Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine, wants to revamp the conference business, because we pay too much to get too little.
[from Exploding the conference business by Jeff Jarvis]
Too many conferences suck. They're too expensive. They are filled with boring panels. They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don't capture the expertise of the crowd. They enrich the organizers at the cost of both the "talent" and the "audience" (a distinction that is usually random, meaningless, and essentially insulting). They are filled with commercial pitches. The large-scale conferences are too obvious; the high-end conferences are too often too safe. There are exceptions and conferences I do like attending because of the people they attract or because they are provocative. But often, the problem is that the interests of those who make conferences work -- the people who fill it -- are not aligned with the interests of the money behind conferences -- the organizers and sponsors.
The conference business is ripe for revolution. If newspapers, TV, magazines, books, reference works, telecommunications, entertainment, retail, real estate, recruiting, and countless other industries are exploding thanks to the internet and the direct connections it enables, then so should conferences. Why shouldn't we organize our own better conferences on our own terms?
He dissects the finances of a typical conference, and makes a case for speakers getting a piece of the game -- which some high-flying keynoters may get, but the majority of speakers do not. But that is just one slice of his argument, and not the center of it. A redistribution of the income is not what Jeff is calling for: he wants something more radical.
Although Jeff doesn't use disintermediation to describe what he intends, he does suggest that the unconference may be the answer, like the various "camps" that have sprung up organically as an abreaction to conference doldrums and excesses, such as last fall's BarCamp and TagCamp, and the upcoming MashupCamp. He gives credit to Dave Winer for rejecting the panel session format (Bloggercon) and for asserting that "the room is the panel."
Personally, I am a strong advocate for moving away from panels toward interviews and other forms of multi-person presentation, at the least. Bloggercon has had its problems, and maybe they aren't based on the format, but specific personalities (see the What's Wrong With Bloggercon). But I am willing to go along with the thrust of Jarvis' argument, that the principle behind an event like Bloggercon is to rethink the experience and expenses around conferences. But the tactical implementation will prove to be just as important as the principles, if not more so.
The emerging Camp model has several parts, but basically can be thought of as an 'open source' conference model:
- low-cost or no-cost, subsidized by various sponsors, explicitly based on a non-profit mindset.
- the principle that all attendees can be presenters if they want to be: a self-selection process, rather than a centrally controlled program.
- self-organization by an ad hoc group of organizers who are not in the business of running conferences.
- tightly focused agenda, on a well-defined topic of interest to those involved.
At the same time, I don't think that camps and other unconferences are the only way to go. We do need to reject the stultified program thinking that goes back to the professional science conferences of the late 1800's, where a stream of learned professors would drone on about their research, hour after hour, day after day. Various approaches have been take to alleviate the tedium of that sort of thing, but conference organizers have painted themselves into a corner. On one hand, they like to advertise a crammed program, with many speakers, on many topics. On the other hand, the more speakers involved, the harder it is to have consistent quality and a complementary program, which the various bits add up to a solid experience. In reality, the ideal is almost never realized. Which is what has led to Jarvis' Lutheresque proclamation of the need for revolution to overthrown this dreadful orthodoxy.
But I hold out some hope for other formats, like late night TV. David Weinberger and I had some fun with this format years ago at a KM Industry Leadership Summit in Camden Maine. We tried to put aside the stiff formal trappings, and treat it like entertainment; or at least use that format. We limited the guest's schtick to 15 minutes, then casually interviewed them, all of us in armchairs. Taking this to more Hollywood level might be even better.
Just as tech conferences are rebounding, based on a dynamic period of investment and innovation, we will see the emergence of very new, very different approaches to what a conference is supposed to be, what it is supposed to deliver, and how we will measure the value and success of conferences as a whole, and individually.
Over the course of the year, we will be on this thread, seeking out the new approaches that are emerging, and trying to evaluate their near-term and long-term impacts on the conference experience for attendees, and the shifting economics behind these changes.
I tried to differentiate our conference from others and make it more affordable, but after the costs of wifi and such it was difficult. I still think we are different from the rest!
Posted by: Jim Turner | February 08, 2006 at 12:15 PM