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Last week I was introduced to the concept behind the BarCamp movement.

Don’t look at me like that – just because I hadn’t heard of it before doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. Anyway, once Justin and Stii had explained BarCamp to me I was pretty excited –I figured I’d blow the whole year’s marketing budget sponsoring BarCamp events all over the continent. I mean, here we have groups of people gathering to discuss and learn in an open environment – what’s not to love about this! And since we’re Africa’s best social media aggregator, it makes perfect sense for us to come on board as a sponsor, right? The problem, it seems is that this group is often microscopically small. In some cases, it’s not so much people meeting as it is one person there. Or at least that’s what it looks like. Right now it’s 5 days before the BarCamp Dakar event, and there’s not one attendee registered. Bummer.

From a business perspective, it won’t make any sense for us to sponsor this event, so even though we’d love to get on board and help, we’re a little tied down by the fact that there will be no-one there to wear our cool t-shirts. Now, it could be that Dakar is an isolated incident and that there are other BarCamps in Africa going on all the time that are packed to the rafters – I don’t know. Are there?

BarCamp Johannesburg’s Wiki shows that there were 26 attendees registered for the event – not a bad result. But my suspicion is that there were probably more people on the day who didn’t register for the event. Did any readers out there make it to this event? How did it go? Please let us know, or better yet – write a blog post about your BarCamp experience for all of Africa to see.

So now the question rattling around in my brain is this – how can we help to raise awareness around the BarCamp events BEFORE they take place, rather than simply taking up space on a t-shirt once the 3 people registered get there? I’m sure that between all the smart folks here at Afrigator (that would be you) we can think of a way to get these amazing events the support they deserve.

What do you think?

Along with Google, WordPress and a few others - Afrigator is now an official sponsor of BarCamp Africa.

BarCamp Africa is a chance for people from Silicon Valley to learn about Africa on many levels: the place, the people, contemporary issues, outlooks, opportunities and more and we are proud to support any initiative that encourages discussions between Africa and the developed world.

For those who don’t know a BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants and you can read some detailed FAQ’s about BarCamp Africa over here.

This year BarCamp Africa will be held on the Google Campus in Mountain View, California, USA on October 11, 2008. If you’d like to attend then book your seat now as there are only limited tickets left.