I am honoured to have been invited to the KiwiFoo/Baacamp weekend organised by Nat and Russel. It was held the past weekend, Feb 1-3, which was filled with amazing sessions, very smart and creative people and lots of “corridor talk.” The people ranged from Tech Nomads from Estonia (Tony had fascinating tales to tell), Media folk (such as Radio NZ, Weta Workshops and TVNZ), robot-heads, web geeks (I met some of the Shift guys, who were awesome), crafties (Lucy from felt.co.nz was always interesting to talk to), events organisers (such as the organisers of Barcamps Wellington and Christchurch, as well as Natalie and Simon from Oxford GeekNights - now livin’ it up in Brighton), Kiwis livin’ it up in the Valley (such as Ponoko) and much much more.

The one thing Foocamp has over Barcamp is the control over who is attending. Where Barcamp is more a web geek event, Nat and Russel could control who was invited to KiwiFoo and so could make sure there was a great variety in attendance allowing cross pollination of ideas. The invite only part meant that everyone was cutting-edge or leaders in whatever they did, so a lot of the more technical talks were way over my head.

I especially enjoyed Justine‘s talk on Usability and the effects of change and unintentional blindness and the effect on user interfaces, e.g. showing errors, opening new tabs in the background or even just navigation to a page with a left-hand side navigation adapting for the current page. A lot of the time, the change is not apparent so we are lost, trying to figure out what we are meant to do next.

Another talk (the last one of the weekend) was also about usability, and this was basically a round table discussion about solving some issues with a particular site’s “Privacy and Security” form. It is a real mess, looks like a port from the database structure to a form. My immediate reaction was to solve 90% of the problem with only 10% of the interface. After a heated, sometimes boisterous discussion, we seemed to reach that conclusion. Showing 2 options “Public” and “Private” then only revealing more of the options when you select private. Simple check boxes will do, no need for Yes and No radio buttons!

Another session I attended was led by Russel, Rod and Mauricio, entitled “Fixing broken revenue” in which we discussed the current advertising model and how this was broken when it came to smaller publishing companies. It was definitely an interesting discussion that I’m excited to keep going.

By far, my favorite sessions were about “building web communities” and “bringing geeks out of the woodwork” - which is ideal since I believe the reason I was invited to Foo this year was because of my organising Barcamp Auckland. The first session, which was entitled “Web Community NZ, who is it and how big , is it closed shop? How to nurture it” we discusses whether we were missing out on something and if we were, how we could find out about it. We decided that yes, a lot of us were missing out on something and that was mainly because of lots of “pockets of community” that weren’t interlinked or communicating with each other. Our solution? A single agnostic activity aggregator. More on that later.

The the next morning, Simon and Natalie presented a session on “bringing geeks out of the woodwork.” Natalie started by talking about her experiences organising GeekNights and how this quickly grew to a large event. Mike, Mike and I talked about our Barcamp experiences (Sydney, Wellington and Auckland) and others talked about other smaller communities such as The Valley in Christchurch.

Mauricio rightly blogged The conversations around here are not NDA, but it’s a matter of principle to only disclose things if you ask and receive a positive response. so although I’d love to share more details I don’t think it’s appropriate to share more than an overview of the weekend.

One thing I can share, and we’d really like to share, and would love you to pass on is a little thing entitled “NZWC.”

NZWC

What is it? Basically NZWC is the agnostic activity aggregator I talked about stemming from the building web communities session. We decided the best thing we can do is to create an aggregator of everything happening in the NZ web scene. It’s open to anyone to post to, just tag your stuff with “nzwc” and our stuff should start appearing on the site.

Currently the actual site is just some information about the project and a quickie MagieRSS mashup, but we plan to build it out into something a little more useful. Of course, if you start tagging content you believe is relevant to the NZWC then we’ll be able to see how people use it a lot better and build a better experience around the content.

Something to note about posting to NZWC. The content you put up there doesn’t necessarily need to be your own. You can add it as a del.icio.us bookmark, tag it with “nzwc” and it’ll show up just as well. The idea is to surface as much content concerning the NZWC as possible.

We are planning to support Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us but could possibly later include support for Twitter, Upcoming etc. All we need from you right now, is to tag stuff. Surface it, for the rest of us to find on NZWC.