Scott Kveton

What a week its been. This past weekend was SG FooCamp ‘08 (more on that below), on Tuesday I got a new job and then yesterday we made the long-awaited announcement around Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joining the OpenID Foundation board. Add to that trying to get a house ready to sell, moving, finding new office space in Portland and speaking at Ignite Portland 2 this has easily been the craziest (and most fun) week I’ve had in years. I really wish I’d had time to write this post earlier in the week.

What I really want to talk about here is about where we’re at now that the dust has settled from SG FooCamp ‘08. When David and I cooked up this event we had one thing in mind and it quickly morphed into something else. The outcome from my perspective was an entirely positive one. Lots of amazing people got to make some really great connections, people hacked on code, discussions (heated and otherwise) were heartfelt and engaging all weekend long.

That said, I’ve certainly taken my fair share of abuse for organizing the event. It was invite-only and for that I’m more than willing to take some heat. David and I chose the invite list and the reality was, there was a finite amount of room (we somehow crammed 105 people in over the weekend and a good chunk of those slept in tents in 30F+ weather). Okay, so where does that leave us?

In my travels this past week, in blog posts I’ve read, in people I’ve seen (even at Ignite Portland) it was clear that everyone wished they could be at SG FooCamp ‘08. People want an open discussion about these things. Me too. And even more so now that we had this event last weekend. Social graph/data portability/distributed social networking/etc … this is as much of a technical problem as it is a policy and best practices one. The weekend showed to me the passion that a small group could have around this space. What if we expanded the scope significantly?

We already have the Internet Identity Workshop as well as the Data Sharing Summit. Both of these are open-space style events and both are really well attended and organized. I think there is room for something combined or even expanded in scope.

I can foresee two tracks to an event like this. One would cover the hacking pieces. How can we use XMPP? What does Google’s Social Graph API reveal? What are the hard problems devs are dealing with? The other track would cover the policy and best practices components. How do we put users in control of their data? What should be the rules/best practices around scrapping? Who owns my data? Yes, I’m suggesting that we bring together a cross-section of people to discuss this. This could/should even be an extension of the DataPortability work going on. Its not a contest and its not about size, but I could easily see 1000 people coming to an event like this and I can only imagine the intensity and camaraderie being 10x what we had at SG FooCamp ‘08.

Okay, so … who’s going to do it? I was really hoping to hear word of a another Data Sharing Summit from Marc and Kaliya. I think its a great basis for this event and I’d love to help make it a reality. The sooner the better in my opinion. People are hungry to discuss this and with the maturation of technologies like OpenID, OAuth and microformats we have the building blocks we need to make it happen. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves, anybody else?

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.