The Social Customer Manifesto

A Few More Conference Thoughts

Continuing the conference conversation from here...

"Something has been bothering me about the format of the [Etech] conference. Each session is so rushed that there is little room for Q&A following each presentation. As a result, you don't often get a chance to hear the audience's point of view. The only way to get at this is if you force yourself on strangers in the hallway but, depending upon how you strike up a conversation, it can be hit or miss." - Ian Kennedy

More:

"I’d be willing to bet that, if polled, 90% of etech attendees would tell you that they hear the most interesting and compelling ideas and thoughts in the hallways, around the coffee pots, and out on the deck… not in the presentations. This year’s etech is big, much bigger even than last year (my first time here), and there are a lot of first-timers. You can usually identify them pretty easily– they’re the ones standing awkwardly alone, sometimes on the peripheries of conversations." - Chris Lott

One more, also from Chris Lott, on "The Name Badge Assessment"

Lott: "...you try to talk to one of the Conference All-Stars– perhaps someone you’ve interacted pleasantly with via email or IRC just minutes before– and they stare at your badge for a moment (you can almost hear the mental checklist preceding the shutdown: Google? Nope. Yahoo? Nope. Press? Nope. A-List blogger? Nope.) before their eyes glaze over. It doesn’t happen every time, but often enough to discourage input from just the people from whom interaction should be encouraged."

More here.

On The Conference Thing: Etech, SXSW, Unconferences and Monocultures

It's the idea that just keeps on giving. It's been brought up before. It'll be brought up again. And this week is going to be an interesting study in contrasts.

"I can’t think of a conference that is more insider, exclusive, obnoxiously rude, insidery (did I say they’re all insiders?) than Etech." - Marc Canter

Over the weekend, was talking to one of the women who was speaking at Etech this week, and she said the following: "Yeah, when they added me to the list, I increased the number of women speakers by 25%." No way, I thought. Then I checked the Etech speakers list. (The list is also repeated after the jump, for convenience.) Wow. It wasn't much of an exaggeration. By my rough count, about a dozen female speakers out of about 113 total speakers. A 9:1 ratio. Zoiks.

Why does this matter? Because conferences in this image have no edges to them. They are monocultural.

"But...but...where do we find speakers/participants for our technical conference on x?"

Here are a few dozen speakers. (By the way, to set up this Haystack took all of a couple of hours. The conversation was on Saturday, started putting speakers in on Sunday, and we were ready to rock by mid-day Monday. This thing is fun.) Click on the link above. You want a speaker on Digital Identity? Click on the "Speaker Topics" tag category and choose Digital Identity; you'll find a bunch. Want a speaker on Product Development? Remix technologies? New Media art? They're in there. Not sure about the credentials of these folks? Go into their profile, if they have an RSS feed, you'll see what they've been thinking about lately. Want to see where they've spoken before? Check the "Past Talks" tag category.

Not enough choice for you in that haystack above? Here are a couple of hundred more speakers. No excuses.

I also don't think it's just the monoculture thing in conferences that is broken. In fact, I agree with Dave Winer:

"My guess is that if you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting. In other words, putting someone on stage and telling them they’re boss probably makes them dumber. In any case it surely makes them more boring." (This is from his unconference essay from earlier this week.)

Now, let's compare the speakers list at Etech to the speakers list for SXSW. The ratio is utterly different, and improves from 9:1 to about 3:1. Not perfect, but hellaciously better.

Here's what I propose: next time you choose to invest your time in going to a conference, think about what that investment of time is getting you on the following scales:

(There could be a number of other dimensions on here as well: geographic background, political beliefs, sexual orientation, art vs. tech vs. performance expertise, and so forth.)

Look for the un/conferences with edges. See you in Austin.

[Update]

"I found refuge in the hallways, since the ETech format is highly structured, and the sessions were all jammed." - Stowe

"I was also surprised -- it's my first ETech -- at the depressing ratio of women to men. Perhaps its inevitable that a conference that is constantly referring to its audience as the 'alpha geeks' would be so skewed, but it's still annoying to me." - Mo' Stowe