FOO Camp

I was lucky enough to go along to the Friends of O’Reilly camp; it’s a dif­fer­ent style of con­fer­ence. The recipe is to put a bunch of geeks togeth­er, give them a num­ber of rooms, feed them reg­u­larly, and see what they come up with. 

There was an inter­est­ing mix of geeks there, includ­ing those who write code. those who man­age the pro­cess, and those who write about it. There was also a bunch of O’Reilly edit­ors observing what the geeks were talk­ing about, as well as show­ing us the cool books they are edit­ing or have just released. I met people whose names I knew and whose blogs I read, who don’t come to the XML con­fer­ences, so I would­n’t nor­mally get a chance to meet them. There’s some­thing about being able to match up a per­son with their blog, and get­ting some idea of wheth­er their blog per­sona matches their real persona. 

There were some 12 rooms and the sched­ule was a self-arran­ging one, with people writ­ing on poster boards when they wanted to talk and what they wanted to talk about. Some ses­sions were more like tra­di­tion­al present­a­tions com­plete with slides, while oth­ers were more of a BOF. A lot was thought-pro­vok­ing; I’ll be put­ting some of the thoughts down over the next little while when I’ve recovered some of the sleep-deficiency. 

Before I go, one of the favor­ite geek toys (par­tic­u­larly amongst the kids) was the rock­et launch­er. This photo is cour­tesy of Stu­art Cheshire; I could­n’t get a decent one.