A breezy location along the Ayeyarwady River, Pyay is the most interesting stop on the Yangon–Bagan Highway. The city, whose glory days date back to the ancient Pyu capital of Thayekhittaya, was the venue of Barcamp Myanmar 2015.
Representing EngageMedia, I participated in Barcamp Pyay, which was held over July 11 and 12 at a Basic Education School and attended by over 3,500 people. The camp was teeming with crowds of attendees delivering speeches and taking part in lively discussions.
The morning panel on the first day of the camp addressed opportunities for youth leadership in development, mostly in entrepreneurship, open-source and civic engagement.
On that day, I conducted a session called ‘How to Make Films on Low-Cost Devices’, where over 20 people attended. I delivered this topic to the folks at Yangon Heartz organization, who are holding the first Smart Phone Film Festival in Myanmar. I also briefly introduced how to deal with digital security issues for videos.
Since the Barcamp is an unconference which doesn’t make use of any slide presentations, I just used entries in my notepad to deliver the main contents of the talk. This unconference format worked really well to bring people and ideas together in a non-formal setting.
On the second day, I ran ‘How to Subtitle Online’, where Myanmar Barcampers asked a lot of questions because they’ve had no experience in using online subtitling tools like Amara. This was a very active session and our room was pretty noisy from all the excitement!
After my presentations, I took part in other sessions and led discussions on topics such as ‘Google Maps for Businesses’, ‘Social Networks and Innovation’, and ‘Love Problems of Youth’, which was of course very popular!
In this Barcamp, the organizers focused not only on technology, but also agriculture, civilization, archaeology and education. This made Pyay Barcamp very different from the other Barcamps we’ve had in the past, and made it much more memorable for me. You all can have a look at all of the fun activities on the camp’s Facebook page.
So, would you like to join the next Barcamp in Myanmar?
