{"id":309,"date":"2006-04-21T12:29:08","date_gmt":"2006-04-21T16:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/04\/21\/is-there-a-perfect-kind-of-conference\/"},"modified":"2006-04-21T12:29:08","modified_gmt":"2006-04-21T16:29:08","slug":"is-there-a-perfect-kind-of-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/04\/21\/is-there-a-perfect-kind-of-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there a perfect kind of conference?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since I&#8217;m involved in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meshconference.com\">organizing one<\/a> in May, my eye always gets caught by any mention of what makes a good conference versus a bad one, which is how I wound up reading Euan Semple&#8217;s post on his blog The Obvious, <a href=\"http:\/\/theobvious.typepad.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/a_word_or_two_o.html\">about a forum<\/a> on blogs and society that he is attending <a href=\"http:\/\/www.socialmediaforum.com\/\">in May<\/a>. In it, Euan (former head of knowledge management at the BBC) says that he has grown wary of &#8220;being taken advantage of by commercial conference organisers,&#8221; and was also concerned about &#8220;being associated with yet another money-spinning, bandwagon-joining, pointless exercise.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As are we all, Euan, as are we all. That&#8217;s why I keep writing about how with mesh we are trying to create something <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/04\/20\/the-mesh-wiki-create-a-workshop\/\">part-way between<\/a> a traditional conference and an &#8220;unconference.&#8221; Can&#8217;t get enough of my thoughts on that topic? Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/03\/27\/when-is-a-conference-not-a-conference\/\">another one<\/a>. I think Euan and I share a similar thought &#8212; that boring, stale, PowerPoint-filled conferences are useless, but also (as he puts it) that he&#8217;s kind of irritated by &#8220;a small group of people who have attended mind-boggling numbers of conferences&#8230; over the past four years in the US getting bored with themselves and declaring conferences dead.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And what would a post on conferences be without a reference to Dave Winer? Euan includes in his post a reference to the fact that the idea of an unconference &#8220;wasn&#8217;t invented by Dave Winer,&#8221; and gets <a href=\"http:\/\/theobvious.typepad.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/a_word_or_two_o.html#comment-16398163\">a comment from<\/a> &#8212; naturalement &#8212; Dave Winer.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>My fellow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meshconference.com\">mesh<\/a> organizer Mark Evans has some thoughts about the perfect conference too, and so does Stuart at <a href=\"http:\/\/stuart.blogware.com\/blog\/_archives\/2006\/4\/21\/1901852.html\">the mesh blog<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.michaelmcderment.com\/article\/third-way.html\">Mike<\/a>. We may not hit perfection but we&#8217;re certainly going to try  \ud83d\ude42  Stowe Boyd, who is coming to mesh, says he isn&#8217;t tired of conferences, he&#8217;s just <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stoweboyd.com\/message\/2006\/04\/euan_semple_on_.html\">&#8220;tired of tired conferences.&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I&#8217;m involved in organizing one in May, my eye always gets caught by any mention of what makes a good conference versus a bad one, which is how I wound up reading Euan Semple&#8217;s post on his blog The Obvious, about a forum on blogs and society that he is attending in May. In &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/04\/21\/is-there-a-perfect-kind-of-conference\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Is there a perfect kind of conference?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}