Based on the Wiki-organized geekery of a BarCamp Web developer conference and held at the grassroots people-powered Citizen Space, the CC ostensibly had everything you'd want in a free Sunday afternoon. The three-dozen or so different cupcake varieties were scheduled for maximum efficiency into half-hour shifts spanning the entire afternoon. And about those cakes: There was everything from store-bought chocolate and vanilla to maple bacon to stout cakes with Grand Marnier frosting, plus some sweet vegan flavors too. Hundreds of people crammed into the tiny Citizen Space for what was most certainly a fire hazard, and the cakes were gone in (literally) seconds.

It was a sugar marathon that would predictably peak in the middle in a weird haze of digital SLR flashbulbs, Twittering iPhones, and San Francisco body odor. On the one hand, this thing was a smashing success, with empty platters where dozens of extra cupcakes were expected to be languishing uneaten. And I got distracted by the two (2!!) laptops being circled to livecast every move, which is why it took me an extra minute to realize that this whole thing was hardly user-generated at all, save for the eight percent of attendees who brought cakes.

The central camp at CupcakeCamp was, of course, the 2.0 kids: All those savvy programmers and community managers who are changing the way we interact online(ish), yet often seem to find it so hard to interact IRL. What they find so useful in a grassroots BarCamp, however, doesn't seem to hold up when it comes to pastries, where they aren't the experts. If you build the public Wiki, they will come -- to hand out business cards and talk to their friends. (And if you were actually worth my time, you'd know to put your URL on that nametag, dumbass.) In fact, most of the crowd was too busy documenting what's happening to really take part in it in any substantive way. (Apparently, it is more important to prove you were there than to actually have fun, which is especially ironic when you can't stop bitching loudly about "the damn media.")

Of course, the worst affront to the user-generated spirit are the cupcake awards -- Best in Show, Best Frosting, Best Cake, and Most Creative -- determined by a handful of "judges" (organizers) who are probably as objective here as they are when they score friends jobs at their startups. But here's the thing (and you probably didn't expect this): I do remain a naive cupcaking socialist, and an optimistic one at that, so I look forward to the next CupcakeCamp (yes, they plan to have them every couple months or so, and at a larger venue).

The set-up for a functional and genuinely crowd-sourced pastry potluck is right here, as long as we just get more people involved: tech novices can edit public Wikis, too, and awards be damned. And we only have those snotty 2.0 kids to thank for it! So let's kill 'em with kindness and vegan tiramisu. Just know that if you do show up, there will be unflattering photos of you stuffing your face on Flickr before you've gotten back home.