Foo Camp geek out
I spent last weekend at Foo Camp hosted at O'Reilly's headquarters in Sebastopol, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. The 200-person event was 3 days of non-stop conversations, sessions, and planning with the occasional break for food or a few hours sleep under a cubicle desk.
Context & Ripple Effects
Niall Kennedy's account lands inside a small but real arc in this corpus about how geeks convene: Scripting News had already mused on a BloggerCon-style gathering last October, and HorsePigCow spent November celebrating why regional geek communities matter. What distinguishes Foo Camp is who runs it — O'Reilly, the publisher whose Radar blog had just devoted a full week to GData, convening 200 people at its own Sebastopol headquarters for three days of self-organized sessions.
The significance is that the convening power sits with a media company rather than a conference business: no syndicated pickup and no public discussion threads followed Kennedy's post, so the camp's influence travels through the attendees' own blogs and the ideas they carry back into O'Reilly's editorial pipeline.
First-order effects
- The 200 attendees get three days of unstructured access to each other at O'Reilly's expense, with sleeping under desks signaling that the value is the conversation density, not the venue.
- O'Reilly converts its headquarters and brand into a gathering space, deepening ties with exactly the blogger-developer audience that feeds its Hacks series and Radar coverage.
Second-order effects
- Other event organizers face a format comparison: an invitation-only weekend with no panels and no sponsor booths sets a reference point against which conventional paid conferences look expensive and scripted.
- Invite lists become reputation currency — being in or out of the 200 shapes who brokers next season's introductions among Valley builders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tech publishing brands increasingly compete on convening power as much as content, treating periodic closed-door gatherings as a moat that paid admission conferences cannot replicate.
The trend: Technology media companies are turning their communities into the product itself, using invitation-only unconferences as a durable alternative to the traditional conference circuit.