Presentations are 25 minutes long, with 5 minutes in between. You’re welcome to sit in on a presentation or hang around in the lounge and talk; it’s all the same with us. If you run a presentation, we don’t care how you run it–so long as you don’t get us in trouble! Give a monologue, a Q&A or a round table; it’s your topic, your presentation, your audience. If people didn’t want to spend 25 minutes on your topic, they wouldn’t be there.

Certainly you have some relatively unique experiences. What do you do for a hobby? What’s something you managed to fix that you’re proud of? It doesn’t matter if the height of your accomplishment is changing your car’s oil or if you’ve wardriven half of the Grand Rapids area; if people aren’t interested, they won’t show up at your talk. If they are, they will.

Sure you are! If you know the first thing about a subject, you know more than people who don’t. And, yes, people who know more than you will probably attend your presentation. Interact with them; you both have something to learn from each other. Chances are, if you’re both really interested in a subject, you’ll find yourselves looking for each other in the lounge, later.

But perhaps you’re…

That’s fine. Come on in, get a look around and a feel for things. It’s a two-day event; come by on Friday, sit in on presentations which interest you or hang around in the lounge and network with other people. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to talk about something later, or on Saturday. You never really know.

If you’d like to be able to listen, but don’t know if you’ll have anything to say, you can still…

Spread the word with our marketing materials. If you want to help plan the event, join the BarCampGR Organizers mailing list.

On the days of the event itself, we typically need people to help at check-in, setup and clean up, to keep the food lines flowing, people to respond to technical issues such as “why won’t the projector work with my laptop” and “could someone turn down the lights so we could see the screen?”