BoingBoing has a post on BarCamp, an overnight un-conference for techies where everybody’s a participant, where everybody has to make a presentation, and where everybody’s reponsible for getting their presentation up on the Web so that those couldn’t attend can still participate at a distance. Open registration happens on the Web, and the word goes out via the existing social networks of the seed group.

Me, I’d attend a BarCamp for religion geeks. Admittedly, they’d have to be religion geeks who are tech-savvy, because I’d want to stick with posting all presentations on the Web. But I can imagine 24 hours of presentations and networking about theology, and maybe technology used in religion — an intense dose of the kinds of discussions we already have in the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere.

No, I know it’s not realistic. My sense of religious liberals is that, generally speaking, we’re not tech-savvy enough, and that we’re generally unwilling to discuss theology. But if I were going to make techno-theological BarCamp happen here in the northeastern United States, my social network actually has quite a number of people who would fit right in: the usual bloggers; some people who have created very cool church Web sites; seminary students including one who also has an MBA from MIT; a couple of theologians; then assorted ministers and lay leaders who are into theology and not afraid of computers.

And if tehcno-theological BarCamp did happen, not only would it be very very fun but it might actually shake up the staid stodgy world of religious liberalism, injecting it with a saving dose of theological speculation and technological savvy. So I’m throwing the idea out there, expecting the idea will fall into a black hole, but you never know….

Later poston BarCamp and religion giving my personal vision for how BarCamp might combine technology and religion.