Category: Industry News

David Crow loves his Mac. He is a software designer, an agent provocateur, and a general trouble maker. When he’s not busy with client work, David can be found in downtown Toronto trying to build the next big cross-platform thing.
*One Degree: I’m not sure that many people in Canada are familiar with the major buzz happening around “camps” these days. Can you give us a little background on FooCamp and BarCamp?*
“FooCamp”:http://wiki.oreillynet.com/foocamp05/index.cgi was started by Tim O’Reilly, the publisher of O’Reilly books – the technical ones with the woodcut drawings from the Dover copyright-free archive. FOOCamp, FOO stands for Friends of O’Reilly, is an invitation only event at the Sebastopol, California campus of O’Reilly publishers where 200 people spend the weekend sharing their works in progress, the latest tech toys, hardware hacks and tackling interesting problems together.
“BarCamp”:http://barcamp.org/ is a response from the community. Where FooCamp was invite only, BarCamp is open. “BarCamp”:http://factoryjoe.com/blog/?p=55 is an non-exclusive, open alternative to FooCamp. BarCamp is an opportunity for people to share and learn in an open environment. There have been BarCamp events in Palo Alto and Amsterdam, and planning for New York City, Boston, London, and Vancouver.
FooCamp and BarCamp are based on the OpenSpace conference concept. “OpenSpace”:http://martinfowler.com/bliki/OpenSpace.html is an unstructured format, where you do not pre-plan activities and speakers. Instead, you provide a basic framework of time and space, allowing the attendees to figure out what happens. The conference self-organizes around the attendees and ideas.
*One Degree: Why did you instigate TorCamp?*

_Ian Kelso is an interactive producer, strategist and the Principal at “Modern World Communications”:http://www.modworld.com/, a Toronto-based interactive production and development firm. He is also President and a founding board member of the New Media Business Alliance “(NMBA)”:http://www.nmba.ca a member-based not-for-profit industry association representing interactive digital media content production companies in Ontario._
*One Degree: What is the NMBA up to these days?*
We are in the midst of a very busy and exciting period at the moment. NMBA is developing a number of new programmes and services including a new conference, a monthly networking event, an online industry directory and the return of our popular iLunch case study series. In August we moved to a new office and hired a communications and membership coordinator so now there are three of us working more or less full-time.
Over the past year we have also co-founded a national umbrella association — the Canadian Interactive Alliance — with 7 other New Media organizations from across Canada. One of our first projects — which NMBA is managing — is a national economic profile of the industry due out this spring.
*One Degree: How has your mandate changed since your inception in 2001?*