This weekend was FOO Camp ‘08 which I, as an employee of O’Reilly Media, was privileged to attend. And, frankly, wow. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. I missed the sessions on Friday and a couple of the Saturday sessions, but everything I managed to attend was, without exception, astonishing. Over the next week or two, while the experience is still fresh in my mind, I’m going to try to turn my hastily-scribbled notes about the sessions that really stood out for me into coherent blog posts.
First, though, I’d like to mention something I noticed over and over throughout the weekend:
Innovation Isn’t Isolation
I was going to title this section “Developers Don’t Drive Development”, but after thinking about a couple of the sessions that really jumped out at me, I concluded it just wasn’t true. A more accurate statement is that just developers don’t drive development. What I think of as the “old model”, of giving someone a technical education, sitting them down to think really hard, and then turning them loose and getting all kinds of awesome products is gone, and I’m not sure it ever existed. A lot of the coolest things I saw this weekend were things that were created for very non-technical disciplines, and by very non-technical people. It might just have been the sessions I picked - honestly, I did steer away from anything that smelled like it’d fit in at a tech conference - but a lot of the motivators and big new ideas seemed to be coming from humanities and artistic folks. People with non-technical educations, who were taking technology and bending it to their own ends.
I’ve suspected this for a while now, but I was kind of nice to see that I’m not totally out to lunch. How far out to lunch I am remains to be seen. Other opinions along the same lines included:
- Robert, one of my co-workers, who was utterly floored by a cello performance on Friday night. I’m really sorry I missed it.
- Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientist (seriously, guys, best name ever) was most impressed by what I’m going to call “sewing origami”, for lack of a better term. I can’t remember what Windell Oskay (also of Evil Mad Scientist) was most impressed by - sorry, Windell.
- Lane Becker was most impressed by a game designer who ran a session I’m really sorry to have missed on Saturday and, on Sunday, had a bunch of people collaboratively build a game in chalk on the concrete between the session-tents.
Next Up: Bees. My god.