On today (December 15, 2007) I went to the first Barcamp in Hong Kong, it was from 10:00am to 5:30pm which was really equal to a typical work day. I am neither developer nor business representative in the event while I were just a blogger to observe things to happen. Here are my findings:

Population Proportion

It seems to me that almost 40% were developers, 30% were from business organizations (project manager, start up owner), 10% were from NGOs and 20% were unknown (maybe bloggers just like me?). This is just my wide guess, I am sure that someone could give me a better answer.

In terms of nationality, 70% were HongKongers and 30% were Foreigner. However there must be Singaporean because I heard the accent. Language used during the presentations were English while I heard that offline discussions were mostly in Cantonese.

When I left the premises, there were only 2 t-shirt left therefore it should be 98 people joining the Barcamp. Congratulations to the event organizers! 98 is a good number because 8 is longevity and money for Chinese.

Presentation Content

I have to be honest that I didn’t play attention to the presentations everyone were given. It was because of the “weekend ventilation” (not much air-con) in Yahoo! Office while I were just 5feet1, I couldn’t breath any air from the “top-layers” cause I am not tall enough -_- I were not able to concentrate therefore I just kept on taking pictures. You may find them in the Barcamp Hong Kong facebook group.

Environment and facilities

Yahoo! got 3 conference rooms and the Wi-Fi provided by Outblaze FON was convenient. I managed to upload a lot of photos to the facebook group and twittering with my EeePC for real time sharing. We had sandwiches, snacks and drinks provided by various sponsors to cheers us up.

Social Responsibility

Well, snacks are always good however the leftover were not being cleaned properly. I saw half-finished sandwiches and 3/4 bottle of drinks left on the desk. We are technology pioneer doesn’t mean that we don’t have to care about the environment as internet regulatory starts from self regulatory. We really have to pay attention towards these things if we have to conduct any community activities in the future.

Last but not least

I really want to meet and talk to more people however this 1st Barcamp was too rush (30 minutes section, running from one room to another). I hope that the next Barcamp would be conducted in a more relaxing style and I could really make friend and spend time with people.

Anyway Barcamp is good and I’m lovin it! Cheers~~~~~