Minnesota Public Radio is head and shoulders above the rest of Minnesota’s major media outlets in terms of audience involvement and has been for a long time, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised that they’d host their own BarCamp-style event, but it blew my mind grapes a little.

Along with the MinneBar/MinneDemo folks, MPR presents PublicRadioCamp.

Minnesota Public Radio produces tons of really interesting content, data, audio, meta-data and feeds. PublicRadioCamp will be a day spent collaboratively remixing and mashing up these goodies.

In addition to their public feeds and data-sources… we’ll have the same highly-granular access to audio-clips, transcriptions, photos, etc. used by their own newsroom. Their newsroom uses them to create their on-air and web-stories. What could you do with them?

Expect studio tours and other goodies.

Saturday, July 12th, 2008, 9:00am (registration at 8:30am), at The UBS Forum at MPR studios in downtown St Paul.

I have nothing to offer in terms of actual technical skills, but this looks like great fun to attend (and I’m unavailable that day, dammit). I hope there’s some sort of organized public display of the results.

(via @sandentotten)

MinneBar -– one of the largest BarCamps in the world – is being held this Saturday at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Union.

For those unfamiliar, BarCamp is an ad-hoc “unconference” — a user-generated conference that’s rich with participatory workshops, discussions, demos and more. Lots of discussion about start-ups, programming, open source and social media in talks mostly run by average people who are passionate about learning, sharing and collaborating.

This year’s schedule of events runs 8:30 a.m.-8:30 p.m.

Here are just a few panel highlights: Blogging for Benjamins; This Thing called Twitter; Social Search in the Corporate Enviroment; The Mathematical Foundations of Music; Why Should I Care About Grails? Full list here.

More than 400 people have registered already. Everyone is welcome, and the event is free. More info here.

(Geek note: If you’re planning to be there and are on Twitter, be sure to use #minnebar as your hashtag and follow @minnebar for updates.)