live and direct

Tim "Mumbrella" Burrowes is over live blogging (or tweeting) and Katie "GetShouty" Chatfield is feeling the same way.

It's important to note that this kind of activity is still limited to certain events full of "webby" people. Many of the events I go to have no live blogging nor tweeting (and varying proportions of live attendees). So this is a bit of a minority issue but let's assume these behaviours will spread over time.

Rather than seeing tweeting and blogging as potentially distracting activities and so a disaster, I think they may be an opportunity to improve the event experience - if used with a bit of thought by the savvy presenter.

I am not really a fan of straight "presenting". My short attention span means that I'm getting bored of my own voice just after the first slide. I would much rather have others play with and critique or extend my ideas rather than have them received as so much cognitive junk mail - and these new whizz-bang "Web 0.2" technologies allow this to happen. If you build twitter-based activities into your session or offer 3 questions you want to invite the audience to blog about at the end, then you are creating a space for this interaction. At other times, you can invite participants to put down their devices and briefly give you their full attention.

This does require those with a "speaking" role to act more like facilitators than presenters. It means that you probably have to learn improv as well as voice projection, posture, storytelling and visual design to be good at this. It also means that speakers have to accept a more humble but ultimately more powerful role than "the sage on the stage". The only justifiable reason to get on a stage is to change the world a little bit, everything else is ego. And if you want to change the world, that means that the action is out there in the audience - they are the future and you, as a speaker, are the past. You have to go where the action is and tools like twitter can light up the action for you like a flare.

So what else can we do to make events better?

Who do you want to see speak?

You may remember the post about speakers and conferences. I have asked a few people and got the following responses:

• Daryl Cook suggested Clay Shirky. Daryl would pay AU$100 (or less) to see Clay and reckons that around 400 people would see Clay. Which means that Daryl estimates Clay's value to AU$40k. Coincidentally, I had an email exchange with Clay's agent a couple of nights ago so I now know what CS thinks he's worth (that is not a joke). What do other people think of Daryl's estimate?
  
• Laurie LockLee suggested John Seely Brown. Laurie would pay $50 and reckons that 200 people would turn up - so JSB's value would be $10k in LLL's estimation. I will find out what JSB thinks it should be.
  
• Cai Kjaer suggest Barack Obama. I haven't got a $ figure of Cai for that one but let me work on it and see what the Big O's people have to say.
  
• James Dellow suggested Charles Handy but didn't want to pay to see. Which means he has assigned CH a value of $0. Is that fair people?
• Stuart French suggested Andrew McAfee - no $ value yet tho.

One thing to remember here is that people pay $000s to go to conferences and they are often drawn in by the "big names" (and most of the other presenters at conferences are not getting paid for this). In trying to reimagine the conference and get over our obsession with the "headline act", I realise it was futile, so why not harness that effect and do something interesting with it?

Please fill out the form below (feel free to do it anonymously).

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.

canberra - information & knowledge policy

Just a quick note to say that I enjoyed the presentations by Kylie Dunn, Sally-Anne Leigh and (of course) Nerida Hart at Information & Knowledge Policy Development gig.

gigs - melbourne / sydney / canberra

I'll be doing sessions based on the actKM presentation in Melbourne next week (courtesy of the KM Roundtable) and possibly in Sydney two weeks later (courtesy of NSW KM Forum). There's now the white paper and I'm toying with T-shirts & coffee mugs but I reckon there's a limit to cross-promotion on this baby.

And then there's that gig in Canberra that with a social software bent. Thanks to Alex, Andrew, Paul, Cory, Kelly, Luke, Viv & Dan for answering the dilemmas and sharpening the thinking.

Hmmm - T-shirts, now there's an idea....

enterprise 2.0 tomorrow

I will be chairing Enterprise 2.0 for Information Professionals tomorrow and then presenting the following day. See you there.

I promise to be as nice as possible.

information architecture in the public sector conference

The 3rd Annual Information Architecture in the Public Sector Conference 2008 will be held on 23 & 24 June in Canberra and then I will be running a workshop on the Friday afternoon on "Architecting Anarchy".

Beg the money from your employer or steal it from an old lady or sell crack or something. Just come.

Interesting (1)

Patrick is reporting on his conference trail. And act-km was his pick of the bunch. And Patrick has a point. The richness and collegiality of the event was wonderful. But Interesting South ranks up there for me. Expect to see a flood of posts about IS stuff over the next few days. Nuff respekt to Emily & Co for their work on this. The venue was cool, the audience was up for it. The brain is fired up. The heart is pumping.

KM in Public Sector redux

Small but intense, the KM in the public sector conference was enlightening on a number of fronts.

Paul McDowall presented on the last 10 years of KM in Canadian public sector. Given that senior public officials are rotated every 18-24 months and the organisational changes involved in a full KM programme require 2-5 years, the story was largely one of bursts of activity & brilliance that were unsustained.

There were presentations by James Digges, Paulette Paterson, Craig Delahoy, Suzanne Zyngier & Nicholas Gerhard but the 4 delivered on the morning of the second day resonated with me. The SageCo / Country Energy presentation on managing the exit of baby boomer experts from a technical workforce was cool, as was David Pender's mix of ONA techniques with collaborative climate surveys. Steve Bussey of VicRoads talked about cultivating technical expertise and Kerry Moir's presso on KM in ATO Business Solutions (which included CoPs, lessons learned & narrative) overlaps with a lot of things I have been involved with from a work perspective.

And it was a whole heap of fun co-presenting with Keith De La Rue. Cheers...

KM in the Public Sector - Nov 14/15

I'll be at this conference. I was going to be talking about social software. Now it'll be me & Keith De La Rue doing a tag-team, good-cop-bad-cop session on the same. If you are attending & have a burning question about this topic that you'd like us to address, drop me a line beforehand.