O’Reilly’s company slogan is: “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators”. And FOO Camp itself is a perfect example of the company’s approach to achieving this goal. O’Reilly operates through a kind of personal networked social intelligence. They identify early adopters, create relationships with them, introduce them to each other, find out what they’re working on and what they’re interested in, and then use that knowledge to make informed guesses about where the tech world is going. Nearly all of these activities happen in person. All the books they publish, conferences they put on, and blogs they run are an epiphenomenon of this underlying process of personal relationship-building and hunch creation.
