SG FooCamp ‘08 wrap-up

I’m at SFO on my way back to Portland after a fantastic weekend in Sebastopol, CA at SG FooCamp ‘08. A really, really huge thanks to Tim O’Reilly, Sara Winge, Tony and the rest of the O’Reilly staff for providing a fantastic venue for this event. Also, we had some great sponsors in BBC, Google, MyStrands, Six Apart and Yahoo! We couldn’t have done it without you.

As a little background, David Recordon and I came up with the idea for SG FooCamp literally 44 days ago. The original idea was to get a bunch of hackers together, lock them in a room for a weekend and see what happens with respect to distributed/portable social networking, data portability, etc. Slowly but surely the invite list went from 10, to 25, to 30 … then David mentioned it to Tim and the idea was hatched to turn it into a FooCamp style event and host it in Sebastopol. Sweet. Now we can go all the way up to 70 people. We blew through that about an hour later and by the time all was said and done, we had over 100 people show up for the event.

It rained most of the weekend in Sebastopol (I must have brought it from Oregon with me) but the rain actually forced folks to stay inside and participate … the sessions were fast and furious and some of them pretty intense. It was cramped inside the O’Reilly facility but it sort of reminded me of the old school OSCON events hosted in the basement of the Portland Marriot; small spaces led to so many great conversations (and the booze helped to lubricate things).

Some of my favorite moments:

• Putting names with faces for just about everybody else I follow in Twitter
• Chris Mocko amazing us with his statistical prowess (”I’m less likely to be a werewolf this round”)
• Drinking the XMPP koolaid - XMPP may be the killer app that drives things like OAuth and OpenID … its the data stupid. Really cool stuff Twitter is doing in this space.
• Great OpenID/OAuth discussions
• Portland representin’ with Matt Tucker, Renny Gleeson, Brian Ellin and myself (and technically Brad and David)
• Watching Brad and Eran figure out OpenID <-> Email identifier specification in a matter of minutes.
• Discovery, discovery, discovery.
• Talking about OpenID as a URL (why is that interesting?) as well as UI.
• Realizing that Joseph Smarr is not only a great developer and evangelist for Plaxo, he’s also a great entertainer and tequila provider … err enabler.
• Fantastic Open IPR discussions (yes, this can be fantastic) … I’m always drawn finding an end solution and the idea was hatched for an administrative org like “The Open Web Foundation” to help technologies like OpenID, OAuth and others … who knows if it makes sense … hoping to talk more about this.
• Quality time with Chris Messina.
• Renny Gleeson coining the term “ebrandgelist” and thinking he actually coined it … :-)
• Making Sara Winge laugh and doing my video interview after far, far too much cider.
• Endless games of werewolf until late, late, late into the night.
• Getting to meet Chris Saad and talk seriously about Data Portability (have a whole other post to share on this).
• Sleeping outside both nights while the temperature was in the 30’s … I knew I kept that +15 bag for a reason.

I took about 500 pictures over the weekend and will be posting them on Flickr soon (its going to be tough; Ignite Portland 2 is on Tuesday and I’m not ready!)

What started as a weekend of hacking turned into a chance to bring together a bunch of different folks that don’t necessarily know each other. The biggest thing I’m taking away from this weekend is the direct connection to so many fantastic people. Now when I see their tweets, I’ll hear their voices and see their faces. I don’t know if we’ll do this event again. There was so much interest and we could have done a Social Graph conference on this (easily I think). Hopefully we can weave some of those themes into upcoming events like the Data Sharing Summit or even IIW.

Thanks everybody for participating and I can’t wait to see everybody again soon.