Was your last conference poor? - MES020

You know conferences. For sure you do. You might be a fan of them. Or even not. You might be even disappointed, as I am after visiting the Embedded Testing 2015 in Munich last week. Although I was invented as presenter, I was not convinced. I mean the topic was really good - no other conference or meeting available covering exactly this specific part in the Embedded Systems realm. But the conference got stuck as a sponsor-driven event which highlights products over general knowledge, marketing over sharing of experience. One could have made a lot more out of this conference. So the participants have finally had only their others to get acquainted with each other, hear the problems, discuss and finally detect the old rule, that the best of conferences are the pauses. Free time which can be used for connecting and sharing. In this episode I wanted to highlight the approach of traditional conferences in comparison to BarCamps. A BarCamp is an un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is the direct response on all attendees who wanted to create and design their own agenda of content. For me BarCamps, the un-conferences are by far the better conferences. Listen to this episode and create understanding about this popular approach to confer.