A brief history of P-Camps

The first unconference apparently dates back to an XML Developers' Conference in 1998, described as a conference by developers, for developers, now typified by agendas and topics being determined on-the spot by the attendees. O’Reilly later also ran some unconferences, co-opted the familiar “foo” term as a backronym for Friends of O’Reilly, (apparently the idea of a FooBar as a bar/café meeting place for O’Reilly’s colleagues had already been toyed with), and named them FooCamps. Foobar is a placeholder tag for describing variables of undetermined value in code examples, so perhaps the term FooCamp does effectively convey the undetermined nature of an unconference to a geek audience. Since O’Reilly’s camps, other organizers of unconferences have used the opposite half of the term foobar to name them BarCamps, and a bewildering array of variations on the theme have emerged (my favorite being BaaCamps in New Zealand), and thus we arrive at P-Camps, for software Product, with participation by Product Managers. You can keep track of unconferences on the BarCamp.org website. I’m sure there will be many more variations to follow.