FooCamp, BarCamp and now DemoCamp?

I was at DemoCampToronto on Monday.  DemoCamp is a lightweight un-conference style event which is similar to BarCamp and O’Reilly’s annual FooCamp.  Basically, DemoCamp is a free event where you can watch small companies show off and discuss cool new web applications as well meet new people and network.  There is only one rule at DemoCamp.  No power point presentations.  You have to show a working demo of your product or service.

The only demo that caught my interest was Design Bibliography Beta.  It’s a wiki that

“exists to collect and annotate resources of interest to the human-computer interaction, social-computing, participatory design and information systems design communities.” 

Basically, it’s a place to find useful resources and summaries of papers for design and usability academics.

It has a pretty small sampling of resources, but it’s bound to pick up speed in the future.  This service will likely be good for everyone who wants to read summaries of papers on design and usability rather than reading an entire article only to find it was completely useless.

This month’s DemoCampToronto was for the most part, a pretty boring event.  BarCampToronto was much more enlightening.  I admit that BarCampToronto won me over with their free food, but that’s what happens when you have sponsors for your events.  I hear BarCampUSA is in the planning stages and will be available next year.