Barcamp Minnedemo

I attended the MinneDemo tonight and it was definitely a hoot. It was refreshing to see all the bright and cheery nerds come out of the woodwork. Seriously, they would all be at work if there wasn’t any free food.

There were about 60-ish people in attendance at Chang Mai Thai, geared up for 6 web demos emcompassing wikis, aggregation, flight data, rails, and social networking. All awesome, and all local. Big ups to those companies who sponsored the great location and my dinner out.

In Summary:

MinneDemo is the Twin Cities’ own DemoCamp, a miniature, demo driven, version of BarCamp.

MinneDemo is an opportunity to show off something novel you been working on to a receptive audience of fellow travellers. Previous DemoCamps (in other cities) have featured AJAX apps, disposable digital camera hardware hacks, mashups and OSS phone system demos. MinneDemo is thin on ground rules: just prepare in advance, get the word out and, oh, no PowerPoint.

We have a simple goal: to showcase the kick-ass software that’s being built in Minnesota, whether it be open source, corporate, or academic.

This’ll be the first of hopefully many MinneDemos. We’ll have them quarterly, or maybe even monthly if there’s enough interrest.

I didn’t get any good pictures of the event, but since two whole hours have passed, a bunch of photos have appeared on Flickr (naturally).

All in all, it made me really proud to see evidence of a flourishing tech scene right here in Minneapolis. Rad.