About

Welcome to the Barcamp Nonprofits! Our aim is to organise a series of events bringing together representatives of IT and digital world with 3rd sector professionals in the UK and all around the world. We are convinced that both sectors benefit from the opportunity to spend a day on informal sessions, creative collaborations and hands-on workshops based on barcamp model. You can find the initial story behind our first event which tool place on 20th of November 2010 in Oxford and which now continues to grow in supporters worldwide here, in this original blog post. Our initial events in Oxford and London received such a great and overwhelming feedback that we have decided to share our idea and allow registrations of local BarcampNFP’s all around the globe. If you would like to organise an event in your location or simply get involved as a volunteer, sponsor or an attendee browse around this site for relevant sections. We are looking forward to your ideas and your collaboration with our teams!

BarCamp Non Profits – London FEB 2012 – Sylwia Presley from FireFly Photofilms on Vimeo.

What is a BARCAMP?

“BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences (or unconferences). They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and were related to open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. The format has also been used for a variety of other topics, including public transit, health care, and political organizing.” (from Wikipedia)

The list of all upcoming barcamps can be found here, we will ad our London event to this list as soon as we have its date, in the meantime you can go to our section of this wiki.

Why Barcamp Nonprofits?

Increasingly social media agencies and nonprofit organisations using social media tools come to realise the potential of on-line interactions and word of mouth for charities and other nonprofit organisations. Commercial brands grow interested in corporate social responsibility. There are a lot of networking events for social media fans and many events for nonprofits but we feel there is a gap between the two worlds. Barcamp Nonprofits was born out of the need to establish and maintain dialogue between users and developpers of social media tools; to brake the boundaries of industry slang in both areas of work 9we help nonprofits understand the world of social media, we help geeks speak the language of nonprofit organisations); to promote the spirit of collaboration and mutual respect without the need to pitch for new client, look for the next social media volunteer or free service.

To give basis to this dialogue we will invite speakers from both industries and we will release equal amount of free tickets to both groups of professionals and fans. Our friends working in nonprofit sector asked immediately if we are worried about opening doors to many agencies? Our response was: no, we all come from or agency or nonprofits background. Sometimes we wear both hats! The very reason why we have chosen the format of a barcamp is to open the doors to both worlds and bring them together at one table. Our social media friends, IT professionals, regular barcamp attendees asked if we are going to expect them to commit to any free work on particular projects or nonprofit campaigns? We said: no. Barcamp is basically a series of brainstorming sessions, sharing of case studies, if at all – asking for support on ideas, not for specific commitment to projects. Our event is not a Social Innovation Camp, not a hackaton. It’s an un-conference where everyone is welcome and the only expectation is to PARTICIPATE on the day.

We are already now – and we will repeat it many times on the way to our event – kindly asking you to leave your professional interest outside the venue and bring your supportiveness, openness and willingness to actively participate (even if it means making your own food! – something that all barcamp attendees are familiar with already). We are bringing this event to you for free and doing our best to invite really interesting speakers to ensure that the core value of the day is provided in advance (thus actually braking one of the rules of a barcamp, but you will have to forgive us this one!;)). But we hope that all of our attendees will arrive with their own ideas and will share those freely in a supportive, friendly environment. If our approach is still not clear, please read the rules of a traditional barcamp posted below.

The Rules of BarCamp

• 1st Rule: You do talk about BarCamp.
• 2nd Rule: You do blog about BarCamp.
• 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
• 4th Rule: Only three word intros.
• 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
• 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
• 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
• 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

by Tantek Çelik as parodied from The Rules of Fight Club, taken from BarCamp.org.