2007 Attendees
The inaugural New Zealand event was the first Foo Camp to be attended by government ministers. Communications and Information Technology minister David Cunliffe attended and held a session on broadband and regulatory policy, which he concluded with an indication that the discussion would have a significant impact on his portfolio priorities in the coming year: "Thank you for helping me write my action plan for 2007... As of tonight peering is an important issue"
Another minister of the crown, the Hon Judith Tizard spoke in her capacity as Minister of Archives New Zealand, Minister responsible for the National Library, and Associate Minister of Arts and Culture on the Copyright Amendment Bill, which she sponsors in the New Zealand Parliament.
Notable Open Source luminaries to attend included Chris DiBona, the manager of Google's open-source software programme, Ben Goodger, former Firefox lead with the Mozilla Foundation and now also at Google, Robert O'Callahan, lead engineer for the Mozilla Gecko layout engine, director of the GNOME Foundation board Jeff Waugh, and Asa Dotzler, co-founder and community coordinator for the Spread Firefox project. Other tech industry guests included British software developer Matt Biddulph, the co-creator of the BBC Programme Catalogue, a landmark searchable database of all programming ever broadcast by the BBC, and Artur Bergman, operations and infrastructure architect for SixApart, owner and operator of the LiveJournal, Moveable Type, TypePad and Vox blogging platforms.
They were joined by a varied group of New Zealanders, including Auckland University computer scientist Peter Gutmann, InternetNZ fellows John Houlker and Andy Linton (source), technology entrepreneur Rod Drury, user experience designer Ross Howard, Rowan Simpson of Trade Me, Mike Hodgson of the electronica group Pitch Black, Idolblog and Throng founders Rachel and Regan Cunliffe, Mark Cubey Wellington radio producer, motivator and all round creative-talent instigator of note, Seth Wagoner, who gave the first public demonstration of Interclue, and many others - about 120 in all.
Pictures from the Kiwi Foo Camp meet have been uploaded to the Flickr image sharing service and are tagged with "kiwifoo" and "baacamp".
Read more about this topic: Kiwi Foo Camp