Open-Sourcing Conferences

Editors' Note: The following is the text of the
June 9 and June 23 editions of Doc Searls' SuitWatch newsletter.
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June 9 - Why Am I?
I'm leaving in a few hours for the airport. Three airports after that
one, I'll be in Copenhagen for
Reboot,
which describes itself this way:

reboot is the european meetup for the practical visionaries who are
building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for
creation and organization--in a world where the only entry barrier
is passion. reboot is two days in june filled with inspiration,
perspective, good conversations and interesting people.

This year's theme is the *new ways ahead*. After more than 10 years
of *old ways* of creation, old values, and old models for
communicating and organizing ourselves, *new ways* are emerging. That
is what reboot is about.

Hey, that's what I'm about too.

In particular I want to reboot the whole Conference System. It sounds
as though reboot is trying to do exactly that. Hope I can come home
with some fresh ideas. Lord knows, we need them. Because the defaults
are as stale as dumpster gunk.

The problem is mass habituation. We're so used to the whole routine:
picking up badges, grabbing coffee and cookies, sitting in rows
behind tables with laptops flopped open, surfing the Web or answering
e-mail while keynoting CEOs from sponsoring companies drone PR while
the PowerPoint deck shuffles by, complaining about the absent power
strips and bad Wi-Fi connection. The list goes on. And on.

There's infrastructure galore to support the system, especially at
the hotels, many of which are designed from the start to be conference
habitats. All your better hotels know how to set up and take down the
furnishings, organize mics and projectors, put signage on easels
and trouble-shoot problems when they come up. But they have their
routines, and it's hell trying to break them. Want your tables in a
big circle instead of rows arranged like church pews? They can do it,
sure, but you're in virgin territory.

Conference organizers are part of the same system and are no less
routinized, whether they work for the company giving the conference
or are hired for the job from the outside. One organizer for a recent
conference hounded me repeatedly for my "PowerPoints", even though I
repeatedly said I didn't work that way and wasn't sending any.

It really strips gears when attendee know-how trumps a venue's
roadblocks. I've been at many conferences where the hotel or the
conference center refused to offer Wi-Fi but instead insisted that
everybody share two blue Ethernet cables beside a bank of
Net-connected PCs nobody wanted to use. So somebody would configure
his or her laptop to be a wireless access point and treat the room to a
Wi-Fi connection, with the venue completely unaware of what was
happening.

I wrote about conferences in
"Showtime",
my April 2004 column in Linux Journal. In it I
offered nine recommendations to improve the existing tradeshow
format. They're still good, but this time I'd like to offer some
recommendations for what Dave Winer calls
"unconferences".
Here goes:

1. Gather around a subject rather than a publication, a publisher,
   an analyst or any other established source of finished wisdom by
   lecturing authorities.
2. Make the subject so new that most of the wisdom still is forming.
   This is critical. There are a lot of subjects out there on which
   everybody is busy making and changing minds rather than compiling finished documents.
   These are the subjects for which there are too many qualified speakers
   available to bother casting one person in that role.
3. Recruit attendees from the population of people who are forming that
   wisdom, informally. These are the people thinking out loud about the
   subject and contributing unique wisdom to it. Podcasting is a good
   example; so is grass-roots journalism.
4. Don't set the topic agenda. Let the attendees do that through a
   conference wiki or some other shared DIY note-taking area. This is
   one of the cool things I learned form O'Reilly's first Foo Camp. The
   schedule was an empty grid. Rows were times and columns were rooms.

   Attendees posted topics in boxes on a first-come, first-post basis. It
   was, in effect, a DIY conference. But do begin and end the day with
   everybody in one room. It frames the day and gives the organizer a
   chance to play host, make announcements, set the ground rules and so
   on.

5. Provide working wireless connections with no encumbrances--no splash
   screens, registrations and so on. Make it as easy as possible for
   everybody to get on the Net, blog, join the IRC, update a wiki or do
   whatever else they want.
6. Record and podcast the sessions. The idea isn't to make the event
   public but to seed the world with whatever wisdom grew at the
   conference. One thing I like about the Bloggercon conferences is the
   sense that the whole field moved forward. It was like we got together,
   and instead of raising a barn, we agreed on improved barn-raising
   materials and methods.
7. Create plenty of opportunities for schmoozing, including evening
   networking events. Set up meeting space, too, if possible.
8. Set out a lot of cold water and ice, in addition to coffee. It's just
   a bugaboo of mine. I'll pay more for a conference that doesn't skimp on
   vittles.
9. Designate a summarizer. Somebody needs to follow up on the
   conference, gather feeds of searches by Technorati, PubSub and
   Feedster on subjects that came up during the conference and
   summarize the whole thing. It's not possible to catch everything.
   What matters is knowing that the conference made a difference in the
   world.
10. Learn and reboot. And share the wisdom about the conference
    itself: how it succeeded and failed. What worked and didn't. We have
    an institution to rebuild here. There are a lot of mistakes to learn
    from.

Any more ideas? Send them to me. If I like them, I'll bring them up at
reboot.
June 23 - Open-Sourcing Conferences
Two weeks ago, I was on my way to Copenhagen for a terrific little
conference called
Reboot.
Now I'm in San Francisco, writing from a conference called
Supernova.
Its theme is decentralization. I got in tune with the theme right away
on the morning of the first day when, after driving 400 miles from Santa
Barbara, my car was hit by a garbage truck three blocks from the end
of the trip.

After we both pulled over, the truck driver got out and clearly felt
bad about causing an accident that obviously was his fault. "Relax",
I said. "I'm not hurt, and I'm driving a rental car." He seemed
relieved. Credit where due: the agency, Budget, swapped my busted
Ford Focus for a new Ford Focus--my favorite rental car--once again
violating
Searls' 4th Law,
which says "No matter what car you want to rent, you'll get a Chevy
Cavalier". What's more, Budget also proved that you don't need to buy the
insurance the agencies always try to upsell you at the counter. I didn't
buy it, they barely looked at my accident report and they swapped the car
with no questions asked.

My breakfast date, for which I was an hour late, was with a couple of
folks from Cyworld, the giant Korean on-line service. It was
fascinating. Rick Kim, whose title is too long to repeat, told me a
little about what's happening on the Net in Korea. In some respects,
it's nothing like what we experience here in the US or in Europe.
In others, it's remarkably similar.

On the difference side, the carriers, notably telcos such as SK, which
owns Cyworld, don't believe broadband is a Done Thing or that
3Mb/sec is a good maximum speed for broadband to the home. I asked
Rick about the speed of service at his house. He said he got 88Mb,
but that the more typical bandwidth for homes there was 15-25Mb--and
going up.

Not long ago I talked with a cable installer in Santa Barbara who
told me his company had no intention of increasing bandwidth,
whatsoever, for the foreseeable future. We're stuck at 3Mb/down and
300Kb/up, for the duration. No Moore's Law here, folks. Move on.

By the way, when we moved to Santa Barbara in 2001, we were getting
speeds of 7Mb/down and 3Mb/up. The provider throttled back the bandwidth
after its backbone provider, @Home, went belly-up. Now the company uses
its own backbone, it says. Oh, and the provider blocks port 80 and
port 25. Nice.

So bandwidth is one big difference. Another is the culture in and
around on-line services. To my surprise, the first syllable in Cyworld
isn't short for "cyber". It represents "relationship" in Korean. The
company sees relationships with customers and customer relationships
with one another as paramount concerns. Somehow I don't get that from
MSN or AOL or Yahoo, much less from the big cable and telco carriers.

What's similar is the infrastructure on which they build their
services. It's Linux. To give an idea of how much their Linux
infrastructure supports, 90% of all 20-somethings on the Net in Korea
are Cyworld users. Among the free services offered is unlimited
storage. There are a few limitations, mostly having to do with
technical issues around uploads from cellphones and similar
real-world issues. But the space is there. More encouraging is seeing
"linux" embedded in the e-mail address of the head engineer.

Right now at Supernova, there's a panel ironically focused on
attention. Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, just gave a
talk about a meme that she delivered to the world a few years ago:
"continuous partial attention". She had exactly that from the
audience.

Between the last sentence and this one, I was called outside the
ballroom by the head of a well-known "social software" company who
wants to open-source its proprietary goods. What's more, he wants to
work on an open-source framework for all social software--blogs,
wikis, RSS aggregators and so on.

Earlier, a guy I was talking with had a cool idea for conferences like
this one. Set it up like any other conference--with speakers, panels
and so on--and then announce at the beginning that all the speakers were
bait, that the whole conference is completely open. Anybody
can learn anything from anybody. Bring up the house lights, arrange
the chairs in circles, roll out the hors d'oeuvres.

With no speakers, every attendee's expertise is a "source" for every
other attendee. Conversation becomes the most efficient and effective
means for moving and growing knowledge throughout whole crowd.
The idea here is a profound corollary to Bill Joy's observation that
"most of the smartest people work for somebody else". The balance of
smartness in any conference session heavily favors the audience.
So, what's the most efficient and effective way for everybody to share
what they know?

We've been lecturing at conferences for the last umpty years.
Audiences have been opting out through schmoozing in hallways,
hanging out on IRC channels, blogging, IMing and e-mailing each other.
In other words, they're going to other sources of knowledge.

When I play the lecturer role, I try to be so compelling that the
audience has no choice but to quit typing and start listening to what
I'm saying. But even when I succeed at that, I'm merely improving on
the lecture model. I'm giving one man's opinion. If the purpose of a
conference is to increase everybody's knowledge, we need to find ways
for everybody to be available to everybody. An any-to-any model, rather
than a one-to-many model, naturally is far more flexible and efficient.

So, what we're talking about here is, ta-da: open sourcing conferences.

Next step: making them smaller and cheaper, with better UIs.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux
Journal. He writes the Linux for Suits column for
Linux Journal. He also presides over Doc Searls' IT Garage, which
is published by SSC, the publisher of Linux Journal.