I was planning to write up a description of Foo Camp 2010 myself, but I decided to be more time-savvy and just use the content from Wikipedia, below. Suffice it to say that it was an honor to be invited and a pleasure to present The Doodle Revolution to such a stellar audience. Some highlights from my experience include (as I mentioned), presenting on the topic above, bonding with author Scott Berkun who, seemingly impossibly, is even more likable in person, meeting June Cohen, Executive Producer of the TED Conference and finally, drinking bourbon with my editor, Colleen Wheeler who – poor thing – was probably relying on bourbon to get her through the last edits of Gamestorming, which comes out in July. Colleen, you are amazing. I will send a non-alcoholic present your way very soon.

FYI, reader, Foo Camp is an annual hacker unconference hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly describes it as “the wiki of conferences”, where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule. The goal of the event is to reach out to new people who will increase the company’s intelligence about new technologies, and to create opportunities for cross-fertilization between people and technologies that are on the O’Reilly radar. Some have described it as a meta-birds-of-a-feather session, that gets smart people together to discuss technology issues. [Added by Sunni:] During the event, people camp out in actual tents – not something I expected to do in the desert heat of Sebastopol, CA. But for this crowd, it ended up being worth it. Thank you, O’Reilly, for being a publisher that defies tradition and instead focuses on innovation. Nice work.

On my way to Wimberley a couple of months ago, I got a call from Derek Woodgate. He was on the planning team for TEDx UT and I assumed he was going to ask me for speaker recommendations, since our team had just produced TEDx Austin and we had a long list of incredible possible presenters. You can imagine my surprise then, when he said that the committee wanted me to be one of the speakers. I mean – I’m good – but I wasn’t sure if I was TEDx good. However, never one to miss an opportunity, I said yes and then hung up and had to roll down my window to get some fresh air. Speaking in front of academicians and graduate students about visuals and the brain opens yourself up to all sorts of criticism about your empirical data. But I’m Ms. Brown. Risk never stopped me before. So, like all good girl scouts, I did a lot of homework, prepared for weeks, and custom-doodled my slides so the audience would have fun and learn at the same time. I think they did and I think I did justice to the TED brand. Once I get the digital video, you can see for yourself.

The presentation above was created in conjunction with H2O Partners, an agency founded by Jo Ann Howard, FEMA’s former Federal Insurance Administrator.  H2O Partners specializes in the planning and management of national disasters and has a challenging message to communicate in a highly politicized field. So a simple but memorable presentation was important for two reasons: the first is that national disasters have widespread consequences and the second is that much of those consequences could be mitigated if people understood who’s responsible for what, when. H2O did an incredible job of creating the metaphor and the script for this “disaster drama” and my role was to produce a presentation that is visually compelling for any age and that gives H2O the flexibility to adapt the script for different audiences. You can view the presentation on Flickr by clicking on the image above, or you can click here to see it on SlideShare. H2O will present the visual case for disaster prevention and mitigation to numerous audiences, hoping to rally the political will to prevent another tragedy like Hurricane Katrina.

My company has the pleasure of designing and illustrating Tony Hsieh’s (CEO of Zappos) PowerPoint presentation. I met him, Alfred Lin, Brian Kalma and Loren Becker at SXSW 2009 while I was graphically recording the keynotes. They appreciated the graphic recording and apparently had been looking for someone to partner with them on employee classes. So, one thing led to another and I found myself and one of my principal illustrators, Erik Kuntz, working with Tony on his presentation about Zappos and the pursuit of happiness. Needless to say? Delighted. I have various other posts about Zappos so I won’t go into detail about how inspiring they are as a company, but I will say that I’m very happy with how the presentation is turning out (if you click here or on the photo above you can see most of the slides minus animation). However, since Amazon recently acquired Zappos, there are design modifications to be made, so expect an update soon enough…