Unfortunately, the "professional" price-tag is more than many of the rank-and-file open source hackers can afford. So last year, the rank-and-file from Portland (the conference venue) organized FOSCON which stands for "Free" OSCON and held it off-site at FreeGeek, a local Portland geek hangout. Even though FOSCON lasted for only one evening, it raised the specter of a conference "fork". As the de facto "physical center" of Open Source, Portland is the natural location for an Open Source conference. But, since O'Reilly could almost certainly draw a larger turnout of $1000 attendees if they chose to hold OSCON in a bigger market, the possible development of a competing "free" conference in Portland gave the organizers reason to reevaluate their choice of venue.
OSCAMP was conceived of at RecentChangesCamp as a grassroots cooperative effort with O'Reilly to make OSCON better for everyone. O'Reilly would provide free space for OSCAMP at the conference center so that folks who want to come to OSCON but can't afford the entrance fee would have a place to participate. In return, volunteers would organize OSCAMP as an additional attraction that would draw more people to OSCON. OSCAMP helps organize the fringe of activity that has grown up around OSCON so that it doesn't hurt, but promotes OSCON paying attendence.
Since RecentChangesCamp we've developed our strategy for bringing more folks to Portland for OSCON/OSCAMP and created http://oscamp.org to host a wiki for our organizing effort. OSCAMP is going to be OpenSpace just like RecentChangesCamp, but this time with a focus on OpenSource. We're sending out invitations to groups that don't get together face-to-face very often and encouraging those groups to host a "camp" within OSCAMP. So we might have PhpCamp, InkscapeCamp, RubyCamp, SoftwareDefinedRadioCamp, ... all within the umbrella of OSCAMP. When project teams come together to discuss project specific topics at their "camp" the team members will also be able to participate in topics of interest that might not be directly related to their main project.
All in all it's a solution that helps OSCON and associated activities rock even more!
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