Review BarCamp Berlin 3

As you already read last week I went to the BarCamp Berlin 3 on the past weekend. It was a nice weekend not only because of the Camp itself but also because of being in Berlin! Together with my colleague Hendrik we spent full saturday and half sunday to participate in sessions mainly web technology and information management.

The Location

The BarCamp took place in the “Hauptstadtrepräsentanz” of the Deutsche Telekom right near the popular Gendarmenmarkt. Actually it was a very nice building and an awesome lounge, but since the sessions were held inside a big room with temporarily seperate walls the acoustic was pretty bad and sometimes sessions were hard to understand.

The Sessions

Beside a lot of sessions concerning microblogging and the legendary “web 2.0″ there were also interesting sessions on information and knowledge management.

The first session I went to, was held by Hartmut Wöhlbier a former founder of germany’s motor-talk.de forum. He asked the question not on how to search for new information but how to remind and keep information you’d already found! Within this session, Wöhlbier presented Zootool, which aims to exactly the topic. Unfortunatly Zootool only addresses web content – but what will happen to the content of your local harddisk? In my opinion the whole web hype totally forget what is already on people computers.

The next session was all about how to introduce a wiki into a company to save knowledge. Fortunately there was no discussion about what knowledge management actually means but a lot of practical experience about how a atlassian wiki is used inside a software development company. It came up that it was not only important for knowledge about a certain topic but on how to know WHO has the knowledge about this topic! (who was doing this session?)

Another session was held on sunday by Roy Uhlmann and Dr. Klaus Holthausen from Queap (their BarCamp Review) about how to automatically gather metadata from unstructured information on the web. Uhlmann and Dr. Holthausen were doing a nice job on explaining the complexity and problems of the “semantic web”, and methods on how to automatically create metadata by using ANI. Their opinion is, that it is not possible to create semantic web through the (manual) annotation with metadata because taxonomies and within metadata is also time dependent, so metadata is changing all the time. ANI stands for “Artificial Natural Intelligence” which stands for their algorithm to recognize metadata and calculate similarity to other information.

My Critics on BarCamp Berlin 3

I already complained about the bad acoustic before. Another issue was about some sessions (I don’t want to say names) were held by companies which were pretty superficial and looked like they aimed to sales only. I don’t have a problem on companies earning money and doing marketing at the BarCamp, BUT, please, provide also valuable content to the audience!

Thank you very much Orga and Sponsors which made the BarCamp Berlin 3 happen!