuss Google Apps, or sitting in on the "How to date Japanese Girls - Tips from a Japanese Girl" (which was insanely popular with the Thai guys, natch!)

Oh - for anyone wondering about BarCamp 2, that was held in Vietnam. I would loved to have gone; Franz Nitz, the friend I went to BarCamp at Chula with, did go to the one in Vietnam - I'll have to find out from him how it stacked up! Since he has a Google news-alert set up on his name, I'm betting he'll find this post, and let me know ;-)

BarCamp Bangkok 3 (hit the link for the official site) will be held on May 23-24, 2009 at Sripatum University. The Sripatum website does have a map, but the entire site is in Thai (and completely in Flash), so I'm posting a Google Map of the location here:

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Or just view the map in another tab/browser.

I'm definitely planning on going again, this time for both days. A friend from the U.S. (but who is actually German) is hopefully visiting during that time, and since he's in I.T. also, we'll hopefully both go, and report back here on how it goes. Last year there were great presentations from both big shops, like Google and Mozilla (where I got a great Firefox sticker for my ThinkPad), as well as smaller companies and individuals. Even Franz gave a presentation on creating an Agoda affiliate website (which I'm betting he'll do again this year!)

Anyone else planning on attending? Leave a comment below if you've got a great topic to present, or a topic you're hoping to see.