[OSList] Foo Bar OST Re: What's the difference between BarCamp and OST?

Sun Aug 21 12:38:48 PDT 2016

If my memory serves me right (and Wikipedia seems to bear this out), the 
history is the following:

There used to be Foocamp, a conference initiated and led by Tim O'Reilly. The 
Foo in Foocamp supposedly stands for Friends of O'Reilly. O'Reilly is quite 
influential among what you call "the geeks". There is an alternative 
explanation of "foo" in that it refers to, well, "foo", which among geeks is a 
placeholder term for nothing in particular. You use it like "thingy" if you 
dont really have a term at hand. A random variable name that is.

Attendance at Foocamp was invitation-only and so eventually, some people 
frustrated over not having been invited, created Barcamp as a free and open 
alternative to Foocamp. Bar, like foo, is also just an empty placeholder for 
nothing in particular, and in geek lingo, foo and bar always occur together, 
hence foobar (no relationship to fubar as far as I know).

I don't think there is a particular defined structure to barcamps; they are 
much more loosely organized than open-space-organized events. They tend to 
have an agenda wall but none or not much of the ceremony that open space 
provides. So any one event may be quite different from another. Well, that's 
at least how it was when I last attended such events 10 years ago.

Talking semantics then:

1. Foocamp was a particular conference series.

2. Barcamp refers to a widely-copied conference format and is a synonym for 
unconference.

3. Open space technology is a meeting/event facilitation technique.

My understanding is that OST is not a conference format but rather helps 
structure a meeting/event/conference in a particular way.

You can probably tell me whether it is a good idea to embed OST in a 
conference as one track, with other tracks using more traditional formats 
(i.e. planned agendas). I used to structure a conference series (WikiSym, now 
OpenSym, http://opensym.org) using OST, but later general chairs didn't do 
that; they didn't like OST and probably didn't understand it either.

Cheers,
Dirk

On 21.08.2016 21:15, Harrison Owen via OSList wrote:
> Eva -- you are, as usual, correct. Bar Camp has been around for some years, and it is a copy of OS. I think it had something to do with the geeks wanting to maintain something more like control. So they did the same thing (mostly), and called it something different. Is this called innovation?
>
> Harrison
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: OSList [mailto:oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org] On Behalf Of Eva P Svensson via OSList
> Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2016 2:01 PM
> To: World wide Open Space Technology email list
> Subject: [OSList] What's the difference between BarCamp and OST?
>
> Dear friends,
> Today I heard a woman talking about setting up a meeting using BarCamp as a method. I asked her to explain to me what it was and when she did that I had a hard time finding the differences between that and Open Space. One thing was that, as she explained it, the time slots were 45 minutes then 15 minutes pause then new 45 minutes and so on. Otherwise it seemed more or less like copy and paste from Open Space. Anyone who knows more about it?
> :o)
> Eva
>
> Skickat från min iPhone
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Website: http://dirkriehle.com - Twitter: @dirkriehle
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