Today I’ll be heading across the Bay to attend Web 2.0 Expo. I don’t have a ticket. I don’t attend to buy one. It’s not that I’m cheap (although I generally am) so much as I don’t have three days for this. My plan is to suck as much knowledge from the event as I can in six hours.
Conferences are more than conferences
Conferences are sprouting extensions. For example, with nothing more than a freebie expo ticket, I plan to attend presentations by Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky, join in a concurrent un-conference, hang in the Blogger Lounge, interview people for the Informal Learning 2.0 project, and gather stories from the vendors. O’Reilly Media, whose Dale Dougherty came up with the term Web 2.0, is masterful at making an event larger than life. This one will reverberate through the blogosphere and the web for months, even though it’s not than big a deal among tech conferences. The whole shooting match fits inside Moscone West, the expo building next to the mammoth, underground Moscone Center.
Keeping up with things should not be a problem:
Photos are already going up online. Pages of news have appeared on the web.
I will miss gobs of presentations and neat stuff the first time around but can catch up with the hot items as they appear on blogs, video interviews, and tagged content.
Web2Open is a free unconference taking place within the real conference you pay to attend.
How a new process takes off
Isn’t holding all ancillary activities a ton of extra work? Yes, but the work is distributed to people who consider it fun. The participants are running large parts of the conference. In fact, they are inventing large parts of the conference, some of it as they go. The original BarCamp is an inspiration: put together a great event for hundreds in under a week. Check out the how a variant of speed dating (this one involves experts and the rest of us) got on the agenda.
Sara sees speed dating in action at a conference less than a month ago and asks for ideas. A dozen people chime in, one extolling the benefits of speed geeking. A wiki page for what has morphed into speed Q&A gives background information and details. By today, you can see who plans to attend on the conference’s online social network:
As Ron Popiel would say, “And… there’s more.”
In addition to offering the traditional open grid, where participants sign up on site to lead discussions, we’ve also pre-scheduled a handful of very cool sessions:
* Three Hybrids: We’ve picked three sessions in the main conference track that will be open to all Web2Open attendees: Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business, Taking Web 2.0 Offline and On the Desktop and Influence Is Overrated. Those presenters will then follow up with discussion sessions in the Open.
* Four round-table discussions, each with a panel of people passionate about their topics: Small Business Hacks; UI for Data Portability; Troll Whispering; and Social Responsibility for Web 2.0 Businesses: Geeks Doing Good.
What’s in it for you?
Doesn’t Web 2.0 Expo sound more exciting than your annual sales meeting? I plan to participate, not just listen.
There’s more going on than a three-ring circus. It’s immaterial if I miss 95% of what’s going on, so long as I can take away stuff that’s important to me.
Aside from the main stage, there’s no master plan. Lots of what’s going on here is self-organizing. A master plan would stifle creativity and diversity. At the same time that a master plan dulled down the event, it would generate mountains of administrivia and busy-work. Just do it.
People can dive in because they’re familiar with the basic processes and tools playing out here. The three people running the un-conference are following a model set by the three people who did this the year before. Others have left plenty of breadcrumbs and advice on the web for how to do these things. Furthermore, most of us are accustomed to keeping up to date and ourselves updating information on wikis. At the events, we expect to be challenged to take on some things outside of our routine comfort zone. That’s part of the fun.
Related:
We’ve got to start meeting like this
Notes from the first BarCamp
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