I went to lunch today with Oleg and Alex here in Kazan, Russia. The whole experience reminded me of how flat this world has become. Oleg drove us to lunch in is Toyota, he said that Japanese cars are really considered to be much higher quality then the Russian Ladas. We went to a mall that is the first branded mall I have ever seen, called Mega Mall, a Russian company. It was right next to IKEA, a Swedish company. On the other side was the a do-it-youself megastore OBI, a German company.

Inside the mall, we went straight to the food court for lunch. Alex chose his favorite restaurant, McDonalds, and got his usual order of a Fresh Mac meal (a Big Mac modified with tomato’s and lettuce). Oleg got a chicken sandwich meal from KFC. I was the only one to actually have a meal from a Russian company, and it was a Greek gyro at that.

The world truly is flat.

We are very pleased to announce the very first BarCamp to be held in Russia. BarCamp Kazan (Russian here) will be held on August 4th, 2007, in Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan.

This BarCamp conference will coincide with my trip to Russia to visit my colleagues at Flatsourcing, Inc. we are all very excited to bring the “unconference“-style conference to Russia.

Kazan is a city with multiple excellent technical University programs. There are many highly qualified computer scientists and web programmers, and we look forward to this opportunity to bring them together, and share some of our experiences through our last six years of developing our global partnership.

I’m personally excited to host a conference session with my colleague Oleg Kurnosov in which we will share concepts from Thomas Friedman’s excellent book The World is Flat. This book has had a tremendous impact on us both personally, and provided a blueprint (and name inspiration) for our current joint venture, Flatsourcing Inc.

We want to extend the invitation to anyone and everyone to join us in Kazan August 4 for this BarCamp. The airfare might be a little steep, but we will make sure the conference is free. Thanks to everyone who is helping to put this on. Be sure to read the announcement on the Tatsoft Blog too, (English version here.)