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.
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.
- ^ Emily Sohn (28 December 2018). "The future of the scientific conference". nature. Retrieved 8 August 2019.
- ^ Battelle, John (10 January 2004). "When geeks go camping, ideas hatch". CNN. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
- ^ Watt, Justin C. (2005). "FOO Camp – Justinsomnia". justinsomnia.org. Retrieved 15 March 2018.