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Fred Stutzman, a UNC Ph.D student and co-founder of ClaimID, announced on Thursday that he’s organizing a BarCamp for the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. If you are a technologist in the RDU area, add your name to the list of Campers before space runs out. It should be fun!

Like Fred, I’ve attended two of O’Reilly’s Foo Camps. Foo in this case stands for Friends Of O’Reilly. O’Reilly limits Foo Camp to around 200 people (it is invitation only) and hosts it at O’Reilly HQ in Sebastopol, CA. Foo Camp is a blast because you find yourself in interesting conversations with people like Jeff Bezos, Bram Cohen, Paul Graham, Larry Wall among many others. Partly due to the exclusivity of the event and partly due to the remote location, other people started organizing their own “un-conferences” called BarCamps. As Fred explains on the BarCampRDU Blog:

A BarCamp is an unconference where people interested in a wide range of technologies come together to teach and learn. Unfamiliar with unconference? Here’s the idea in a nutshell. Rather than having scheduled speakers, everyone pitches sessions the morning of the BarCamp. Those sessions are put on a schedule, and lots of little groups form for intense group learning. Yeah, its different from a regular conference - but it works!

Organizing a BarCamp for the RDU area is a great idea. I had lunch with Fred recently and we talked about the various projects we are working on. He’s a bright guy and I’m happy to help out as needed with BarCampRDU.