DivaBlog

At the first night of EuroFoo, and already I'm happy!

Foo is an invitational conference that's put on by O'Reilly....its sort of a camp-out for geeks. This is only the second ever Foo and the first ever in Europe, where O'Reilly hopes to host a European OSCon sometime next year...so this meeting is a chance to hook up people active in the European F/OSS scene. But it so much more than that. There's a whimsy to Foo that's lost at regular conferences (sadly even at O'Reilly ones). It is much more reminiscent of 1990s era Apple WWDC events, because people are encouraged to play, to get to know each other and to have fun (not just to circuit between flashy keynotes and endless sessions). At those old WWDC events there were always (pre-MindStorm) lego contests and afternoon junkfood binges and pinball tournaments...and if your demo crashed (of course there were tons of real sessions too) you had to do pushups while the system rebooted ;-).

So tomorrow I'll be co-presenting on "Guerilla Evangelism" with the enthusiastic Zak Greant. Then on Sunday I'll co-present with Rishab Ghosh on "Open Source in Developing Countries"...but the sessions I'm really looking forward to attending are the ladies from the BBC talking about how their open source archive project and the guys from this week's FOAF conference talking about what they decided (oh and the lock-picking session). Conferences like these remind me why I was interested in software to begin with. The people are so weird and wonderful, and so enthusiastic about projects that let them express themselves.

So, I'll blog more about EuroFoo in the next couple of day, but in the meantime check out that funky clocktower here at the University of Twente, where EuroFoo is being held. This university has all kinds of whimsical features...What a perfect place for a Foo!