On a day when the latest wave of bad reports about jobs sloshed through the news, several dozen people met at a downtown Dallas coffee shop for a volunteer-run employment seminar.

LaidOffCamp Dallas felt like a cross between a 12-step meeting and a speed-dating event, with everyone sharing a bit of pain and groups quickly exchanging contact information and advice. Friday's event was a spinoff of a similar meeting held in San Francisco earlier this week.

Almost everybody was looking for work. Some had lost their jobs this week; others had been looking for more than a year. They ranged in age from the 20s to the 60s, in attire from ties to T-shirts. Most had tech skills, but the group included others such as former marketers and bank employees.

A few people came to offer inspiration and tips:

"Always be upgrading," said Cali Lewis, co-creator of the tech podcast Geekbrief.TV ("shiny, happy tech news"), which claims 300,000 daily viewers.

"If you're praying folks, pray. Ask God for guidance," Dave Curlee said. He's a now-independent new-media producer who was laid off twice in 12 months.

"You can't put all your marketing eggs in one basket," said new-media marketing consultant Shelley Ellis. She was laid off by a Dallas ad agency in November, but she has already hired four employees for her company that helps people use keywords and other online strategies to make their online ads successful.

LaidOffCamp is patterned on "barcamps" that spun up several years ago in the tech community. Volunteers would commandeer a bar and coordinate a series of short but practical discussions on the latest hardware and software issues.

"Micro-learning," explained Neils Brooks of Dallas, one of the coordinators for Friday's event.

Seeds for LaidOffCamp were planted in San Francisco by Chris Hitchens, who wanted to apply the barcamp strategy to job hunting. The first LaidOffCamp event, held Tuesday in that city, attracted hundreds of people.

Brooks declared Friday's Dallas meeting a success. He said he and his friends would like to schedule a second event, but they want at least a month to better plan and organize.

Those who showed up for the first meeting seemed interested in what they heard.

Christine Turner of Dallas was laid off from a marketing job Wednesday. Given what else was happening at her company, the chop didn't come as a total shock, she said. She seemed intensely ready to get on with her life.

"I did my grieving over the past several months," she said. "This week has actually been very energizing."

Joseph Borsh of DeSoto last worked as a company chaplain. But for 30 years, he worked for AT&T in "employee assistance." That meant part of his job was to hold "coping with change" seminars to counsel people who were about to he laid off, he said. "Now I get to apply what I was teaching all those years," he said.