This is the official landing page for bpmCamp 2010, where we can provide a fairly static location for links to bpmCamp information.

The original bpmCamp 2010 announcement here…

The followup with additional details here…

The official bpmCamp wiki is live!.  It will be kept more up-to-date than this page, but this page can only be edited by the author so that we can guarantee a few pieces of information stay in one place. You need to join the Google Group for bpmCamp to participate actively on the wiki:

Subscribe to bpmCamp Stanford 2010

Email:

Visit this group

Registration is open, please follow this link to Eventbrite to register. Early Bird rates apply until January 1.

Quick fact check:

When:  January 28-29

Where:  Stanford University, California.

Who:  People who are BPM practitioners and use Teamworks or Blueprint.  Registration is required!  *Note: bpmCamp is not affiliated or sponsored by Lombardi Software.

Founding Sponsors: BP3, Stanford.

How Much: $100 Early Bird, $150 Regular (I think we’ve kept our commitment to keep it inexpensive).  Thanks go to Stanford for providing a few of the most expensive items:  a venue, and Audio/Visual and Wireless Internet.

How I can Sponsor: Contact us about sponsorships, we’ll have sponsor packets ready by November 30.

Why single vendor: See below as to the background and thought process.

Contact us:

Background

BPM Conferences are good…

Conferences are a great way for colleagues and peers to network, share best practices, and re-energize and re-motivate their efforts.  In particular we’ve enjoyed participating and presenting at Lombardi’s Driven conferences in the past, and at bp3 we’ve attended Lombardi Driven, Appian’s conference, OMG’s Thinktank, Gartner BPM, and Forrester BPM conferences (when we weren’t too busy with customers).  Conferences have some of the value of an off-site meeting within the company: recharging the batteries and motivating action.  But they also provide a chance to be exposed to much more diverse points of view, to out-of-the-box thinking, to new tricks of the trade, and to new market dynamics.  In smaller conferences, or small breakout sessions, real discussions break out that can really be illuminating (OMG’s Round Table format is a well-known example of formalizing this kind of small-discussion format, and it led to the six barriers to BPM Adoption at a very humorous and educational round table that I was fortunate to attend).

…but Missing the Mark

There are just a couple of problems.  First, conferences run by Analyst firms and Conference organizers are often too expensive (especially with today’s budgets).  Second, vendor conferences are too focused on the sponsoring vendor’s messaging, and often neglect the real needs of attendees. Attendees to both types of conferences get value, but I often hear them expressing an interest in getting into more detail – moving past concept to tactics.  Moving past platitudes to showing real solutions.

Its our belief that it is just too hard to get into the specifics and details in a multi-vendor conference.  Even with respect to project methodology, the *right* approach to a project has to take into account the realities of the technology being used.  If you’re using a BPM tool that doesn’t provide rapid UI prototyping, you’ll need a different approach to your project than someone using a BPM tool that does provide rapid UI prototyping.  And that’s just one trivial example.  When we get down to sharing technical best practices, going cross-vendor just doesn’t make much sense- BPM execution level detail simply isn’t that portable.

…So What’s the Answer?

If we put together a conference that is focused on what attendees want to talk about, we’ll get more value for the dollar.  If we aren’t looking to clear a profit on the event, we can lower the investment barrier required to attend.  If we focus on a single vendor, we can focus all the way down to shared source code if it has value. To that end, we’re going to borrow from concepts pioneered by unconferences and barCamps, leveraging advice from folks who put on the SXSWi barcamp in the past.

With preamble aside, I’m very happy to announce what I believe to be a first:  a BPM unconference for BPM practitioners of a single product suite.  We’re calling it bpmCamp.

This first event is focused on users of Lombardi’s Teamworks or Blueprint products.  We’re focusing on this community because it is the set of products and practitioner community that we have the deepest connections into, and because we want the event to be a single BPM product event for the reasons stated above.