It should be a fun weekend at Foo Camp. I attended one of the first Bar Camps in Toronto in January of 2006, and I really liked the un-conference style. I even sponsored it through ObjectSharp, the company I was a partner at before I came to Microsoft to build IronRuby. I met a ton of folks in the Toronto start-up scene there, and remain in contact with a lot of those folks today.
One thing that Foo Camp made me do was to take a closer look at social networks. Folks who are at Foo Camp are part of a social network created by the folks over at CrowdVine. Shortly after I got my invitation, the Foo Camp CrowdVine network was created, and I started playing around with the software. At roughly the same time, a friend at Microsoft 'friended me' on my largely dormant Facebook account. I responded, looked through his friend list, added some friends in common and got hooked on the idea.
Most folks my age (39) aren't in Facebook. I found exactly two people from my high school, and two more from college (although strangely enough, my Ph.D. thesis supervisor is there ...). However, I found an awful lot of folks from the Ruby community and the startup community. I also found lots of younger folks at Microsoft, and some older folks who are trying to figure out this new medium.
What strikes me is how there is a winner-take-all networking effect happening with Facebook. I doubt that I'll keep my CrowdVine network around; instead I'll try to convince folks that I meet at Foo Camp who aren't already on FaceBook to join that instead. And with all of the recent buzz around Facebook, that's hardly surprising.
Give it a try, you'll never know who you'll run into.
