BarcampSaigon, That Awesome Unconference, Comes To Vietnam on July 7th

These days in Vietnam, there are tons of events in the startup space. There were two hackathons and a Startup Weekend just this month. Big and small events have been littering the landscape from Mobile Day to StartMeUp to TECx to Agile Forum. But before all of these events came into play, BarcampSaigon was one of the first events in the tech-oriented space for the startup and larger community.

Barcamps are a worldwide phenomenon. The concept was started by Tim O’Reilly in 2005 in Palo Alto, but it’s been replicated across 350 cities across the world. The main idea is allowing participants to choose and submit topics instead of organizing committees and teams deciding the content for an event. In other words, even you, dear reader, could present. It’s totally open, and organized by the community, for the community.

Oddly enough, in Asia, this concept has taken off in a big way. Just a few hours’ flight away, the biggest Barcamp the world has ever seen was held last year in the form of BarcampYangon, bringing in 6,400 people. This isn’t an anomaly. BarcampBangkok and BarcampPhnomPenh have both exceeded 1,000 participants each. This trend is seen throughout the region. Since Barcamps allow all participants to create their own topics and present about whatever they want, they’re bottom-up, rather than top-down. So each one has its own character and themes. In BarcampYangon, the most popular topics included Unicode and Ubuntu. In BarcampBangkok, many of the topics revolved around online rights and design. In Vietnam last year, many of the topics headed into mobile, but in the past has seen a plethora of topics within startups, technology, marketing, and business. Each Barcamp is a reflection of the latest trends in each respective tech ecosystem.

It’s the open and youthful nature that has somehow appealed greatly to the up and coming countries throughout Asia and Southeast Asia. This is in stark contrast to Barcamps throughout Europe and America, where the numbers stay at humble numbers in the range of several hundred and sometimes even smaller.

BarcampSaigon was started in 2008 by a ragtag of foreign and Vietnamese entrepreneurs, tech nerds, and designers. The original founders have since gone their own ways and a new team of people have stepped up to the plate, including myself, Tomo Huynh from Taembe, Anh Dao Le from Keewi.me and a bunch of other awesome students and professionals. This year we’re hoping to see over 1,000 participants. We’ll be pulling out all the stops by adding in mobile apps, new networking activities, and training presenters.

You can check out the BarcampSaigon iOS and Android apps here. And if you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so on the homepage here.

(Full disclosure: I’m one of the BarcampSaigon organizers.)

(Editing by Steven Milward)