Foo Camp
Encyclopedia
O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...
. 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-pollination between people and technologies that are on the O'Reilly radar.
Some have described it as a meta-birds-of-a-feather
Birds of a Feather (computing)
In computing, BoF can refer to:* An informal discussion group. Unlike special interest groups or working groups, BoFs are informal and often formed in an ad-hoc manner...
session that gets smart people together to discuss technology issues. This style of event has also been described as an unconference
Unconference
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization...
.
The event started as a joke between Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements.-Life and career:...
and Sara Winge, O'Reilly's VP of Corporate Communications. Sara had always wanted to run a foo bar
Foobar
The terms foobar /ˈfʊːbɑː/, fubar, or foo, bar, baz and qux are sometimes used as placeholder names in computer programming or computer-related documentation...
, 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. 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
BarCamp
BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences . They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and were related to open source technologies, social protocols, and open...
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
Socialtext
Socialtext Incorporated is a company based in Palo Alto, California that produces enterprise social software, comprising an integrated suite of web-based social software applications including microblogging, user profile, directories, groups, personal dashboards using OpenSocial widgets, and shared...
offices in Palo Alto, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
by Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield
Ross Mayfield
Ross Mayfield is co-founder, Chairman and President, and former CEO of Socialtext Incorporated, an enterprise social software company based in Palo Alto, California.He now is Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare...
, with an open invitation to anyone who wanted to join.
Over the weekend of 2–4 February 2007, former O'Reilly employee Nathan Torkington staged the first Kiwi Foo Camp
Kiwi Foo Camp
Kiwi Foo Camp, also known as Baa Camp, is an annual Foo Camp, an unstructured gathering of technology industry people and policy makers, that takes place at Mahurangi College in Warkworth, New Zealand in early February. The first Kiwi Foo Camp occurred on 2–4 February 2007, and the second ran 1–3...
(otherwise known as Baa Camp) in Warkworth, New Zealand
Warkworth, New Zealand
Warkworth is a town in the upper North Island of New Zealand, within the Rodney District and lying at the far north of the Auckland Region but just south of the Northland Region...
, where he now lives.
O'Reilly has since held a series of topical Foo Camps at Google Headquarters, including Science Foo Camp
Science Foo Camp
Science Foo Camp, also known as SciFoo, is a series of interdisciplinary scientific conferences organized by O'Reilly Media , Nature Publishing Group and Google Inc., based on an idea from Linda Stone...
, Collective Intelligence Foo Camp, Social Graph Foo Camp, and others. In December 2010, O'Reilly co-organized NewsFoo with Google and the Knight Foundation
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is an American private, non-profit foundation dedicated to supporting transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts....
at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix Arizona.
In 2011 O'Reilly announced the Health Foo on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Blog.
