The night before last year’s BarCamp Philly, I was staring at a spreadsheet that refused to cooperate. Anyone who’s organized a community event knows that math: something’s coming in, something’s going out, and the gap between those numbers keeps you up past midnight.
The next morning, the board filled with session ideas, the atrium buzzed, and you’d never have guessed how close the whole thing came to not penciling out.
Johns & Taylor helped close that gap, proudly.
And this fall, we’re sponsoring BarCamp Philly for the eighth event running. I want to talk about why — because the reasons have changed, and I think the change says something about where our whole industry is right now.
One of the last ones standing
BarCamp started as a global movement in 2005, a pushback against exclusive, invite-only tech conferences. At its peak, it spread to more than 350 cities. Philly’s version launched in 2008 and never stopped, apart from a pause during the global pandemic. Today it’s one of the few remaining unconferences in the United States.
If you’ve never been: there’s no pre-set agenda.
You show up on a weekend morning, and a blank board fills with talks proposed by whoever walked in the door. A session on obtaining Czech citizenship might sit next to a design leader working out material for a bigger stage. There’s a “rule of two feet” — if you’re not learning or contributing, you move to another room, no apology needed. And the people who show up are, by definition, the right people. (Last year that included at least one twelve-year-old, who was awesome.)
I spent years as a radio producer before I ever touched a website, so I have a soft spot for anything that hands a microphone to someone who’s never held one. That’s what BarCamp does better than any event I know. It’s the open mic of the Philly tech scene — the place where a first-time speaker can test an idea in front of a generous room, and where that same talk sometimes grows into a keynote somewhere else.
The old sponsorship pitch is dead
For years, tech events ran on a simple trade: companies wrote checks, and in exchange they got a room full of hireable engineers. That trade doesn’t exist anymore. Hiring has contracted across the industry. Many of the companies that sponsored BarCamp a few years ago aren’t around to ask. The ones still standing don’t have recruiting budgets to spend — at least one would-be anchor sponsor walked away because we couldn’t guarantee a headcount. (That’s the one that was being candid with me, there are likely others.)
So when I tell you Johns & Taylor sponsors BarCamp Philly, I’m not describing a marketing line item that pays for itself in résumés. There’s no recruiting pipeline here. There’s just a question every business in this community has to answer for itself: is this thing worth keeping alive?
Why our answer is yes
One of our core values at Johns & Taylor is Community Impact — connecting the work to the people it serves. That’s easy to put on a website. BarCamp is where we find out whether we mean it.
Because here’s what BarCamp actually gives Philadelphia: a day when a junior developer and a CTO argue about accessibility as equals. A stage where somebody rehearses the talk that changes their career. A community that keeps finding each other in person, in a moment when so many of the institutions that used to connect us have quietly disappeared. Last year, donations from the community covered tickets for about a dozen people who couldn’t afford to come. Somebody’s generosity put somebody else in the room. That’s the whole model now, and it fits the spirit of the event better than the old one ever did.
The venue tells the same story. Wharton donates the space — the atrium, the classrooms, the AV — and that gift is worth more than every cash sponsorship combined. BarCamp Philly has always run on people deciding it should exist.
The part where I ask you to decide too
BarCamp Philly 17 is coming this fall. Johns & Taylor will be there, because nostalgia has never kept an institution alive — people stepping up before the night-before spreadsheet math gets scary is what does it.
If BarCamp has ever given you something — a talk, a connection, a push — there are two ways to give some of it back. You can support the event directly at opencollective.com/barcampphilly. Or you can just show up this fall, grab a marker, and put a talk on the board.
I’ll see you in the atrium.
