This past weekend I attended the first BarCampCharleston.  I must say, this event was as fun and enlightening as I thought it would be.  Thanks to all that put the event together.  And special thanks to the Lowcountry Innovation Center for hosting the event.  If I ever do a startup, I’ll be looking there for space.

One thing I discovered was, it really sucks that you can’t be in two places at once.  While I enjoyed all the sessions I attended, I regret missing a couple of the other cool ones.  I think my high school drum skills would have helped me in the Rock Band Challenge. Also, there were a few times that  I thought, “what the @*&% are they talking about?”  I really need to do a lot of tech reading in my spare time.  Apparently, there is a lot I need to learn about Github and Amazon Web Services.

In another session, I finally got to see how @jaredwsmith does his weather tracking magic.  Who knew there were so many free tools to track weather?  Also, thanks goes to @bank_daddy for sending the Google Wave invite.  Now I feel like a hip techie.

BaconCamp, the last session I attended, was a bacon lover’s dream.  Ted, from Ted’s Butcher Block brought in a couple hundred samples of bacon.  Let me tell you, that stuff you get at your local grocery store does not compare.  I still have applewood bacon flashbacks.

Now that I’ve attended a BarCamp, I can really see the need for BarCampBank.  I don’t know if we can get 130+ attendees, but I’d sure like to try.  So what do you think, BarCampBankCharleston in February 2010?

Ayer se celebró la I Jornada de Innovación en Banca que organizamos Afi y Google Enterprise. Creo que sirvió para transmitir un mensaje claro y la asistencia superó nuestras propias expectativas. Sinceramente, estamos convencidos de que hay mucho que hablar sobre innovación en banca.

Precisamente, conversar sobre innovación bancaria es lo que vamos a poder hacer en la primera BarCampBank que se organiza en España, gracias al esfuerzo de Jesús Pérez y la gente de Financial Red. El evento tendrá lugar el próximo 16 de febrero en Madrid (todos los detalles en Finanzas 2.0, en la convocatoria en Facebook y en el wiki de BarCampBank).

Para los que no conozcan el formato (y no tengan el tiempo o las ganas de seguir los enlaces anteriores), se trata de una reunión informal a la que acuden personas que trabajan en (o siguen de cerca) la innovación bancaria para discutir su visión a título personal, aunque trabajen en entidades financieras. La idea es evitar grandes discursos institucionales y situaciones incómodas en las que alguno de los participantes no quiera dar demasiados detalles de la estrategia de su entidad, para que todo el mundo sea libre de contar lo que crea oportuno.

De hecho, el formato habitual, que ya ha tenido buena acogida en varias ciudades de Europa y Estados Unidos, comienza con las presentaciones y con un tiempo dedicado a proponer temas de discusión en los distintos slots de tiempo disponibles, para que la gente se vaya apuntando.

A aquellos que se animen a acudir el 16 de febrero, allí nos veremos.

After the shock that the crisis created and the quick – but not cheap – measures that were passed, it seems that the debate is currently moving on the terms of a longer term solution (see posts in Javelin Strategy or The Bankwatch for example). And there, things do not look good either.

It is obvious that free market created a lot of wealth (that has not been equally distributed), but was unable to stabilize the deep imbalances it generated. Furthermore, it’s now obvious that the wrong mix of regulation and laissez-faire created serious flaws in the incentive mechanisms. Regulation prevented competition to come and erase unfair rents that some actors were extracting. Laissez-faire meant than no-one had the authority to correct these undeserved appropriation.

But going back blindly to regulation is certainly the wrong answer. It is interesting to see that people who considered Alan Greenspan as a genious, treat him now as the villain who made all this possible. The truth is simpler: Alan Greenspan is certainly a very smart man, but there’s no single human being on this planet who can master a complex evolving system like the financial system. So regulation is not the answer in itself.

I think we should think of the problem in deeper and wider terms. It’s a real refoundation of significant part of our financial system that we must address. And to do this, I don’t believe that tinkering the current system through new regulations will do. We must get back to the roots of this industry which aims at providing a service to people looking for an opportunity to save and to people looking for means to get access to current resources.

We will be discussing this subject – and many others – in London on Feb 14, 2009 at BarCampBankLondon2 and in San-Francisco on Apr 25, 2009 at BarCampBank SF2. Anyone interested in putting back innovation as a solution and not a problem to the current financial woes should certainly consider joining us.

There is a recurring question about BarCampBanks and what you get there beyond meeting great people, exchanging business cards with them and feeling the dopamine running through your veins hearing what they have to say. If that’s not enough for you, I’d say that in my view there is even more: a powerful accelerator of ideas maturation and pre-innovation incubation.

I’ve been doing the pitch on a couple of occasions and I thought it may be good to write this on paper because it may sound counter-intuitive to some: it’s by sharing your ideas that you get a better chance of implementing them.

First point of the pitch is that “an idea has not value in itself”. I don’t want to run into the debate that it often starts, but just bear with me and take for granted that if you do not implement the idea, you’ll never see any value come out of it; and that for the community, it’s better that an idea is implemented by a good executioner than put in practice by a less able orginator who would have supposedly conceived the breakthrough out of the blue.

Second point is that if you try explaining your idea, you just realize that usually everything does not come out so oderly that you thought it was structured in your head. That people have sometimes intelligent counter-points that you did not think off; and that finally it helped you refine your understanding, opened new horizons and all-in-all accelarated your thinking process.

Third point is that thanks to the BarCamp format and its emergent approach to subject selection, you end up speaking with people who have at the same time very similar interests than those you’re just pursuing, and slightly different as well. Confronting your ideas with them help you understanding in what sense what you think is definitely unique, but also at time how complementary it is to the others’ points.

Finally, I point to the image of conceiving discussions at a BarCampBank like a way for everyone to bring their own pieces of the puzzle, of putting them on a table, of trying for a couple of hours to compare and trying to adjust them together. Then letting everyone go back with a still incomplete picture, but certainly slightly larger and more focused than everyone had when entering the room.

So what’s the deal? For me it is because execution is the real test that you should not spend unnecessary energy in producing ideas on your own. It is much better to speed up the process of idea creation by contributing to a common pool, then let the best implementers bring the result to reality.

There is also the question of knowing if this does not entice a free-ridder attitude: just listen to others’ ideas without giving yours. While everyone is perfectly free to adopt this behavior, I’d say that there are probably those that will get the least out of the deal. I have rarely seen people understanding perfectly what the others say without asking questions, plus I also think that you get the best explanations when you really give the context of your question and you let the train of thoughts run full speed.

Then there is the finaly question if this mechanism is equally interesting for big organizations and entrepreneurs, and if one side should not be wary of having the other one stealing their ideas. And here, people often think of entrepreneurs seeing their great ideas stolen by big organizations. My answer to this is first from the macro level on one-side: if an idea has every chance of better be implemented by a big organization, the community should spare the cost of seeing an entrepreneur duplicate capacities to just do what the big organization could provide at once; plus, if this is really the case, it is more than probable that the above entrepreneur will get squashed by the big organization when it realize that he/she has discovered a lucrative market. Then my answer is on the micro-level on the other side: there are ideas that can better be implemented by big organizations, then there are those that cannot – these are innovations called disruptive because they cannot be carried by current organization the way are operating.

So anyone, from a startup or a big organization, should find interest in participating in a BarCampBank if they are attracted by innovation and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance. I hope that I made my point in explaining why in my view the more they bring to it, the more they’ll get out of it.

Well, BarCampBankCharleston is over.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get the expected turnout.  John Buchanan and Tom Polk, from First Federal, along with George Kelley, from ClairMail, were able to make the event.  I knew that attendance would be low because of traveling budgets being cut in the last few months.  The intense rain we had here at the end of the week didn’t help matters either.

Because there was only four of us, we pretty much talked about projects that our bank was looking at.  We also discussed some things that we heard other financial institutions were doing.  Recent bank closures was another topic discussed.  After a couple of hours, we decided to move our get together to Buffalo Wild Wings and partake in some wings and college football.

Although I was disappointed with the low turnout, I still think the BarCampBank concept is something we need.  Hopefully, I can participate in BarCampBankSF2 in April and really see how BarCampBank works.  Perhaps we’ll try this again in Charleston next year.  One thing that I know we need to do is get the word out sooner.  This way people can save the date and plan accordingly.

We also need to take a grass roots approach.  From what I’ve seen, not too many bankers in South Carolina know anything about BarCampBank.  Getting the word out to local bankers and explaining the concept will be better in the long run.  It’s not all about talking about using Twitter and Facebook in your bank.  Now, more than ever, we need to come together and help each other restore confidence in our industry.  Sharing ideas and collaborating is the best way to do that.

Hopefully, we can get a huge turnout the next go round.  Until then, see you at the next BarCampBank.

Last Saturday happened the first BarCampBank London. I shared earlier my excitement of participating to this first English BarCampBank and I must say that I’ve not been disapointed. BCBL was just great!

First we had an interesting mix of participants with

• a lot of influential bloggers, including James Gardner, Dave Birch, Chris Skinner and many others.
• a lot of young fi-startups, including Kublax, Scred, KuberaMoney and many others
• and there were representants of several big banks, mainly from the innovation departements

Second, the different workshops were really great and covered diverse subjects like biometrics in fi-services, innovation and regulation, near money, open banking,.. This all showed that the European ecosystem in financial services is currently full of vibrance.

I disclosed earlier the different projects I’m working on. At BCBL, I had the opportunity to expose in more details the piece about FundCamp FinTech. From the reactions to the discussion and because of the general atmosphere during this BarCampBank, I feel that we should definitely move forward. Anyone interested in this intiative, please do not hesitate to contact me.

BathCamp is now just over two months away (registrations are open). If you can’t wait that long though, you may be interested in other BarCamps coming up over the summer, which range in topic and in location. Attending other BarCamps is a great way to get a feel for the format, and to give you some ideas for things you might like to talk about at BathCamp.

On Saturday 5th July there’s a BarCampBank in London, focusing on innovation in the financial services sector. Good to see that the format has no bounds! (I love the piggy bank in the logo too.)

On Saturday 1st August it’s BarCamp2, the BarCamp in Cambridge. It’s hosted at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus and the topic is the ‘interface between science and technology’ – should be interesting that.

On Saturday 6th September (a week before BathCamp), it’s the 3rd annual BarCamp Brighton, which is returning to the University of Sussex. Also on this date is PhotoCampLeeds, the UK’s ‘first photographic-focussed BarCamp’ – perfect for Flickr lovers.

Plus of course there are BarCamps around the world, if you can afford the flights (and the environmental guilt). See BarCamp.org for the full list.

Since the first BarCampBank in Sept. 2006 in Paris, BarCampBanks have been springing up everywhere as William Azaroff noted on NetBanker. With such a number of BarCampBanks currently scheduled or being planned, it made me think that we could use some sort of “How To” guide for anyone interested in getting the ball rolling in their city. I decided to throw a shot and put down on blog a couple of ideas and tips. This only represents a personal view and need to be elaborated. Please, anyone build on this and create your own version.

Rules?

1. What is a BarCampBank?: this is a BarCamp where people gather around the mission of “fostering innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance“. This means that people will be enjoying the power of the unconference format with the expectation of finding like-minded people interested in innovation in banking and finance.
2. Should it be free?: the goal of a BarCampBank is to attract very motivated people. A fee should not be a barrier to get interested and interesting people in the room. But we know that having people pay a small fee shows commitment in participating and helps planners arrange for logistics. My view is that a fee of the order of a good meal at a near-by restaurant could serve as a landmark. We should try to get sponsors to cover most of the expense and let costs be supported by the fee only for essential things (which means that we should definitely get a sponsor for the room)
3. Should I use the BarCampBank logo?: my view is that we should benefit from having some sort of visual link. While I think it is great that logos reflect as much “localness” as possible, it would be great to keep a central recurrent theme. The BarCamp’s logo with the piggy could serve this purpose at this time.

How to get started

1.  create a page on BarCamp’s wiki with the naming convention BarCampBankMyCity and possibly a number if this is not the first one in your city
2. start filling out the page, using possibly content taken from http://barcamp.org/BarCampBankTemplate
3. register on http://barcamp.org/BarCampBank under the “Getting planned” section
4. broadcast the news to see if it gets momentum
5. if you get enough interest, set a date (having a firm agreement for a venue usually helps in the choice of the date)
6. move on http://barcamp.org/BarCampBank to the “Firm” section
7. open up registrations. This can be done directly on the wiki, but – because of regular defacements on BarCamp’s wiki – I would recommend using a tool like EventBrite or equivalent to keep a clean list. You’ll need this tool anyway if you are planning to ask for a small fee.
8. broadcast even wider when date and venue are set. You can use the different BarCampBank groups on Google, FaceBook,.. to make your BarCampBank known.*

OK, now if you are playing with the idea of organizing a local BarCampBank, hopefully this will help you get going. There’s only one thing to remember: you’ll never know if this is going to work if you do not give it a shot!

This is going to be quite a fastuous Summer for BarCampBank this year with no less than 4 events happening across the globe: BarCampBankDallas, BarCampBankLondon, BarCampBankMadison and BarCampBank Vancouver are the 4 BarCampBanks on firm dates.

I’m personnaly involved in the organization of the only European BarCampBank in this series: BarCampBankLondon. Antony Evans and Thomas Barker have done a wonderful job making this first UK BarCampBank a reality and I’m excited and honored being part of their team. While I wish I could have intended every single BarCampBank on earth, I must admit that being 2 hours away from London makes this most convenient. With the commendable determination of attending every BarCampBanks in the US (and Canada..), Morriss Partee will thus surely hold very soon the record of participation to BarCampBanks. We should all applaude his stamina. I’m nonetheless equally happy that London has now joined the club and offers a valuable opportunity for European fi-startups to gather and show the vibrance of entrepreneurship in this sector.

I hope meeting a lot of you there. Resgistrations happen on http://bcblondon.eventbrite.com/. Thank you for all your help in broadcasting this event and making it an absolute success for innovation in financial services.

Eric Bugnon, seul auteur francophone d’un blog qui parle souvent de social trading (j’espère maintenant devenir le 2éme ;0)) nous propose sur son blog la présentation qu’il présentera samedi prochain au BarCampBank.Il reste encore des places alors n’hésitez pas.

La présentation d’Eric Bugnon intitulée Trading, biais psychologique et web 2.0 Merci Eric!

Je suis heureux de vous annoncer que le prochain BarCampBank aura lieu à Paris Samedi 24mai, chez Sun. Je fais personnellement parti de l’aventure BarCampBank depuis le 2éme du nom et à chaque fois j’ai vraiment beaucoup appris lors de ces événements. En plus j’ai vu dans la liste des participants qu’il y avait (entre autres) Eric Bugnon, un suisse dont je suit le blog et qui s’interesse beaucoup au social trading. Je le suit aussi sur Twitter mais je vais enfin pouvoir lui parler de vive voix.

Si vous ne connaissez pas les BarCamp ce sont des conférences organisées le samedi pour éviter les pitchs de commerciaux (même s’il y a parfois des commerciaux zélés qui travaillent le samedi…) et ouvertes à tous. Les BarCampBank sont autour du monde de la finance et des nouvelles formes déchanges financiers que le web autorise. Vous n’avez qu’à vous inscire ici (la liste des invités promet déjà une belle édition) et venir chez Sun le 24 mai. J’y serai. Je tacherai d’ailleurs de faire un compte rendu rapide des ateliers auxquels j’ai participé sur ce blog.

Merci beaucoup à Frederic Baud de faire vivre ces BarCampBank.

Merci à Sun qui accueille maintenant de nombreux BarCamp sur Paris.

Le BarCampBankParis6 aura lieu le samedi 24 mai de 11:00 à 18:00 chez Sun France 42 avenue d’Iéna 75016 Paris (GPS : 48° 52′ 1 N, 2° 17′ 43 E).

Thirty years ago today I went to my first Grateful Dead concert. We drove the hour or so from Binghamton, NY to Syracuse and saw what could only be described as a nondescript, uneventful concert. About the only thing I remember from the show was Bob Weir coming out for the encore wearing a gorilla mask, which was appropriate since they played Warren Zevon’s Werewolves Of London.

Needless to say, it wasn’t my last Dead show. Thirty years later, despite the fact that the Grateful Dead haven’t existed as a band since 1995, I’m still as much as a Deadhead as I’ve ever been. My wife and kids certainly don’t understand. And, in fact, few non-Deadheads can really understand why Deadheads are as fiercely loyal and into it as they are.

It’s really simple, actually. It’s not just the music. It is (and was) the experience. If the Dead were a business (well, they were, and actually still are), you’d call it the customer experience. Going to a Dead show was an experience from the time you left your house till the time you got back. Which, of course, could be days (and for some people was weeks). All of today’s Web 2.0 talk about community only leaves me wanting to tell the Gen Yers who think they’re oh-so-community-minded that the Deadhead community has been going strong strong for more than 40 years now.

To be honest, I wasn’t really going to blog about this, but a blog post from Gene Blishen made me change my mind. Gene recently wrote about BarCampBanks, and had this to say:

“The format and the way the event is held is unique and it contributes a lot to its success. No one owns the agenda. Relationships have already been created through Internet means (blogs and Twitter). Meeting people face to face after you have know them online is a phenomenal experience. But each one that I have attended is unique. And I keep trying to nail down what makes it so. Maybe it is because we don’t really have such a strong expectation of what will come from the event. We already know that will happen. he expectation is the excitement of the discussions, the passion shown by everyone, the energy in just being in a room with such remarkable people. We thought we came seeking a holy grail but found that each of us had the capacity to create something unique in our relationships and our being together for this short time. The time you have is limited and you want to make the most of it. BarCamps cannot really be explained.”

I read that and thought “oh my god, BarCampBank meetings are just like Grateful Dead concerts. All about the experience. And completely inexplicable as to why the experience is so satisfying.”

Now when I do blog about something like this, I always start the blog title with “Off-Topic.” I’m sure you noticed that the title of this post starts with “[Only Partially] Off-Topic.” Here’s why:

There’s an important lesson for marketers in mine and Gene’s stories. Specifically about how to think about customer experience. There’s a paradox that few marketers really grasp. While the customer experience is the most important thing to customer satisfaction and loyalty, you cannot over-engineer, over-design or over-control that experience.

You have to establish a framework, some guidelines, and then just let it happen.

The Dead didn’t — and in reality, couldn’t — control every aspect, or even a fraction of the aspects that made up the Deadhead experience. They let their fans freely record and distribute tapes of their concerts, which helped engender an intensely loyal following. But they did (wisely) retain control of ticket sales and protected the sale of their merchandise. But you were free to sell food, stuff you made, and tons of other things to the tens of thousands of other Deadheads who showed up at every show. But you couldn’t sell their copyrighted merchandise, and contrary to popular belief, the strongly discouraged the sale (not the use) of illegal substances in and around their concerts, because they knew that that would hurt the potential for future concert opportunities at that venue.

Gene alludes to the same notion about BarCampBanks. There’s little structure, no pre-set agenda. But there is an expectation that participants will be able to contribute to the agenda and the discussion. That’s the framework. It’s like color-by-numbers. Here’s the guidelines — you provide the rest.

Marketers are right to obsess about customer experience. Unfortunately, too many equate it simply to Web site design. Or come up with consultantese titles like customer experience management, which they define as “capturing and distributing what a customer thinks about a company.” (Huh?)

It’s as if there’s a spectrum. At one of the spectrum is chaos — the absence of any controls, guidelines, or predefined experience elements. At the other end of the spectrum is the complete design and over-specification of the experience. The trick is finding the middle point.

Also unfortunate is the fact that there’s no simple way to find that middle point. With the “one ultimate question” mentality that exists, too many managers are in search of some simple holy grail that makes their job easy and their companies widely successful.

It doesn’t work that way. Just ask the Grateful Dead.

Technorati Tags: Banking, BarCampBank, Grateful Dead, Gene Blishen

BarCampBankParis6, la Banque version Web 2.0

Annoncées par le Grand Maître Jean-Christophe Capelli dans son blog , les désormais célèbres rencontres BarCampBank se tiendront à Paris le samedi 24 mai prochain. Toutes les infos sont sur le blog de Jean-Christophe :

http://capelli.typepad.fr/capelli/2008/05/barcampbankpari.html

Vous avez le projet d’émettre votre propre monnaie ? Le BarCampBank est fait pour vous.

Vous voulez emprunter de l’argent sans passer par une banque ? Le BarCampBank est fait pour vous.

Vous êtes banquier et vous pensez que vous pouvez travailler autrement ? Le BarCampBank est fait pour vous.

Vous vous intéressez au social lending,  au P2PVenture, au social money, au PFM (Personal Finance Management) ? Le BarCampBank est fait pour vous.

Vous ne comprenez rien à ce qui est écrit plus haut ? Le BarCampBank est fait pour vous.

Le BarCampBank est un pacifique groupe de réflexion et d’action dont la mission est de développer l’innovation et de nouveaux modèles économiques dans le monde de la banque et de la finance.

Malheureusement, c’est un peu loin de chez moi, vous me raconterez ?

The date and location for BarCampBankCharleston have been set. The un-conference will be held at the First Federal Corporate Center in N Charleston on July 26, 2008 (9am-5pm) and July 27, 2008 (9am-1pm). The address is 2440 Mall Drive.

The location is about 10 minutes from the airport and there are about 10 or so hotels located nearby. For those that love to shop, the Tanger Outlet is in the area also. Historic Charleston is about 15 minutes away.

So go ahead and pen it in your calendar and we’ll see you at the end of July.

Ok, I admit it. I’m jealous of all the credit union people meeting and discussing cool ideas. I’m also saddened that no bankers have shown up at a BarCampBank. Well, that is about to change. After much contemplation, soul searching and meditation, I’ve decided to organize BarCampBankCharleston.

Well, actually, I just mentioned it to a couple of people and they said it would be a cool idea. So, I’d like to invite you all to beautiful, historic Charleston, SC. Right now, it looks like the event may happen in late July. So bring your families along for a fun weekend. Hopefully, this will be big enough that we have to spread it out over a Saturday and Sunday. If anyone would like to help with the planning and organization, please don’t hesitate to contact me.