If you've been to barcamp before, or even done the slightest amount of reading about it, you're well aware that anyone is welcome to do a talk at barcamp. It's true! If "speak at a conference" is on your someday-maybe list, maybe this is your year.
If you're waiting for someone to encourage you to do a talk at barcamp, here's the encouragement: Please! Speak!
You don't have to have a huge slide presentation, or some sort of airtight defense like you might have had for your thesis (if you even did a thesis defense -- I certainly didn't). You just have to have a subject that you're interested in, and that you know something about, and would like to hear questions about it that other people have.
If you do want to do a talk, you probably should start thinking now about what you might talk about. For example, I'm toying with a couple ideas. One would be a discussion aimed at programmers about how to improve their deliverables by exploiting the non-technical people around them (And you thought marketing folk just made work for you!). Another idea I had was some variation of the old "Why don't more women go into tech careers" talk, but with the slant of examining why lots of men DO go into tech careers. I don't know about that idea; the last thing we need is another boring discussion about gender differences.
Anyhow, there's also a couple things I'd like to hear other people talk about, if any of you know about this stuff, because I sure don't. For example, the current state of DRM in Canada, and all the controversy around that, because I'm too lazy to read up on it myself, and I'd be more interested in a discussion about it than reading news articles or Wikipedia.
Also, I'd love a session on animation, or stop motion stuff. It looks cool, and again, I'm too lazy to take a class. If you know how to do this, maybe you could demo something? That would be awesome.
If you have ideas for talks, your own or someone else's, please add it to the Talk and Hear sections on our wiki page. We've created three very flexible tracks: Art, Science, Business. We chose them to help reflect the notion that Technology is about more than just ones and zeros (although it's also about that). We do want to hear about the art, science, and business of technology. If you have an idea that you don't think fits into those tracks, it's okay to propose it anyhow.
Good luck generating those ideas! Can't wait to hear what everyone has to teach us all.
