conferences & the cost of organising

It used to be really tricky & expensive to find people. Finding speakers. Finding venues. Finding attendees. You needed contacts & experience & these were high barriers to entry.

It's still hard to put on an event but the economics have changed. Finding speakers is not hard - altho finding good speakers is more challenging - how about a ratemyprofessors* for conference speakers? Finding attendees is still tricky but a lot easier. Venues are falling over themselves to host events in the current climate. Running an event professionally is quite demanding - but there are professional events organisers all over the place.

So the question becomes: "What kind of events do we want?"

Traditional conferences work well for new topics where attendees need "educating". They start becoming boring as soon as the attendees know as much as the speakers. Then BarCamp formats become more interesting - participants start talking to each other. Many conferences get caught in the ravine between the two. Finally, the conference morphs into something else completely - probably closer to Open Space or a similar format.

So one idea I'm toying with is crowdsourcing an event. Doing it at cost. We find someone lots of Australians would like to see and bring them out here. We discuss who they are and what they could do with us. I know of several events that are run on a cost-recovery basis but how can we make this as interesting as possible? As useful as possible for all concerned?

Who would you invite?

What I need is:

• An international speaker.
• Some places we want the speaker to come to and do their thing.
• What you want them to do. Talk, facilitate, whatever.
  
• Some software to manage the money side of things. I need something that will collect "donations" but only charge people is a certain threshold is crossed by a certain time.
  

[Edit 3/3/09] - I'm going to make this simpler:

• Who would you want to invite?
• How much would you pay?
• How many people do you think we could get to see them?

I will then ask & see if the averaged market demand matches the speaker's own perceptions. I already have these figures for a certain famous Web 2.0 speaker & author, let's see what we can find out here...

*If people are interested, I'll take the Pepsi taste challenge & publish all the conference feedback I have got - good & bad.