A who’s who of the social Web industry is currently camping out at the O’Reilly campus in Sebastapol for Social Web Foo Camp—and a good chunk of them happen to be Portland folks.
What’s that? You know BarCamp but not Foo Camp?
So here’s the deal. To keep it brief, Foo (Friends Of O’Reilly) Camp began as an invite-only unconference that brought leading thinkers together to discuss issues and ideas.
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 lots of unused office space in its new buildings, creating the opportunity for Foo Camp.
In response, others started BarCamp (because the complement to foo is obviously bar, as in foobar ne fubar), which was an unconference open to anyone.
If you’ve never been to a BarCamp, you’re in luck. BarCamp Portland is only a couple of weeks away.
But back to the Foo. Especially the Social Web Foo.
Right now, a bunch of the regular Portland gang is embroiled in interesting discussions down at O’Reilly. And camping, of course.
Like who? Well, like:
- Nate DiNiro
- Brian Ellin
- Dawn Foster
- Jason Glaspey
- Pete Grillo
- Matt King (now officially back in Portland)
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
- Scott Kveton (in absentia)
- Michael Richardson
- Matt Tucker
You can keep an eye on the goings-on by watching the tweet stream from attendees on Twitter Search for #swfoo or Tagalus.
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