Apparently I need to track more local blogs, because I missed the original announcement of the Seattle MindCamp. Fortunately, Ted Leung pointed it out to me, or I probably would have missed it entirely. This should be interesting–it’s essentially a local version of Foo Camp (or Bar Camp), held in an office building over a 26-hour span during the first weekend in November.

From the MindCamp website:

Seattle Mind Camp is a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, overnight Seattle confab. What happens when you put 150 of Seattle’s smartest geeks in an empty office building for 24 hours? We’re not sure either, but we’d like to find out. It’s time to meet and connect with those involved in the interesting projects going on in Seattle in a relaxed environment.

What: A weekend, 24-hour, multi-track event. Think huge space with breakout rooms, broadband Wi-Fi, projectors, white boards - and you.

Who: 150 of Seattle’s forward thinkers: techies, entrepreneurs, executives, gamers, musicians, and anyone else with a great idea.

When: Mind Camp will take place on November 5-6

Why?: You know all those hallway conversations that never get to flourish during a “normal” conference? Now they will.

Seattle Mind Camp is completely free of charge, and registration will begin very soon. In the meantime, check out the About page for a little more information.

It looks like there are still a few spots left, but I doubt they’ll last very long.

Update: In the spirit of information spreading, I should probably mention Seattle Code Camp, which is happening this weekend. From looking at the code camp website, it looks a bit more organized, with pre-scheduled talks, and there seems to be a big Microsoft/C#/.NET focus on a lot of the events. There are a couple Perl/Linux sessions and an introduction to Ruby, as well as a pair of Cocoa/Objective C talks, but most of the content seems to be “cool new stuff in C#.” Which is fine, but it’s not really my sort of conference. MindCamp, on the other hand, seems to be drawing a more diverse crowd, with a number of open source people on the roster.