The conference site says that BIL wants to be “to TED, what BarCamp is to FooCamp.” For those who don’t get the reference - FooCamp is an annual event convened by tech publisher Tim O’Reilly. FOO stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”, and the invite-only conference is a gathering of some very bright tech industry people. who are invited to camp out at O’Reilly’s corporate headquarters and design their own “unconference”. Past FooCamp attendees, including Tantek Celik, decided they’d had a great deal of fun at Foo and wanted to participate, invitation or not… hence, BarCamp, which is a joke based on the programming term “foobar”…