Foo Camp Friends

Had a wonderful time at Foo Camp this year, described as "A Face-to-Face Wiki." Seeing how the first Foo was an experiment in the simplest thing that possibly work and somehow did, there was no way to top the first eureka. I expect the self-organizing approach to become a feature of many events. Partially because of the tools, partially because of the economics and access to the practice. Heck, there is even AnarchistU, a free school running on wiki, as an example of how far this can go.

But this time, it was less about the fascination of the format, or even the new tools and projects, but the simple conversations between new and old friends. There was wonderful contrast to the sessions themselves, from David Weinberger sharing about his meta meta book project to a session on Categories/Tags as the new Folders, or solid talk of fostering open calendaring/contacts/rss to good thinking about communication tools with context. Memes were spawned and new beginnings hatched. People were hacking Kwiki plugins in the dead of night and coming together to form a FeedMesh.

Foo got a little older this year, with more people bringing their families. I brought Eveli (pictured left) who immediately made new friends, got to ride a Segway and needed so little supervision that it truly made me feel old and proud. With so many week long or weekend conferences, being family friendly should be more than a necessity. After all, its what we are working for.