China Foo Retrospective

China’s first Foo Camp was a reasonable success over the weekend. The event started off Friday night with an O’Reilly Ignite event held at 798 Space in Beijing. This was followed up on Saturday with the actual China Foo event at the Beijing Landmark hotel. The Foo Camp was only one day, had around 150 some people attending, and there wasn’t much camping involved. The day was broken up into 5 hour long sessions held in 4 different rooms, allowing for only 20 sessions.

Being as this was O’Reilly’s first event like this in China, there were definitely some things that could have gone better and most of this was brought up in the retrospective session at the end of the day. The two most obvious points to me where that, despite intentions otherwise, the event was both mostly in English and mostly about web and internet technologies. The crowed was much more homogeneous than other Foo Camps from what I understand. There weren’t any really wacky or odd sessions—mostly people talking about internet, gaming or mobile technologies. Also, having the event at an upscale hotel added a lot conference feel to this unconference.

All that said, I think it was a great event. I met a lot of cool people and learned a lot, particuarly about the gaming market in China. I led a discussion about the state of open source in China and I’ll be sharing some of what I learned here in Atlanta for ApacheCon.

The event was a good move for O’Reilly and could pave the way into something larger. Given what’s happened with OSSummit it’s clear that small moves are wise.

I’ll try to post up more thoughts about China Foo and what I learned as the week goes by. At the moment, I’m late to the hackathon, so I really should get out of this hotel room…