CookCamp 2007

Now that I’m back from California, it seems like a good time to recap CookCamp, held on Feb 24, 2007 at CitizenSpace in San Francisco, CA.

CookCamp arose from some conversations during HealthCamp in December of 2006 about food, health, prevention, and behavior change. We decided it would be nice to hold a barcamp that focused specifically on food and its role in health. Along with Ann Haiden and Dave Sanford, I helped to shepherd the process of making CookCamp a reality.

This was my first time organizing a barcamp, and it was surprisingly easy to put together. The hardest part was getting the meeting space, and CitizenSpace helped enormously in that department. We didn’t have enough time to get into sponsorship, so there was some out-of-pocket expense. I think the next level of barcamp organization would definitely involve engaging sponsorship to cover things like lunch and snacks and rental of the meeting space.

Name Dropping

I can be rather ignorant about the movers and shakers in various fields, so I hope I can be forgiven for not recognizing Tantek Çelik in our midst. Crystal Williams trekked up from LA and Kristopher Tate of Zoomr took several hundred photos in the course of the day.

But enough background: on to the day’s events!

The Day’s Events

After some introductions, Tantek gave a brief history of the barcamp phenomenon (he helped to organize the first barcamp about 1.5 years ago), which was fascinating in itself—I wish someone had a tape recorder.

We drew up the grid and people started suggesting session topics, including integrating food information into microformats and staging food interventions. I presented some work from the Design Council’s RED: Health project, along with a brief overview of the Fresh Start project. Ann talked about food allergies and health, and provided some scary statistics about Celiac disease.

I was wrapped up with organizing things (keeping an ear out for people buzzing up from the front door) and I missed Tantek’s talk about microformats. I know there was some talk about including “in season” information, but there’s more information in the session notes.

I particularly enjoyed Crystal’s session about staging a food intervention with her family. We can talk all we want about people needing to change their lifestyles, but until we actually make the change, or help others make the change, words are just words. A food intervention doesn’t have to be sturm und drang: the most important part is to get people to try new foods. As I’ve observed before the taste of good food tends to make its own case.

We originally planned to order in some lunch from Whole Foods, but as it was a nice day and the group was small, we took a field trip instead and took over a couple of tables in the Whole Foods eating-area. All the talk about food and health made me very self-conscious about what I was piling into my plate from the salad bar!

In the afternoon I presented some of the work from the RED: Health project, and Fresh Start. I meant it to provide a little overview of some of the innovation going on in other fields and perhaps provide some inspiration. The discussion led into talk about Transformation Design of all things—I was surprised to hear it mentioned outside of a design school.

We then had a session about making healthy eating easier (“having it all”), where we touched on issues like accessing nutrition information for whole foods and problems like understanding what’s in prepared or restaurant food. The discussion ranged from healthier-eating tactics to the number of calories in a banana.

Ray Seddigh finished off CookCamp with some thoughts about future directions. Among other ideas, the CookCamp model could be integrated into other barcamps, or it could be blown out into a much larger event. While organizing CookCamp, we found ourselves heading in the “larger event” direction before scaling things back, so I definitely think a large-scale CookCamp would be amazing. Everyone seemed interested in the idea of another CookCamp, and we’ve now got a CookCamp Google Group for CookCamp thanks to Crystal. Ray’s presentation isn’t online just yet, but it should eventually be linked from the CookCamp site.

Thoughts About CookCamp

Some observations about CookCamp:

• I had no expectations going into CookCamp. I decided that the mix of people who showed up would be the right mix of people, and that something interesting was bound to occur. This helped to eliminate any anxiety or stress I would otherwise have suffered.

• In total, about 15 people showed up and I was very impressed that they stuck around through the entire day. Even more interesting, the people involved in the initial CookCamp discussion and subsequent organization numbered only 4, and one more person had been to HealthCamp. In other words, the majority of people showed up because they were interested in the topic.

• We used blogs, the barcamp wiki, and word of mouth to spread the word about CookCamp. We also sent out a few direct emails, but my sense it that they would have been more effective given a longer time-frame.

• When talking about CookCamp with people outside of the tech community, it’s best not to mention the words “barcamp” or “un-conference”. As Tantek pointed out during CookCamp, it’s better to focus on the benefits of the event itself rather than the format. So: CookCamp is an opportunity to make connections with people you probably wouldn’t otherwise meet. Collaborate with people from a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds while discussing topics around the subject of food and health. And so forth.

• Two important lessons I learned from how we went about scheduling CookCamp were to 1) check for concurrent events and 2) take into account holidays. We basically lost a month because of the holidays around the end of December, and found ourselves with little time before the date to organize sponsors.

• The most important piece of the puzzle was getting space to hold CookCamp. We shared some anxiety about securing a space, but once that was done, everything else fell into place.

• The mix of people was quite diverse, and reflected a range of interests related to food and health, such as design, technology, co-housing, society, media, and medicine. If only in that regard, I considered CookCamp a success.

I found myself a little torn about how to approach CookCamp. On one hand, getting everyone together provided an opportunity to get some work done and produce something of value at the end of the day. On the other hand, merely exposing people to different subjects in the session topics and discussions may stimulate long-term effects. While we have the luxury of not requiring immediate results to urgent problems (although they would be nice), I think taking a long-term approach is more realistic considering the demographics that the barcamps tend to attract. It’s probably more important to excite and inspire people to continue working on these problems than to expect a miracle solution from a single day’s worth of work.

That’s not to say that it’s not possible to achieve concrete results from a barcamp. If people arrive with a particular project and seek feedback or user-testing opportunities, then there’s definitely something specific for people to address. Without a specific thing to catalyze discussion or work, it’s very hard to produce anything concrete.

Future CookCamps

So that’s my review of CookCamp. I’m definitely interested in holding another one in a few months, and I’ll blog on TastyThinking about any planned events. The CookCamp Google group is probably the best place to keep track of what’s going on, suggest ideas, or to help out with organization and logistics. Hope to see you at the next CookCamp!