As I'm in the midst of getting the Stockholm Challenge conference off the ground at the moment I more than appreciate David Isenberg's pointer to Mike Masnick's post on conferences.
The major problem, says Masnick, is that we don't have to go to the conference to know what is going to be said.
I've found, lately, that I have very little incentive to attend. Each time, before I go, I look down the speaker list, and say to myself "I know what all these people are going to say." If I confront conference organizers about this (and I sometimes do), I'm told that this time will be different. Each time, however, I find that I'm right - and I don't feel that I come away from these conferences having learned anything useful.
Too right, and spare me from conferences that set out to come up with something useful or actionable or, god help us, a "policy development document". Masnick encapsulates the experience perfectly.
The only real value I've found myself gaining from any conference was not at the conference itself, but at lunch. Lunch is when people actually get to meet and talk to each other . . . An ideal conference, then, would be more like a day full of these lunches - that forced people to think in different ways.
Fortunately, the Challenge event has some real advantages; our aim is pretty simple, "to get some of the best, most innovative, most stimulating, hard working, knowledgeable people working in programmes and projects that use ICT, and give them every opportunity to learn from each other."
If we're lucky, we get to learn from them as well, along with our sponsors, the academics from KTH, the development people from SIDA and SPIDER.
All we know right now is that there will be a 2.5 day long conference in Stockholm starting May 9 and ending at lunch on May 11, just before the big do in the City Hall. Now the banquet is worth the trip but the real benefit comes from all the conversations we start.
As soon as the finalists are announced, we'll be starting the discussion to figure out what they want to talk about and looking for participants ready to put a case that the rest of us can go to work on.
But of one thing there is no doubt, there will be none of the usual suspects, no grand outcomes, just about 100 finalists who go away from the city enthused, stimulated and buzzing with ideas, contacts and tactics for getting the job done.
On the other hand, if you are putting on a conference, I can pretty well be relied on to disrupt the proceedings. To quote Robert Valentin at the WB from last year's Web4Dev conference, "somebody has to be the rock thrower".
All rock throwing offers considered.
I cannot resist this:
Lunch = water cooler with diversities? :)
Posted by: Cindy | February 24, 2006 at 04:08 PM