Sara Streeter is a continuing education student at Johnson & Wales University and an executive officer of the SofT ICE. She is also a lead organizer of NewBCamp which will take place this Saturday, February 23, 2008 from 9am to 4pm in the Xavier Building on the Johnson & Wales campus in Downtown Providence. You can get more info and register here .

While the idea for NewBCamp was based on the experience of attending BarCamp back in March of last year, it only started to come together when I attended PodCamp in October. BarCamp being all about geek topics and really for geeks, when I went I was surrounded by the people that made coding and web development their life's work. I would ask questions that were basic, because I was still learning (and still consider myself to be learning), repeatedly saying "I'm new to PHP" or "I'm new to Javascript." Finally one fellow audience member who had heard me asked me if there was anything that wasn't new to me. The assumption was that if I was at BarCamp, I already had to be at a certain level of experience.

This feeling of being excluded because I was a beginner stayed with me, and I began to wish there was an unconference for me and people like me. It would have undoubtedly stayed just a feeling and a wish if I hadn't attended PodCamp a few months later. First of all, I met Joe Cascio at a Providence Geeks Dinner, and he was the one to motivate me to connect with the social media crowd on Twitter. When I showed up at PodCamp, I was a little lost until I saw Joe again sitting with a group of people - I remember in particular Jeff Glasson, Nik Butler, and Jack Hodgson. I joined up with them and all of a sudden had some "peeps," as Joe likes to call them. I went ahead and told them my idea of having an unconference for beginners, and jokingly said it would be fun to call it Newbie Camp (I being a newbie myself didn't realize that there is another spelling of that word which is a bit derogatory - the noob). Not only did Joe and company like the idea, they started picking out people around the room who could help me accomplish it, and walked me up to those people - among them Chris Brogan, co-founder of PodCamp, along with Chris Penn - to talk about my idea. With not even a business card to hand out, I gave everybody I met handcrafted Post-its I had brought along with my contact info. They were all very encouraging, but more than that, I had told people - a lot of people - about my idea, so now I had to actually do it. And the rest is history.