Barcamping and Co-working, Parisian style

We’ve been involved in organizing and promoting Barcamps in Paris and we help jumpstart the first Parisian Co-working space. How much cultural differences affect the transposition of models born in the US? We will discuss the challenges and the promise in working on new concepts across cultural and physical borders, and present some of the cool and exciting projects born in and around our Barcamps as well as the “Cantine” the first French co-working space.

The first Barcamp we helped organize was on june 2006, and it immediatly drew a lot of interest. We are now at our eleventh Parisian Barcamp after organizing some other events inspired by similiar motivations (like a DrupalCamp, a Mashpit during the Barcamp at Google’s Parisian headquarters and a three day Hackfest in Linux Solutions). We keep in touch with the San-Francisco crowd trying to get as much cross-pollination as possible. Among the hot issues in Paris are: humanitarian finance, P2P Banking, and a lot of traction around OpenID with an accent on privacy management.

We will also talk about what it means for a company to implicate itself in the community and about how to strike a balance between community activism and running a business in a highly competitive environment.