A BarCamp is an “unconference” and has been described as:

“an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.”

For those of you not familiar with the BarCamp format and concept here is a good video that explains it.

This year the organisers of the BarCamp tried to make the event more interactive and give more time and space for participants to present. With three conference rooms available for the whole day talks were organised in three loosely grouped tracks. ICT4D, open source and developers, this meant that there was plenty to suit all the participants of the event.

Due to this increased focus on participation by the audience the event was a runaway success with so much participation from the attendees that not everyone who wanted to present was able to by the end of the day, in fact even after the official end of the barcamp presentations were still going on!

It was particularly exciting to see some new Cameroonian grown ventures being launched at BarCamp, Churchill from Afrovision Group presented on his new social network for Cameroonians – Camerborn, Gaston presented on his new venture sawa market and the Limbe Labs funded Fritz talked about his innovative new mobile sms app store iYam.mobi. It was also great to see the guys behind real estate and rental site Koutchoumi.com presenting on some of the technology behind their site. It’s still very early days for the Cameroonian Internet market but the level of innovation and creativity sprouting up is very exciting and these young entrepreneurs should be encouraged as much as possible. Hopefully many more will follow their lead over the coming years.

Other notable presentations were made about Citrix Xen Server by a core developer from Citrix, talks on thin clients, talk about using 3D to improve education through simulation, Javascript prototyping with iXEdit, NaYaBoh an opensource internet proxy, and adding Cameroonian languages into Ubuntu! It really was very exciting to hear the buzz at this event.

The Google Workshop

Google also participated and one of their product managers did a workshop on Google App Engine. It was very exciting for many of the participants and the fact that a company like Google would care to attend and even sponsor gave many people a sense of excitement and pride.

Once again this year Ringo provided super fast wireless Internet. Most of the participants were addicted to it during the day and the Ringo logs we looked at later proved it was maxed out over the course of the day. Due to the bandwidth available there was a live blog and a fair bit of coverage via twitter during the event that was followed by Cameroonians in the diaspora all over the world, from the US, France and even in places as far flung as Nepal! Some following online complained that there weren’t enough tweets coming out of the event but as one of participants noted “people were too busy participating at the event to be on twitter constantly!” This was definitely true with a large amount of audience participation in all the talks and workshops. The outside areas were also always full with participants networking and sharing their ideas.

BarCamp Cameroon is growing and gaining maturity and popularity in Cameroon and the participants are inspiring each other to even greater heights. This has definitely become the premier event for grass roots Information Technology and a must attend event for all technologists in Cameroon.

As you can see from the countdown on our sidebar the next BarCamp Cameroon is just around the corner and once again we are a sponsor of the event providing logistical and financial assistance.

There are two great headline sponsors for the event Google and Ringo and it looks like the next event will be an even bigger success than the first one. Register for free here: http://barcampcameroon.eventbrite.com/ Tickets are selling out very quickly!

For those of you wondering what a BarCamp is here is a short definition: a BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

This is event is for technologists, hackers and other technology minded people to come together in an open discussion forum to present and talk about technology and demonstrate the cool things they are doing with it. All are welcome (you just need to register) and everyone should be willing to come along ready to present something (add your talk to the program here).

To get an idea of what happened at the last event, check out some of the pictures in flickr here.