In recent years ‘unconferences’ have been popularized by the bored, traditional conference-attending masses.  Over the past few years in Philadelphia there has been a flavor of unconference for everyone, including journalists, educators, and tech geeks! On November 10 several of us at I-SITE attended BarCamp Philly 2012.  Though Barcamp Philly is largely geared to the tech and web community, the spectrum of talks varies greatly (from “Transition .js” to “Fermenting Fantastic Foods”). It’s an I-SITE favorite and we were proud to sponsor this year as well as attend.

Beyond the day’s programming, the collective takeaway is that BarCamp Philly is always a great opportunity for discussion and socializing with others in the tech, web, and creative communities in Philly.

I-SITE digichemist, Chris Ell, chose several sessions presented by fellow developers from the Philadelphia community. The “Transition .js” session provided a brief overview of Transition .js – a custom testing framework for javascript that has an in-browser UI built specificly to run cross-platform.  Chris also attended “Nontrivial Node” – another javascript-oriented session.  went beyond the typical ‘hello world’ example of using Node .js and gave attendees a practical introduction to building a web framework in node .js. “ABCs of AWS“, presented by John Rivello of N3RD street company AppRenaissance, explained why using Amazon Web Services and it’s cloud computing platform, EC3 are good for one’s business.

Dana Pavlichko, Web Designer extraordinaire, also attended BarCamp Philly and found one talk in particular inspiring. Kevin Hale (https://twitter.com/ilikevests), Founder and Designer of Wufoo (wufoo.com), gave a talk about Expanding Your Design Vocabulary. Wufoo is a much admired form-building site for its UX and personality, and is used as a primary example in A Book Apart’s Designing for Emotion, by Aarron Walter (http://www.abookapart.com/products/designing-for-emotion). Hale’s talk began with color systems spanning throughout the ages and how different cultures have created their own systems of interpreting color. He spoke about how the area of your brain that processes colors is the same part that processes language, and about how each color has an emotion attached to it.  Everyone interprets color differently, and cultural context plays a huge role in our interpretation of color. Overall, it was a fantastic talk that opened the discussion of how we should be paying closer attention to the details of how we communicate & discuss design. Choose the appropriate mode for recovering data from an unallocated SD card. how to recover files from chkdsk  Slides from Kevin’s presentation can be found here: https://speakerdeck.com/roundedbygravity/expanding-your-design-vocabulary.

I attended sessions on a wide variety of topics (the beauty of an unconference – and perfect for a project manager!). It’s a known fact that I am perpetually hungry and subsequently perpetually eating, so give me a talk on food and I won’t be able to resist. In the afternoon I attended a great (if not slightly smelly) session on food fermentation presented by Amanda Feifer, local food blogger and  ‘fermenter’ extraordinaire. Her presentation inspired me to try my hand at making kambucha and I currently am growing a live scoby in my kitchen at home.  Not to be distracted by food entirely, I also attended a stellar talk by Kelani Nichole, a Digital Strategist at Big Spaceship. The session was titled, “Content Mapping: A Methodology for Structured Content”. She walked us through several of her methods (both tried and true and experimental) for conducting content analysis as she works with a client to build or revamp their web presence. In addition to more traditional methods of content analysis and planning (like creating content audit spreadsheets) she demonstrated several more visual approaches of understanding an organization’s content visually using whiteboards, different colored lists, category icons, and font size.

Chris, Dana and I all found BarCamp Philly to be refreshing.  It gave our team an opportunity to exercise our grey matter outside our daily context and engage with a diverse group of people who are actively engaged in the tech and web community in Philadelphia and beyond.