I didn't have the time at Foo Camp to blog much about what I was doing, who I was meeting, and what we were discussing. I was too busy and interested to tear myself away. I went to bed each night very tired.

Luckily, a few others provided some on-line notes and such:

I'm sure there will be more as people return home.

Mini-Summary

The drive to Foo Camp was a pain. I should have known this in advance. I got stuck in traffic on 101 for a while so it took about 3 hours to get there. The return trip was no better. I really need to get that power license to I can fly to stuff like this. On the plus side, I got to watch the Blue Angels flying around San Francisco for Fleet Week.

I arrived unsure of what to expect. I ran into Andy Oram (our editor on the book) at the check-in desk, dropped off my stuff, and headed to the back lawn to find out who was there. I quickly found myself in a sea of interesting people. Chris DiBona brought bread and cheese, others brought wine. Dinner was soon served.

After dinner on Friday night, we were asked to gather upstairs to get things rolling. We did some introductions so that everyone had a [brief] chance to put names with faces. Then they brought in some very large grids (schedules) so that we could start filling in sessions. We had 1-hour time slots on Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday to fill.

Chaos ensued.

It was good chaos.

We managed to self-organize.

The rest of the weekend was an excellent mix of food, interesting people, discussions, impromptu sessions, and hackery. There was music, a natural sound presentation, water bottle rockets, portable showers, and more.

I think that Dori Smith (of Backup Brain) summed it up well:

Most frequently heard comment at Foo Camp: "I have no idea what I'm doing here--everyone here is so much smarter than me."
It's pretty damn cool to be around 200 people who're all thinking that.

I left a bit early (noon) on Sunday to head back, but not before a meeting in which we managed to hammer out some RSS stuff that will be discussed quite soon. More on that later.

I hope I didn't miss much. Was there any sort of closing event?

People

Here's a partial list of all the people I either got to meet face to face or at least hear speak:

I'm sure I forgot a bunch of others. There were so many that I began jotting down names. I got a few funny looks for pulling out my slip of paper now and then to jot 'em down, but I really don't trust my own memory for stuff like this.

In no particular order:

Whew!

It's no wonder I was tired every night, huh?

And still, there were a lot of people I did not meet but could have, given more time.

Pictures

I put some pictures up here. There are some pictures linked fro the Foo Camp Wiki here. Doc's pictures are here.

One of Doc's pictures features me sitting next to Dave Sifry. It was around midnight and we were listening to an excellent presentation about Rendezvous.

Final Word?

Well, okay. Not really. I'll probably have more to say as some of the stuff we discussed at Foo Camp becomes reality.

Posted by jzawodn at October 12, 2003 09:04 PM

Reader Comments
# Greg Gunn said:

Look at all that booze! Was everybody fit-shaced?

on October 13, 2003 01:03 AM
# Rich Gibson said:

Greg, it's not that everyone was shitfaced, but the Foo Bar was always open. I'd say that mostly people were lubricated to exactly the level required for optimal functioning.

on October 13, 2003 10:14 AM
# Jeremy C. Wright said:

Very cool, I love missing stuff like this :|

Still, flying from Canada would have been interesting.

on October 14, 2003 01:21 PM
# shaun said:

Very intresting information. This is webpage is great!!

on March 2, 2008 07:35 AM
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