Foo Camp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia …

Foo Camp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia                                                  Page 1 of 2




Foo Camp
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Foo Camp is the annual invitation only, no-structure, no plan, tent on the lawns, hacker event hosted by
publisher Tim O'Reilly. O'Reilly describes it as "the wiki of conferences", where the program is
developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or
overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule. The goal of the event is to reach out to new people
who will increase the company's intelligence about new technologies, and to create opportunities for
cross-fertilization between people and technologies that are on the O'Reilly radar.

Some have described it as a meta-birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session, that gets smart people together to
discuss technology issues. This style of event has also been described as an unconference.

The event started as a joke between Tim O'Reilly and Sara Winge, O'Reilly's VP of Corporate
Communications. Sara had always wanted to run a "foo bar" -- an open bar for "Friends of O'Reilly" --
at one of O'Reilly's conferences. That joke morphed into a brainstorm after the dot com bust left
O'Reilly with lots of unused office space in its new buildings, creating the opportunity for Foo Camp.
And sure enough, there was eventually a Foo Bar at the camp.

Tim O'Reilly describes the goal of his company as "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of
innovators." Foo Camp has evolved into an important mechanism for finding those innovators. O'Reilly
asks attendees to nominate new and interesting people to be invited to future camps. The invite list is
calculated to create cross-disciplinary "aha moments" -- new synapses in the global brain, with a focus
on emerging technology.

In 2005, a complementary alternative BarCamp was created by a past attendee of Foo Camp and a few
individuals who were interested in organizing their own version of Foo Camp, and hosted at the
SocialText offices in Palo Alto, California by SocialText founder Ross Mayfield, with an open
invitation to anyone who wanted to join.

Over the weekend of February 2-4, 2007, O'Reilly employee Nathan Torkington, staged the first Kiwi
Foo Camp (otherwise known as Baa Camp) in Warkworth, New Zealand, where he now lives.

See also: Foobar, unconference, BarCamp, Science Foo Camp

External links
      O'Reilly Foo Camp 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 - EuroFOO 2004

      John Battelle's account of the first Foo Camp

      Sample Foo Camp Schedule Board

      Flickr photo stream

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp"




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp                                                         5/02/2007
Foo Camp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia                                              Page 2 of 2




Category: Computer-related events and awards

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Camp                                                      5/02/2007