It’s hard to believe it, but the second national PublicMediaCamp is just a few days away. We’re expecting close to 300 people this weekend, including public media enthusiasts, coders and public media staff representing more than 40 stations and other organizations. For many of us, it’ll be a sort of homecoming, since a large number of last year’s attendees are returning. For others, this will be their very first PubCamp or unconference. Either way, there’s gonna be a lot of stuff going on, so I thought I’d put together this post talking about how to prep for the PubCamp and get the most out of it while you’re here in DC.

Before Coming To DC: What To Pack

Weather in DC can be a bit unpredictable in November, but as of now the forecast for this weekend is pleasantly autumnal, with sunny skies and highs in the upper 50s. Let’s hope this remains the case through the weekend. Either way, though, it’s definitely jacket weather, and you can never go wrong with packing layers. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to bring a small umbrella, but here’s hoping you won’t need it.

If you have a laptop, iPad, or some other type of wifi-enabled device, please plan on bringing it. We’ll hand out wifi logins for all attendees when you arrive. And if you can bring along an octopus plug, that’d be great too. We have a decent number of outlets in the building, but they’re not limitless, so having splitters so we can share the power supply will be greatly appreciated.

Perhaps most importantly, though, bring ideas for sessions. Remember, PubCamp doesn’t schedule its sessions in advance. Each morning we’ll spend a short period of time planning out the day’s schedule – more on that later. But if you’re planning to lead a session, we’d strongly suggest you post some information about it on our proposed session page. This will give other attendees an idea of what you have in mind, and let you browse the dozens of other topics that’ve been suggested so far. Please note that posting your idea here doesn’t guarantee you a session slot; you’ll have to be around for the start of each morning, when we’ll finalize which sessions are taking place.

Friday Night Happy Hour

Once again, we’ll kick things off Friday night with a happy hour at Buffalo Billiards, from 6pm to 9pm. It’s located at 1330 19th St NW. The easiest way to get there is to take the Red Line on the Metro and exit at Dupont Circle’s south exit; when you come up the escalator it’ll be across the street. We’ve tentatively booked the Victorian Room there – the same room we used last year. So when you get there, go downstairs to the main entrance of the restaurant, then hang a left around the main bar til you get to the room. Hope you can join us for a bit that evening.

Saturday and Sunday Mornings: Get An Early Start!

PubCamp will be held at American University’s Mary Gradon Hall. The hall is located in the main quadrangle on campus. If you’re driving, there’s free parking in the main lot at the corner of Nebraska Ave and New Mexico Ave NW. Once you park, cross the street and enter the university quad; Mary Gradon Hall is located on the far side of the quad and to the left. We’ll have signs directing you across the quad.

If you’re planning to take the metro, we’d strongly suggest you get an early start. The metro is notorious for having delays on the weekends, and it’s really important you get here before 9am, since that’s when we’ll plan all the sessions for each day. Seriously, you don’t want to miss the opening session, so try to plan on getting here at 8:30am at the latest.

The closest metro to campus is Tenleytown-AU. From there, you can either walk about 10-15 mins southwest on Nebraska Ave, which is a couple blocks south of the station exit. If you walk, you’ll want to keep going southwest past Ward Circle; the campus will be on your right just after that. Or you can take the free shuttle that departs for campus a block east of the metro on the eastern side of Wisconsin Ave. Either way, allot yourself enough time to get to campus. And we’ll have coffee and breakfast waiting for you.

Board Planning

Each morning of PubCamp, we’ll kick things off with board planning. It’s pretty straightforward, though may seem a little chaotic if you’ve never been to an unconference before. After a quick welcome from the organizers, we’ll go around the room and introduce ourselves. Yes, all of us. When you introduce yourself, you need to keep it really, really short – just your name, organizational affiliation if you have one, three words to describe yourself, and if you’re planning to run a session, the name of that session. If you start going on about yourself, what you do and how happy you are to be here, we will cut you off, as we have just one hour to get all of this done.

As people introduce themselves and propose sessions, we’ll have volunteer note-takers writing down the names of the sessions and handing them to us. We’ll then begin placing the session names on a large board, with spaces for each time slot and room available. There’s always some horse-trading involved here – we may need to consolidate your session with someone else’s, or move it around in some other way, so please be flexible. If all goes well, by 10am we’ll know how we’re going to spend the entire day.

Social Media At PubCamp

Not surprisingly, there’ll likely be a lot of social media activity taking place at PubCamp. If you’re on Twitter, please use the hashtag #PubCamp for all of your tweets. If you’re running a session, you may want to give the session a secondary hashtag, but please be sure to use #PubCamp so all the tweets can be found easily. If you plan to blog or upload any videos, photos, etc, to sites like YouTube or Flickr, please use the tag PubCamp. No need to use the hash mark on those sites, as that’s primarily a Twitter thing.

Saturday Evening Reception

Immediately after the last session of the day on Saturday, we’ll have a reception in the same room we use for the opening session. We’re still looking for a few more sponsors for the reception, so if you’re interested, please go to our Eventbrite page and you can buy a sponsorship ticket. Sponsorship begins at just $50. It’s certainly not required, but we’d truly appreciate it if you can help chip in for the event.

The second national PublicMediaCamp will be back in DC the weekend of November 20-21 at American University. You can register on our Eventbrite page. Meanwhile, over at the PubCamp wiki, you can post session ideas, learn more about the venue and hotel options, and see a draft of our schedule.

If you’re interested in helping sponsor PubCamp, go to our registration page then select the “sponsor” ticket and include your sponsorship amount. Sponsorship starts at just $50, so we’d really appreciate your support!

PublicMediaCampOPB has been rescheduled for Tuesday, September 21, 5:30-9pm

Calling all technology enthusiasts, journalists, students and media makers! Bring your ideas, your wish lists and your “what ifs” and join us for brainstorming and discussion about how public media and the community can better support each other.

When: Tuesday, September 21, 5:30-9pm; light dinner provided

Where: Oregon Public Broadcasting, 7140 SW Macadam Avenue, Portland OR 97219

Registration: Online at http://pubcampopb.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to our sponsors — OPB, CPB and  NPR — it’s all free, though advance registration is required.

Many of you might be wondering what you’ll be doing during tomorrow’s PubCampNC. Here ’tis:

Thanks so much for being a part of PubCampNC (@pubcampnc) in-person; and remotely; and via live stream. North Carolina’s first-ever PublicMediaCamp, a one-of-a-kind unconference hosted by UNC-TV (@unctv) and MCNC (@mcnc), seeks to strengthen the state’s public media engagement through ongoing collaborations with the public: i.e., you.

This collaborative environment begins with content creation and sharing. Content creation and sharing is not only the cornerstone of public media, but also an essential part of the PublicMediaCamp experience. To begin, we want to let you know the many ways you can contribute and let your voice be heard before, during, and after PubCampNC:

PubCamp NC| Where Everything is on the Record | All presentations and sessions at PubCampNC are on the record; blogging, podcasting, live tweeting, and presentation-sharing are all strongly encouraged using the Twitter hashtag #pubcampnc. As such, you are encouraged to bring your laptops, tablets, smartphones or any other connected device and plan to connect, collaborate, and engage throughout the day.

PubCampNC Blog | (http://www.publicmediacamp.org)
As part of the national PubCamp blogging experience, PubCampNC is currently participating in posts at publicmediacamp.org. This site is used to begin conversations, where you can then comment on posts and link to them in your own blogs, tweets, and other social media presences.

PubCampNC Wiki | (http://wiki.publicmediacamp.org/PubCampNC)
In conjunction with the broader PubCamp wiki, PubCampNC has set up a local camp wiki—a collaborative space where PubCampers can edit pages and plan their own camps. Think of it as an active repository for the work we’ll be doing on August 20. From the PubCampNC wiki you can “Join the Workspace,” and add your session comments, session notes, share and embed presentations, and start your own PubCamp.

PubCampNC on Slideshare | (http://www.slideshare.net/group/publicmediacamp)
In addition to being a part of the in-person conversation, during PubCampNC your organizers will be focused on content creation and publishing, detailing who attended, what happened, and what emerged. This is crucial, as content is the key form of social currency that will be exchanged between PubCampNC and other local camps. In order to add content to the body of knowledge around PubCamp, we’ll leverage media-sharing sites like Slideshare and its playlists to distribute information on the wiki and blog. To get involved, create an account at http://www.slideshare.net and join the PublicMediaCamp group (URL listed above).

PubCampNC Google Group | (http://groups.google.com/group/public-media-camp)
As much as we encourage the use if social media for content sharing in PubCampNC, e-mail remains a primary channel of communication for most people online. As a result, e-mail discussion lists such as Google Groups are very effective tools to connect our local community during and after Camp. As North Carolina’s PubCampers, we encourage you to join the national group (see URL above).

PubCampNC on Twitter | (https://twitter.com/pubcampnc)
Share your content, comments and questions with the Twitter community via the hashtag #pubcampnc. Got a little extra space in your tweet? Add the hashtag #pubcamp and let a national audience of PubCampers know what you’re up to. And follow PubCampNC now (and from now on) at @pubcampnc.

As mentioned, PubCampNC adopts an unconference format, during which there is no audience, only participants. In addition to being a partner in content creation, be prepared to take an active role in making the conference what you want it to be—both online and off.

On Friday, you’ll be putting the “public” back in public media. And we can’t wait.

Thanks again.

Want to start the discussion early?  Join us for a pre-camp happy hour at the Scottish Arms!  6 p.m. on Friday, August 13th.

Location – The Scottish Arms

PubCampSTL is just around the corner!  So far, we have about 100 people registered, and we can all look forward to a day of community, public media, and talking about how we can collaborate to make St. Louis a better place!  In preparation for PubCamp, consider the following questions:

1. The biggest issue facing St. Louis is…
2. My one hope for the St. Louis region is…
3. If public media could do one thing for me and my community, it would be…
4. I’d be really interested in working with public media on…

When you check in on Saturday morning, we’ll give you a post-it note so you can write your responses down and post them so the whole group can see what everyone’s saying.

See you Saturday!!

We see Boston as both a media-rich and tech-rich city. We think Boston’s pubmedia presence should draw upon its resources and become a leader in media innovation. By throwing open the doors of the imposing new WGBH station for one day, we want writers, producers, designers, hackers, developers, community leaders and long-time media makers to bring in talent and leave with work to do. We want to increase the new media reporting we see growing throughout public media. We expect public media staffers to form new working relationships with guests who can inform their stories on local and national levels. We expect guests to leave having a new sense of access to their local public media stations. We expect to have new seedlings of ideas to incubate in our local news and public media stations, with the help of new friends. We expect the people of Boston to know “something happened” at 1 Guest Street on August 21 that changed how their media stations work together.

When: 8 a.m. – 7 p.m. Saturday, August 21

Where: WGBH Educational Foundation | One Guest Street, Boston MA, 02135

This event was organized with the help of people from WGBH, WBUR, OpenMediaBoston.org, PRX and PEG access stations in Brookline and Cambridge.

Learn more about our goals for the PublicMediaCamp here

After registering, you may suggest a session you would like to lead on the wiki at http://wiki.publicmediacamp.org/PubCampBostonSchedule

Based on the insights of Kivi Leroux Miller (@kivilm), a leading source of information and guidance for nonprofits with limited resources, @unctv, host of PubCampNC has put together a little Prezi on “The New Realities of Public Media.” What do you think?

On Friday, August 20, 2010, UNC-TV will partner with MCNC to host North Carolina’s first-ever PublicMediaCamp (PubCampNC). PublicMediaCampNC will take place at 10 AM-4 PM from MCNC’s Research Triangle Park’s facility [3021 E. Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889]. [map this] Event check-in will begin at 9 AM.

For general registration:
http://members.unc-tv.org/unctv_pmc

For remote registration:
http://members.unc-tv.org/pmc_remote

Join us!

PublicMediaCampOPB has been rescheduled for Tuesday, September 21, 5:30-9pm

Calling all technology enthusiasts, journalists, students and media makers! Bring your ideas, your wish lists and your “what ifs” and join us for brainstorming and discussion about how public media and the community can better support each other.

When: Tuesday, September 21, 5:30-9pm; light dinner provided

Where: Oregon Public Broadcasting, 7140 SW Macadam Avenue, Portland, OR 97219

Registration: Online at http://pubcampopb.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to our sponsors — OPB, CPB and  NPR — it’s all free, though advance registration is required.