BarCamp Nigeria Update

Hello and welcome to this maiden edition of the BarCamp Nigeria update. A lot has happened in the past and a lot is still happening.

First of all, we’ll really like to apologise for not being able to hold BarCamp Nigeria on our previously announced date - February 13th, 2009. We were unable to hold the event on this date mainly due to problems we had with our logistics. We’ve done away with most of the issues we had and have scheduled a new date.

The new date is Saturday April 25th, 2009. The venue has been tentatively fixed at the Tom Associates Training Center and Conference Hall (pending confirmation on availability) and the theme of this year’s Barcamp is “Web 2.0 opportunities and role in driving innovation.”

For those n00bs out there who don’t know a thing about BarCamps, A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of people to share and learn from each other in an open environment. Because of it’s nature, it’s hardly strictly formal. There’s only one rule every BarCamp participant needs to abide by - contribute! It’s that simple.

So what to expect?
You’ll get to listen to keynote presentations by seasoned experts in the tech industry, discussions, networking sessions and my favorite - breakout sessions. If you’ve attended any seminar or conference, all these activities should be well known, probably except for breakout sessions.

In breakout sessions, participants volunteer to lead a discussion on a certain topic. Depending on the number of topics and rooms available, some sessions may be merged or not taken at all. During the breakout sessions, other participants get to choose which breakout session they’ll be interested in attending. It’s really during the breakout sessions that you get to discuss a particular technology, topic, method or whatever as the case may be with others. You can read up more about BarCamps at the BarCamp website.

So what do you do?
Soon enough, when we’ve tidied a number of aspects concerning the event, we’ll be opening up registrations for the event. Please bear in mind that the facility we have can only take so many people so we have limited spaces available.

In the meantime however, you can tell your friends, colleagues and acquaintances about the event. It’s really going to be big and we are having talks with interesting personalities that will be coming for the event (updates will be published on our Twitter profile and on this blog).

If you will like to sponsor or volunteer, we welcome your input and can contact us by writing to barcampnigeria@gmail.com.