Students, alumni, faculty, and local information professionals filled South Hall for the School of Information’s fifth annual InfoCamp, an ‘unconference’ for the information community.
The morning sessions featured three keynote speakers: Nancy Douyon, UX program manager at Google; Ryan Choi, manager of developer advocacy at Twitter; and Tantek Çelik, web standards lead at Mozilla. The afternoon sessions followed the ‘unconference’ format: none of the breakout sessions, speakers, or topics were set in advance. Instead, participants arrived with their own ideas and planned, hosted, and presented their own sessions.
“It was hard to know what to expect, because you don't know what people are going to talk about until you get there,” said first-year MIMS student Ian MacFarland, who was attending his first InfoCamp. But the result was a wide range of discussions, panels, and presentations, led by a wide range of participants.
“There was a palpable sense of excitement when people started pitching their session ideas,” said MacFarland. “At first, you’re not totally sure who’s there or what their backgrounds are. The way it all comes together quickly creates a real energy.”
For the fifth year, the Berkeley InfoCamp was entirely student-led; first-year MIMS students Shaun Giudici and Jenny Lo headed the team of students who planned, organized, and marketed the event. In addition to organizing the conference, several I School students prepared and led afternoon sessions, including sessions by Brian Bloomer (MIMS ’15) on Bitcoin, by Christina Pham (MIMS ’14) on video game interfaces, by Isha Dandavate (MIMS ’14) on storytelling, by Nick Doty (Ph.D. student) on Google Glass, by Raymon Sutedjo-The (MIMS ’14) on information visualization and the city, by Sayantan Mukhopadhyay (MIMS ’14) on data science as the “next sexy job,” and by Jake Hartnell (MIMS ’14) on web annotation and e-publishing.
“I was floored by the level of volunteer participation,” said Giudici. Lo agreed; “I was blown away by the level of shared responsibility and enthusiasm.”
It was especially meaningful for Lo to be co-organizing the event, since she attended her first InfoCamp at Berkeley one year ago as a prospective I School student. “As a prospective student, InfoCamp really gave me an idea of all that the field of information can encompass,” she explained. After attending last year’s InfoCamp, Lo committed to attending the I School. With several more prospective students attending this year’s InfoCamp, Lo really hoped the day gave them a sense of the wide range of topics that the I School is engaged with.
InfoCamp provided an opportunity for students and information professionals to network and learn from each other. “The non-students and professionals at InfoCamp really seemed to enjoy networking with the students,” said Giudici. “And it wasn't just ‘career networking’ for the sake of getting a job — it was based on a genuine shared interest in the same topics.”
MacFarland agreed. “As I School students, we’ve discussed a lot of these ideas and approaches in the classroom, so it was great to get the perspective of people engaging the same ideas in a professional context,” he said.
Giudici and Lo were impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of all the participants. “People seemed really engaged with the content of all the different sessions,” said Giudici.
“There was so much going on that I felt very plugged in to a network of ideas and interesting projects,” said MacFarland. “InfoCamp was a really rapid-fire intellectual environment.”
All photos courtesy of Priya Iyer.
