Foo Camp

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Tim O'Reilly in Foo China 2007 Tim O'Reilly in Foo China 2007.JPG
Tim O'Reilly in Foo China 2007

Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly describes it as "the wiki of conferences", where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, [1] using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule; this type of event is sometimes called an unconference.

Contents

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 much unused office space in its new buildings, creating the opportunity for Foo Camp. The first FOO Camp was held in October 2003, and had approximately 200 attendees. [2] There was eventually a Foo Bar at the camp. [3]

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.

Other events

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.

Since February 2007, former O'Reilly employee Nathan Torkington has hosted an annual Kiwi Foo Camp in Warkworth, New Zealand [4] [5]

O'Reilly has since held a series of topical Foo Camps at Google Headquarters, including Science Foo Camp, [6] Collective Intelligence Foo Camp, Social Graph Foo Camp, and others. February 2019, O'Reilly co-organized its second Social Science Foo Camp with Facebook and SAGE at the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. [7] December 2010, O'Reilly co-organized NewsFoo with Google and the Knight Foundation 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. [8] In February 2018, O’Reilly, Facebook and SAGE Publications held the first Social Science Foo Camp at Facebook in Menlo Park, California. [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

The terms foobar, foo, bar, baz, and others are used as metasyntactic variables and placeholder names in computer programming or computer-related documentation. They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept.

O'Reilly Media is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an animal on many of its book covers.

Tim OReilly Irish computer programmer, author and businessman

Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media. He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.

Hackathon Event in which groups of software developers work at an accelerated pace

A hackathon is a design sprint-like event; often, in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on software projects.

BarCamp International network of user-generated conferences

BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused around technology and the web. 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 software, and open data formats.

Open Space Technology (OST) is a method for organizing and running a meeting or multi-day conference, where participants have been invited in order to focus on a specific, important task or purpose.

Unconference participant-driven meeting

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 hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization.

Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona is the director of open source at Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches on Google Code. In his former work on Google's public sector software, he looked after Google Moderator and the polling locations API and election results.

Chris Messina (open-source advocate) American blogger, product consultant and speaker (born 1981)

Christopher Reaves Messina is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker who is the inventor of the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms. In a 2007 tweet, Messina proposed vertical/associational grouping of messages, trends, and events on Twitter by the means of hashtags. The hashtag was intended to be a type of metadata tag that allowed users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging, which made it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content. It allowed easy, informal markup of folksonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language. Hashtags have since been referred to as the "eavesdroppers", "wormholes", "time-machines", and "veins" of the Internet.

How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

Science Foo Camp

Science Foo Camp (scifoo) is a annual of interdisciplinary scientific unconferences organized by O'Reilly Media, Digital Science, Alphabet Inc., based on an idea from Linda Stone. The event is based on the spirit and format of Foo Camp, an event focused on emerging technology, and is designed to encourage collaboration between scientists who would not typically work together. As such, it is unusual among conferences in three ways:

  1. attendance is by invitation-only
  2. the delegates come from many different areas of science rather than one subject, such as physics, chemistry or biology
  3. the meeting has no fixed agenda; the invited scientists, technologists and policy makers set the conference program during the conference itself, based on their shared professional interests and enthusiasms, aka unconference
Kinnernet

Kinnernet is a series of invitation-only unconference events formed by entrepreneurs, technologists, startup founders, scientists, media professionals, and creatives.

Linda Stone

Linda Stone is a writer and consultant who coined the phrase "continuous partial attention" in 1998. Stone also coined "email apnea" in 2008 which means "a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email."

Google I/O Annual developer conference held by Google

Google I/O is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. "I/O" stands for Input/Output, as well as the slogan "Innovation in the Open". The event's format is similar to Google Developer Day.

Wikimania Official annual conference hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, free knowledge and free content, and social and technical aspects related to these topics.

RecentChangesCamp

RecentChangesCamp was an unconference focused on wikis, held from 2006 to 2012. It was named after the "recent changes" feature that is found in most wikis. RecentChangesCamp followed an Open Space model in having a program that was determined onsite by participants.

Hybrid event

A hybrid event is a tradeshow, conference, unconference, seminar, workshop or other meeting that combines a "live" in-person event with a "virtual" online component.

Stream is a series of digital unconferences hosted by WPP. It is run by volunteers and sponsored by some of WPP's agency clients. Stream Europe takes place in Greece in October each year and hosts over three hundred people in the creative, media and technology industries. Attendees discuss and debate ideas and opportunities in the areas of culture, innovation and the internet.

The O'Reilly Open Source Award is presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source. From 2005 to 2009 the award was known as the Google–O'Reilly Open Source Award but since 2010 the awards have only carried the O'Reilly name.

The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology and open culture. The organization was founded in 2011 by Linux kernel developer and open source advocate Valerie Aurora and open source developer and advocate Mary Gardiner. It was named after Ada Lovelace, who is often celebrated as the world's first computer programmer, as is the Ada programming language. In August 2015, the Ada Initiative board announced that the organization would shut down in October 2015. According to the announcement, the Initiative's executive leadership decided to step down, and the organization was unable to find acceptable replacement leaders.

SkeptiCamp

SkeptiCamp was founded by Reed Esau in 2007 and is small grassroots conference where scientific skeptics come together and participate and present. Skepticamps are held in varying formats worldwide and are operated in the style of an unconference.

References

  1. ↑ Emily Sohn (28 December 2018). "The future of the scientific conference". nature. Retrieved 8 August 2019.
  2. ↑ Battelle, John (10 January 2004). "When geeks go camping, ideas hatch". CNN. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
  3. ↑ Watt, Justin C. (2005). "FOO Camp – Justinsomnia". justinsomnia.org. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
  4. ↑ "Kiwi Foo Camp Website" . Retrieved 3 April 2013.
  5. ↑ John Ballinger (13 February 2008). "Geeks gather to share, network and play". Computerworld New Zealand. Archived from the original on 10 February 2012.
  6. ↑ Conor Dougherty (22 January 2016). "How Larry Page's Obsessions Became Google's Business". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 August 2019.
  7. ↑ Julia Hobsbawm (18 April 2019). "Social science's lessons for business". strategy-business. Retrieved 7 August 2019.
  8. ↑ "Tim O'Reilly to Host 'Unconference' for Health, Tech Leaders". RWJF. 2 December 2010. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
  9. ↑ Kecskemethy, Tom (7 March 2018). "Ignorance and Interdisciplinary Work: Field Notes from the Social Science Foo Camp". SAGE Ocean. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
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