Valley geeks' social scene has never been busier

Wired on Friday: So, will I attend Nerd Salon this evening, or Copynight? How did I ever choose between Bar Camp or BloggerCon this weekend? Was it bad I missed SuperHappyDevHouse? Should I be booking now for BlogHer, or Gnomedex, or getting up early for Cereal bar?

To be honest, my most likely options this evening, as with any evening, will be staying at home desultorily reading e-mail, listening to the gunshots echoing around my salubrious corner of San Francisco. But in the rest of this city, geeks will be hurrying from one nerd Web 2.0 social event to another, their iCal-synced smartphones brimming with mixers, talks and thinly-veiled excuses to drown their instinctive social awkwardness in drink. In this city, the geek social scene has never been more crowded.

The watchword here is "unconvention" - a reaction to the expensive, $1,000-plus events that have traditionally dominated the IT business. All of these events are for the tech community, organised by their own attendees.

Almost all of them are free or very cheap to attend and have little formal structure. Most have an element of instruction, or networking, or honest to God working. But mostly, they're for the company and the camaraderie of meeting your fellow techies and, perhaps, your techie heroes.

Some of the events are a little more unconventional than others. Copynight is not much more than a few people in a bar.

SuperDevFunHouse takes place in a hijacked office space and consists of a weekend of competing coders denying themselves sleep working to produce a working application in less than 48 hours. In the last SuperDevHouse, the challenge was to create a website that made actual money over the weekend. (The winner was a site that tracked the single status of a user's selected victims on MySpace. Type in the name of your unrequited crush and get a message when he or she switched from "taken" to "available". Money was made on ad sales - until News International, the owners of MySpace, asked that the site be shut down.)

San Francisco and Silicon Valley have long had the critical mass of nerdery to enable such social gatherings - and odd applications - to occur spontaneously.

I remember when I first came here in 1995, the disorientation I felt when walking past crowded bars and overhearing technical jargon ("SMTP server (sip), Apache reconfiguration file (clink)") in almost every bar conversation. Long before that, I remember the biting jealousy of hearing of luminaries rubbing shoulders and exchanging their latest ideas in Silicon Valley with hoi polloi just like me. Only not quite like me, because I was thousands of miles away in London, barely learning about such open forums months after the fact.

There is certainly still an element of such demographic luck to the Valley's geek scene. There aren't that many cities this size where musical guru Brian Eno and Will Wright, inventor of video game The Sims, will tag team a sold-out presentation on "playing with time" (that was yesterday evening's highlight).

But one of the reasons why there's such an apparent boom in such social events in the Valley now is surely because everyone can do more than just hear rumours of their existence. The conversations and gossip of this weekend's BloggerCon was inevitably recorded, packaged and redistributed over the net as textual summaries and endless MP3s within hours of its completion.

Photographs of the duelling robots exhibited at Nerd Salon are gushingly relayed on photography sites and vicariously enjoyed by hundreds.

Gawpers can take part in the conversations by joining the online group chats of audience members. Code hacked together in these public-spirited gatherings is instantly provided for anyone else to use. More usefully, perhaps, the simple mechanics of putting on one of these unconferences has been similarly refined, summarised and uploaded to the net.

Notably, "Bar Camp", one of the first communally-driven unconferences to gain a widespread following, has spread to more than just the Bay Area. Bar Camps have taken place across the world, from Hyderabad to Halifax. Ireland has its own TechCamp, developed on the Bar Camp model. If distant coder gatherings have their romantic allure, the barrier to creating one in your local pub has never been lower.

The amateurisation and redistribution of the IT convention has had its wobblier moments. The Bar Camp creators have agonised over how best to protect the "brand" while still allowing anyone to create their own ad hoc event.

Corkman Tom Raftery held his own convention on the ideas of "Web 2.0", only to find himself faced with a legal letter from lawyers claiming to act to protect the trademark of the original Web 2.0 conferences initiated by publishers O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conferences are the formal, multithousand dollar affairs - but it was inevitable that, with almost anyone able to publicise and hold a successful mini-convention on that topic, a clash of names would occur.

Perhaps what's most amusing is to watch the feedback loop of this explosion in the geek social calendar on their own coding projects. I've met more coders who are looking for venture capital to invest in their calendaring and time-management programs than any other new web application. The most well-known examples, such as Upcoming.org, 30boxes, and Mosuki, are crammed full of those geek events.

But what has happened to the reclusive hacker, coding all night in a darkened cubicle, feverishly attempting to ship before the venture capital runs out?

Some are particularly curious about that. I've overheard one irritated VC question exactly when companies at the heart of the social scene, like Ruby Red Labs, hosts of the early morning "Cereal Bar", actually get around to doing any work. On the other hand, it's hard to get annoyed when people do what they're supposed to do - relax and have a good time. Perhaps a break is as good as a rest for the Valley's worker ants. And if we import some of those San Francisco geek gatherings, perhaps the Americans can import a slightly more relaxed approach to their overtime hours.

Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation