Well, mesh is a wrap, as the TV folks like to say, after a few months of brain-storming and occasional head-pounding, and an awful lot of hard work by a lot of people — particularly Sheri and her team of miracle workers at MCC planners — not to mention a lot of patience on the part of the “significant others,” i.e. my wife Rebecca, Stuart’s wife Anna, Rob’s wife Victoria and Mark’s wife Pamela, who didn’t even blink when we effectively took on second (or third) jobs putting this crazy thing together.
As Rob has mentioned, it was really an amazing and gratifying thing for us — five guys with absolutely no experience at this kind of thing whatsoever — to get the kind of comments we did from people as they came out of the various panels, or left at the end of the day. I lost count of the number of people who told me that it was one of the best conferences they had ever been to, or thanked us for putting it on in Toronto and getting people fired up about Web 2.0, or said that they really enjoyed the lack of eye-glazing PowerPoints and the focus on conversation and discussion.
That is exactly what we were shooting for, and it sounds like we achieved it. And more than anything else, the part that I enjoyed the most was watching people connecting in the atrium during lunch or the networking breaks, or at the cocktail social upstairs after the first day, or at The Drake later that night. Lots of fascinating discussions with Andrew Baron from Rocketboom.com, the incomparable Om Malik, my pal and Ottawa Valley homeboy Paul Kedrosky, Matt Mullenweg and Chris Messina and a whole pile of other amazing speakers. They were the stars, and we were just the roadies.
If you want to check out some of the spinoff effects from mesh, there are several hundred photos already at Flickr.com tagged “mesh06,” and I haven’t even uploaded my hundred or so yet (there’s also the mesh pool). And plenty of people have been live-blogging along the way, including my buddy Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0, who has a gigantic synopsis of the conference that is truly a sight to behold. Tris Hussey of Qumana also has some here, and so does John Ounpuu, and Sacha Chua — who also volunteered at the conference, and even handled a bunch of the IRC backchannel that got running on day two (thanks, Sacha) — has a bunch as well. And Connie Crosby did some, and so did Lieutenant Dan. Mark even managed to work in a couple of podcasts.
What can I say? Awesome couple of days. And more than anything else, I’d like to thank Mark and Stuart and Rob and Mike for making it possible. You guys rock.