I spent the weekend with 150+ wonderfully intelligent, diverse and interesting folks at the 3rd KiwiFoo (aka Baacamp) event, held in Warkworth, north of Auckland, near the home of Nat Torkington and his wonderful wife Jenine, who co-organise the event with Russell Brown.

Kiwifoo is an “unconference” inspired by the orignal Foocamp in Sebastapol California. That means everyone participates and no-one knows what will end up on the schedule ’til you get there. There is no “audience” at an unconference (in this way it’s a bit similar to the SCA event I went to last weekend, but it’s the future, not the past that happens at a Foocamp). It’s also free, by virtue of the many sponsors, this year including Google (as always), Vodafone and Telecom (logos rarely seen on the same T-shirt!), InternetNZ, Catalyst, Silverstripe, Throng, Project X, Shift, and SMC NZ. [nb: will come back and add links later]. By necessity, it is invite only, but the good news is that Nat is now talking about running more than one a year, so there will be more chances to get invited. Alternatively, buy a ticket to Webstock, where many of the same people are going – the timing of Kiwifoo this year chosen carefully so they could invite the speakers Webstock paid to fly into the country! We didn’t get all of them at Foo, but those we did were *great* to have along.

The only bad thing about Kiwifoo is that no matter how much you do, you end up missing out on a lot more – there are 4-6 simultaneous session streams, and often you are torn between 2-3 of them or simply spending more time with someone new and interesting that you just met.

This year I attended some really enjoyable sessions on various diverse topics, including the Future of News, a session led by the formidable Julie Starr, who mostly managed to keep a lid on all the unruly journos in the room (not looking at anyone in particular). I was interested to hear that the pay rates at our major dailies are sufficiently low that most senior NZ print journalists are now independent – which doesn’t really surprise me.

On the other hand I was irritated I didn’t get to any of the economy/finance/banking sessions, which would have been really good since we had Rod Oram and Bernard Hickey at the conference, and if anyone should have a few clues on how well NZ is doing or going to do in the economic maelstrom of 2009, it’s those two. I did get to see them in action on the chosen saturday night debate topic of “Is New Zealand fucked?” (Rod: No! – Bernard: Yes!).

There were many folks I wanted to meet but didn’t, perhaps because a little more planning and a little less serendipity might have been required on my part, but the conversations I did have were superb.

eg (1) A chat with Ben Goodger over breakfast, (yes, that Ben Goodger), who told me some history of the Google Chrome project. One thing that surprised me was that they managed to keep such a major project under wraps until it was released. “We like surprises” was his comment on that one. Earlier on there was a valuable session co-hosted by Ben and Roc on the future of Browsers, which I intend to make a separate blog post about, adding some of my own thoughts with respect to user-scripting and other factors.

eg (2) Really enjoyed sharing a dram (or three) with Russell Brown and various other appreciators of fine scotch whisky. Russel had a very nice Springbank 15yo which didn’t last long, and I’d brought along a bottle of The Glenrothes Special Reserve, which was definitely my Whisky “find” of 2008, and folks agreed it was a very fine drop. It was sourced from the most excellent Whisky Galore, which has an excellent catalogue of whisky online for mail order purposes [and my birthday is October 2nd in case you were wondering ].

Most of the Public Address bloggers were there (at Foo, not necessarily the whisky table) including Emma Hart who just happens to be the partner of Interclue Senior Developer Karl Dearden, who was also there and having a great time.

Many folks asked how Interclue was going, and were impressed to hear that we’d racked up over a million downloads in the last year. Tim Norton was a bit shocked that he hadn’t heard how well we were doing, but I hadn’t exactly publicized that fact, partly because our download stats on AMO have been broken (alternatively reporting 0 downloads and over two million) and our internal stats are a bit off as well (but I roughly know by how much, and we’re almost certainly over a million at this point).

One thing I really should have done was type up a list of people I wanted to meet and things I wanted to see before I got there – it’s far too easy to miss rare opportunities, such as the chance to see a self-replicating machine in action, otherwise. I think the best idea would be to write down 20-50 and hope to achieve at least half, while allowing for as many serendipitous conversations and discoveries as possible.

I’ll blog more about Kiwifoo tomorrow! If you want to find out what other people thought, search for “kiwifoo” on twitter.