My reaction after reflecting on my weekend at FooCamp 2007 is that the silicon valley (or more generally, the “west coast” including Portland and Seattle) is purely a performance-based social economy. That may seems obvious to some - but I’ll contrast that to the deep south. The deep south is a relationship-based social economy.

I realize this is a broad generalization. It’s not that the valley isn’t relationship-based or that the south is without performance-based relationships. In a broad stroke: in the valley it’s not just who you know, it’s what you’ve done, too.

This weekend, I was sitting there surrounded by seemingly normal people that are giants in their own regard. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Mitch Kapor of EFF and Lotus, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose of Digg, Ray Ozzie of Microsoft, Paul Graham of YCombinator, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, the Ninja dude and last but not least Larry Page of Google (yes, Larry came in on a helicopter in a big fare-fare) — just to name a few of the 250+ people with pitched tints and lugged around Mac laptops.

Friday night started out with a dinner and everyone telling their name, affiliation and 3 words (only!) about themselves. That’s hard - and there were quite a few very funny one’s. Mine: “entrepreneur”, “open source” and “telephony”. I debated telephony quite a bit before it was my turn - but I needed some differentiation among that crowd. I also considered iphone - but it was done by one of the apple guys: “don’t askabout iphone”.

After dinner and some mingling, the night really got interesting with several separate games of werewolf - which *everyone* pretty much plays with a passion. It was my first time playing, and I must say it was very addictive. I got to play with Blaine Cook of Twitter and Andy Bai, founder of Upcoming.org, among about 10 other cool people. P.S. I’m just a villager.

Foocampers, which largely represent the culture of the valley, seem to form their network economy based not only on who they know, but also what they’ve accomplished. And in most cases, their performance (either success or failure) is usually multiplicative. It’s not uncommon to meet someone and hear about the “i did this” and “now i’m doing that” and you’ve usually heard of the “this” and the “that”.

The deep south is still rooted largely in relationship-driven currency. Deposits are made by accomplishments, most certain. However, your friends constitute as much wealth as your past performance. In the valley, past performance is an indicator of future performance - and more importantly, your network. It’s not uncommon when being introduced by someone in the south to immediately digress into “oh yea, i know him too”. It’s still a good ole boy’s network down here. (And that’s not necessarily a bad thing).

I’ll also say that the collective wisdom of this crowd is extremely high. There is a high fidelity signal transmitting in this network. With all due respect to my roots (I was born and raised just outside Atlanta), if we added up all the brainpower of the south and multiplied it by two we would still be in the lower index of this crowd.

All that being said, does that mean that relationship-based economies are less important than the performance-based social economy? Well… it probably depends on the context and the desired outcome. If innovation and creativity are your outputs - then the valley’s performance-based economy is clearly working.

technorati tags: foocamp, oreilly, web2.0

* Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. See more great photos from FooCamp 2007.