BarCamp 2.0: be visible…outside the bubble

BarCamp2.0: Outside the Bubble was recently held on December 2 for the book and creative industry.

What is BarCamp?

BarCamp is a participatory conference in which the participants themselves can shape the program and identify the topics that are relevant to them. There are no viewers at BarCamp, everyone is an active creator.

“Last year, our BarCamp was experimental: we tried a new platform for interaction and even succeeded at a party – a teleconference between Kyiv and Berlin. This time, we connected more than a hundred people from 21 countries, and it would have been really expensive if we decided to do such an event offline,” said Oksana Shchur, the curator of the BarCamp 2.0.

The conference…

The conference included two general, one introductory, and four thematic sessions, which were led by four well-known experts from Germany and one from the UK. Obviously, key examples were delivered from the German publishing market, nevertheless, the conversations weren’t Eurocentric – over hundred and twenty specialists from 21 countries and 4 continents joined as active creators – to compare urgent challenges of their markets and to build new alliances, outside the bubble, of course, due to the motto of BarCamp.

“BarCamp is about getting into a situation, where you do not only listen as audience but play an active role, become a co-creator of the program, and work on the identification of communities requests. Keywords here are participation and intensity, with no passive listeners at BarCamp. For sure lead speeches of experts from the sphere are crucially useful, but still, the main value of the format is “sharing of knowledges”,” commented Maria Shubchyk, the curator of the BarCamp 2.0, coordinator of literary projects and translation support program of Goethe-Institut Ukraine.

The sessions…

The thematic sessions focused on new reality trends of scouting (Scouting: how editors look for new voices), translation (Professional associations: based on the experience of the German Translators Union), promotion (What it means to be a producer of online content for book promotion) and collaboration (Collaborative trends and initiatives of German-language book publishing).

The snippets…

“Publishing is a people’s industry – business is done based on personal knowledge, insights and relationships, both domestic and international. Publishing is also a very generous industry – we share knowledge and insights. We are an industry that likes to help itself. More importantly, we build a friendship,” said Emma House, an international publishing consultant, co-founder of Facebook community Publishers Without Borders from the UK.

While, Corinna Kroker, the editorial director for the Klett-Cotta literary list, said, “Today we are talking so much about strategies, and the market, and multipliers… That one might forget what it’s all about – about books. In my experience, it doesn’t help at all when your book is either good or you have a clear publisher strategy. You always need to have both.”

“Our participants, the proactive community of publishers, authors, translators, managers were even more eager to interact, and so the program became much more intense, like it had to be at a real BarCamp. We have been lacking the real bar, we need to test the offline format next time!” concluded Oksana Shchur, curator of the BarCamp 2.0.