PodCamp Montreal report

Montréal is cool. And those aren’t my words. Ask any of the participants at PodCamp Montréal who came from out of town and they will tell you. And there were a lot. Who were they you may ask? Think of any of the Seesmic power users and they were there. Even Seesmic’s vice-president VinVin was there from San Francisco. Believe me, those were only some of the few cool kids that were there.

Making a cool event doesn’t happen overnight, even if the event itself doesn’t last too long. Having an awesome committee with an already strong web presence was half the key. I usually hate the name-dropping sport but we had Julien Smith, Bob Goyetche and Mitch Joel just to name a few, which already made it a success to me. What I didn’t know when I asked these people to join in is that we would end up having the perfect set of complementary qualities to make things happen. A dream team I say. And a lot of hard work.


From there, we shared our own experiences of podcamps and other events to build one that we would love to attend. And we oriented all our decisions toward the cool factor. We had a reputation to uphold to after all.

We asked our friends/podcasting stars to give talks at the event. Cool brings cool, right? And I’m not talking about the temperature up here but the nice people who were there. It could have brought some criticism from the classic-barcamp-formula-lovers but when good content is there, no one is going to complain. Mitch Joel brought his friend/rockstar David Usher to talk about music marketing and it was a hit. So were conferences by C.C. Chapman, Tracy Apps, Kim Vallée, Scarborough Dude, Wanker Girl and others. Go check-out the Ustream channel that Laurent Maisonnave and Christian Aubry have set up. Some of them are available in video.

Somehow it probably ended up as being the most organized unconference. I mean, we had to. Imagine if we had let the speakers decide their timeslots, it could have ended up with a half-day of conferences only in French. Not so good when two thirds of the crowd is anglophone. Speaker submissions had the perfect ratio so at every moment there was one conference in French and two in English and it was just good.

Prior to PodCamp, we set up a blog that was the hub of the event. No registration on a wiki with a separate blog and other channels that make everything fuzzy, just one channel, one place where you could find all the information (thanks to Laurent LaSalle’s great work). And we listened to the crowd. If a PodCamper made a valuable  suggestion, we just took it and did it. We worked a lot make sure attendees would get all the information they needed before the weekend. Well, at least the type of information we personally would have loved to have at other PodCamps. Attendees probably liked it because they arrived in Montréal completely overwhelmed.

So how was the actual event? Again, cool I’d say. But let me answer this with questions:

Have you ever been to a PodCamp where there were free (and good) croissants and coffee every morning? Have you ever been to a PodCamp where the bar opened at 11:00 and you could actually get in the conference rooms and drink? Have you ever been to a PodCamp that was held in a design school where the building is a work of art in itself? Have you ever been to a PodCamp where you had a complete pocket-sized schedule of the conferences? Have you ever been to a PodCamp where there were planned parties in bars every night during the weekend? Have you ever been to a PodCamp so popular that the organizers had to close the registration? Have you ever been to a PodCamp where the hotel rooms were less than a hundred bucks a night and had a kitchen? (Thanks to Michelle Sullivan for booking that deal!) Have you ever been to a PodCamp held in two languages? Have you ever been to a PodCamp where the man-woman ratio is close to 50/50? (And those ladies were actually beautifully brilliant!) And have you been to a PodCamp where the T-Shirt is so fuckin’ cool that you actually want to wear it afterwards? Look at the pictures. You’ll see what I mean.

But most of all, have you ever been to a PodCamp? Man you should. It will change your life. Or at least the way you think. And if you want to go to a cool one, plan for PodCamp Montréal next year. Because we’ll do it again. We have to. All the smart people that were there took it for granted that we’ll do another one next year. Remember, cool brings cool.


Sylvain Grand’Maison is reporting for iProng Magazine, and is an independent art director, podcaster and new media aficionado. He hosts a show called “Le Québec en Baladodiffusion” (Québec podcasting) and launched a bilingual blog, where he discusses issues related to content creation for new media.