Steve Collins, one of the unorganisers, has put some artwork together and modelled it on some t-shirts at CafePress.
The current plan is to get sponsorship for the first 30 t-shirts and order them soon, and latecomers/those that prefer hoodies/odd sizes can order their own.
We’re hoping to have the artwork and t-shirt order details available shortly. If you are organising a BarCampAustralia event and want to leverage off Steve’s graphics work, contact him at trib AT acidlabs DOT org.
YMMV, but I interpret the unconference concept as Organiser Lite… that is, the organisers aren’t really organisers in a traditional sense, more that they organise the sandbox for the unconference to self-organise within. If I have this wrong, tell me 
So what sort of sandbox does BarCampCanberra 07 need? My guess is, at a minimum:
After that, it is butcher’s paper timeslots in every corner of the room and devil take the hindmost
For the people that have emerged as Organisers Lite so far (Steve, Donna and myself), we also like the idea of tshirts.
The venue would ideally be:
If anyone has venue suggestions email me at aboyd AT smsmt DOT com or comment here.
Cheers, Andrew
Good question. I’ve never been to a BarCamp but I’ve read of them - and with all the buzz about, they must be cool!
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp:
BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The name is a playful allusion to its origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off and response to Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only unconference hosted by open source publishing luminary, Tim O’Reilly.
BarCamps are organized (and evangelized) largely through the web, harnessing what might be called a Web 2.0 communications toolkit. By “open-sourcing” the organizational process of a Foo Camp unconference, that is, codifying it in a wiki and making that publicly available, BarCamp seems to have struck a chord. It has since been implemented in 31 cities around the world and is serving as a reference for unconferences in other fields. The involvement of key figures in the web development community, such as Tantek Çelik and Ross Mayfield, no doubt has helped its adoption.
The procedural framework of BarCamp is similar to Open Space methodology for organizing meetings, but looser. It consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. While loosely structured, there are rules. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing, and IRC.
Anyone can initiate a BarCamp, using the BarCamp wiki. Attendance is monetarily free and generally restricted only by space constraints. Participants are asked, though, to sign up in advance. Venues typically provide basic services. Free network access, usually WiFi, is crucial. Following the model of Foo Camp, the venue also makes space for the attendees, a.k.a. BarCampers, to literally camp out overnight.
Thus, BarCamps rely on securing sponsorship, ranging from the venue and network access to beverages and food.
The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, from August 19-21, 2005, in the offices of Socialtext. It was organized in less than a week’s time, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held across North America, South America, Europe and Asia — from Boston to Bangalore. To mark the one-year anniversary of BarCamp, BarCampEarth was held in multiple locations world wide on August 25-27, 2006.
