People felt left out of Web 2.0 in past events because of the cost of attending such a high-powered professionally produced program. Similar to how some people felt left out from FooCamp by not being invited, but channeled their energies positively to create Barcamp with an open door principle.
Last year I had a conversation with Jen Pahlka about having a Barcamp-style event in parallel to Web 2.0, calling it Web2Open. Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were similarly lobbying. With Jen's effort, the good graces of Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, some help from Brady Forrest -- it's all happening.
Free and open for you to participate:
- Sunday, April 15 - Ignite!Expo 7-9 pm
- Monday, April 16 - Community Roundtable 10am - 5pm
- Tuesday, April 17 - Web2Open 1pm - 7pm
- Wednesday, April 18 - Web2Open 1pm - 7pm
Throughout Web2Open, the Mashroom will be open for people to bring their APIs and do something together.
Web 2.0 Expo is going to be quite an event itself, of course. We're talking Moscone scale now. I'm on a keynote panel about Enterprise 2.0 alongside Satish Dharmaraj, Dan Farber and Subrah Iyar. Later Wednesday afternoon holding a workshop with Rob Rueckert, Michael Lenz, David Meyer, Joe Schueller.
There are also a couple of parties.
