This is part one of my three part coverage of FooCamp 2009. You can also read part two and part three for more.
Well – here I am at the 2009 FooCamp New Zealand it’s 11:30 as I start writing this piece and I’d say that things were winding down for the night but I’d be lying. Although the first two sessions of the camp have concluded, there is no end to the discussions which flow as freely as the drinks.
It’s been an awesome start to what is shaping up to be an awesome weekend. I was fortunate enough to be able to offer a lift to 5 other Foo attendees and the car was filled with incredibly interesting conversation ranging from hacking whiteboard presentation tools for the purposes of entertaining infants, to privacy, security and airline saftey – through to the pain of managing open source coding projects.
I have had a remarkable conversation on education with a couple of people from a major Tertiary institution along with a gentleman whose role included going to schools and assisting teachers in the science curriculum. This conversation will spill into a session I plan to run on Saturday afternoon around Education, collaboration and community – not my standard fare of geek and gadgets, but a subject I’ve been mulling over on and off for the past year or so.
Due to the FrieNDA which is put in place at these ‘unconference’ events, there will be no specific details posted about people or the conversations. This is to protect all of the attendees, promote openess, and allow compeditior companies to share views in a intelligent manner without egos and personalities getting in the way.
For the record, the first two sessions of the weekend that I’ve attended were both around the control of content. Session 1 was around if a company should start releasing it’s content under creative common licencing, and the second was a very good session led by New Zealands “Creative Freedom Foundation” it’s worth the time of every New Zealander who is active on the Internet to read and understand the implications of the impending changes to the copyright act. I must admit that I learnt a few things during the session that I’d not known before.
Anyway, it’s very late and if I don’t want to get dragged into a game of Werewolf (and lynched) I’d best go hit the hay… What a great strt to an awesome weekend.