Chris Heuer's Insytes

I may have been a principal organizer of the Web 2.1 BrainJam, but it truly was, “Of, by and for the people”. It was not about expensive versus inexpensive, though that was a part of the inspiration – it was about enabling real conversation between people with different backgrounds to expand our understanding of one another and the world around us. It was about bringing smart people together for ad-hoc collaboration, fertilizing the conversation with positive intentions, setting a little direction and watching the magic happen. It was about trying some new things in the realm of the unconference and so much more.

While calling it Web 2.1 was a bit of marketing finesse, the intentions were true – we, the creators of technology, should learn to speak the language of the ‘average man/woman’ and remember it is not about the things people use insomuch as it is about the people who use them. The ideals of what we happily called Web 2.0 earlier this year have been overtaken by the buzz. Web 2.1 was about re-fortifying those core values and bringing some attention back on the people rather than the technology and the hype. Web 2.1 was about bringing creators, users and facilitators together in conversation – to this end, I feel comfortable calling it a success.

Enric posted some very insightful video in addition to the piece that Brian Shields produced for KRON4, Scott from Laughing Squid had a nice post and many photos are available on Flickr. I will be pointing to more articles over the next few days as I get to read them all.

With this email, I wanted to once again thank all of our Patrons for supporting this experiment and putting their faith in our ability to pull it off. I also want to thank my girlfriend Kristie, without whose help I could never have done this. Given the feedback of participants thus far, it would seem we will be doing more of these in the near future – though the what, how, why, who and where questions are still up in the air.

Lessons learned will be gleaned over the next few days along with a discussion centering on what is next. As of now, one thing is for sure, we will be building a community around BrainJams to help others do these types of events, and we hope to collaborate with the BarCamp folks to work towards common goals. If we are remotely successful at getting non-developer business professionals to share more of their knowledge and experience through BrainJams, we will have taken giant strides in making the world a better place. I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to be a part of this in whatever role I end up playing.

The final accounting will be finished in a couple of days after we return a few items to the store we did not use and take care of some other minor administrative stuff. But I wanted to share the good news now – we expect to donate nearly $1,000 to the Internet Archive once the final checks are in. We have also decided that we will donate all the money from registration fees, about $140, to the Creative Commons fundraising drive.

In the end, my best hope in regards to how this event is perceived, is that anyone else can do what we did by understanding how the systems work, how to use Web 2.0/2.1 tools and believing in themselves enough to take that all important leap of faith.

Empower to the people.

Tech Tags: web+2.0 web2.0 web2.1 web2point1 web+2.1 brainjam brainjams blogoposium1 Web2.1BrainJam barcamp InternetArchive CreativeCommons