My first unconference

Last night I attended CloudCamp Atlanta, part of the CloudCamp series. CloudCamp is an unconference, which is a less-structured way of holding a conference. In the pure unconference model, there is no pre-set agenda; attendees collaborate to schedule talks at the beginning of the conference. In a very real way, the attendees take ownership of the content; if you don't have a good experience at an unconference, it's your own fault.

That's in theory, of course. Last night's event was fairly good, but because of the limited time available -- four hours, on a workday evening -- some sessions were pre-filled, including an expert unpanel. John Willis did a good job of arranging these sessions, but it seemed to me the sessions were a mixed bag.

In addition to the unpanel, I attended sessions on "what is a cloud?", using Puppet to manage cloud computing and Microsoft Windows Azure. The "what is a cloud?" session, led by Ben Charian, ended up going in an unpredicted direction, due to some specific questions about end-user applications in the cloud. The audience was mostly business-oriented, as opposed to technical, which means the conversation ended up rather high-level, but it was still interesting, overall.

The Puppet session, which I came to late, was led by Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs. It was a more technical session, which was great, but the direct applicability to cloud computing seemed tangential. Still, very interesting stuff, and good information to know.

The final session on Windows Azure, led by Chad Brooks of Microsoft, was also a mixed bag for me. The subject was perfectly suited for the unconference's charter, but I really chose the session as the lesser of several "evils" (not imply any of them were actually evil per se).

All in all, it was a good evening, but I can't help thinking that it might have turned out differently if more of the open spaces had not been filled beforehand. I did have several good conversations with other attendees, which is the main purpose of any conference, and learned of the existence of AWsome, the Amazon Web Services user group.