Foo Camp is an annual

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...

event hosted by publisher

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

Event

O'Reilly describes it as "the wiki of conferences", where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, 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 An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organizati ...

. The event started as a joke between

Tim O'Reilly Timothy O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is an Irish-American author and publisher, who is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Co ...

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. There was eventually a Foo Bar at the camp. 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 BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused on technology and the web. They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early st ...

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 Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in Palo Alto, California, that produced enterprise social software for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and social software applications, including microblogging, user profiles, ...

offices in

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, 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 Warkworth () is a town on the Northland Peninsula in the upper North Island of New Zealand. It is in the northern part of the Auckland Region, north of Auckland and south of Whangārei, at the head of Mahurangi Harbour. State Highway 1 (New Ze ...

O'Reilly has since held a series of topical Foo Camps at Google Headquarters, including Science Foo Camp, 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. December 2010, O'Reilly co-organized NewsFoo with Google and the

Knight Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also known as the Knight Foundation, is an American non-profit foundation that provides grants for journalism, communities, and the arts. The organization was founded as the Knight Memorial Education ...

at the

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (often abbreviated to The Cronkite School by its students and faculty), is one of the 24 independent schools at Arizona State University and is named in honor of veteran broadcast jo ...

in Phoenix, Arizona. In 2011, O'Reilly announced the Health Foo on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Blog. In February 2018, O’Reilly,

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and

SAGE Publications Sage Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent academic publishing company, founded in 1965 in New York City by Sara Miller McCune and now based in the Newbury Park neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, California. Sage ...

held the first Social Science Foo Camp at Facebook in Menlo Park, California.

References

{{Unconference O'Reilly Media Computer conferences Social information processing Unconferences Recurring events established in 2003

Event

Other events

See also

References