I attended BarCamp-Madison 2008 this weekend. It's the first time I've been to a BarCamp and it was significantly better than I expected.
Madison is a medium-sized city, but is the primary seat of government and university in Wisconsin (with lots of UW research spinoff companies). So there were a large number of techies in attendance, especially those representing the non-profit sector.
I presented my Fuse+PDF talk again (I'm into recycling :-)) to a small but very curious audience.
One very interesting discussion was about how to aggregate all of the local user groups in the area (Perl, Linux, Python, Java, Rails, PHP, etc, etc) into a tighter network. One of the products of that idea is the nascent web608.org (608 is the regional telephone prefix), which hopes to provide a central place to host mailing lists, meeting calendars, etc. The group hopes to identify a shared meeting space so all of the various users groups will have something tangible in common. I'm very excited about this plan. We also discussed the challenge of time-balancing evening user group meetings with children. People suggested a babysitting coop, or a kid-friendly room at/near the meeting space. Hmm...
The biggest bummer for me was when I described my involvement with Perl::Critic as "helping Perl developers write more readable code". A Python user laughed and said "Good luck with that!" :-(
