The fourth Barcamp in Saigon was held last Sunday, July 24, at RMIT International University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It was the biggest Barcamp in Saigon in terms of attendance. The organizers are grateful for the participation of many people

Thanks to everyone for making this the biggest BarCamp in Saigon yet (with an attendance of 570 people)! We’re really thankful that so many of you came out to participate, share and talk. We at the BarcampSaigon organizing team always want to make BarcampSaigon open, fun, and a learning experience for everyone.

Barcamp Saigon 2011 from the Facebook page of Preetam Rai

Saigonist highlights the activities and events in the Barcamp

Outsiders are awesome. I'm really grateful for the guys who brought Barcamp organizing experience from Cambodia, China, Southeast Asia, Germany, etc. to Saigon to share with us. Barcamps are often bootstrapped by foreigners. Outsiders also expose us to new ideas in technology. But I was happy to see at least some local ideas find an audience in the foreign attendees.

Barcamp isn't just about the sessions. It's as much about people coming together and sharing ideas outside of the sessions. The organizers’ task isn't to control who speaks, unlike traditional conferences. Our job is to provide a platform for everyone to share knowledge with anyone who is interested. The trend, I hope, is for more people to realize that they do have knowledge that's interesting and worth sharing and to give them the opportunity to speak in front of an audience and further develop their ideas when putting together their presentations, and also get feedback from strangers that they otherwise would have never met.

Barcamp Saigon 2011 from the Facebook page of Preetam Rai

Some twitter reactions

@MoodyRain @welivetoplay You are quite welcome. Enjoy! Happy to see #barcampsaigon spread as far as Amsterdam!

@barcampSaigon #barcampsaigon Summer 2011 is over, but having already 4 confirmed sponsors and 1 more team member for Winter 2011.

Some of the topics discussed in the Barcamp were gamification, using twitter in classroom, Vietnamese language lifehack video tutorials, creating a startup, entrepreneurship and innovation, street photography, and What’s wrong with having more than 500 friends on Facebook?

Pictures of the Barcamp were uploaded on Facebook and Flickr.