Icon by Benedikte Vanderweeën

Five months and a few days left to the end of 2011 and still so many interesting conferences to attend to. While you can’t (shouldn’t?) attend too many of them and stay productive at your work (unless you’re pitching to conference attendees/speakers, looking for new clients, or -like me- work in the conference biz), a good conference exposes you to new ideas, useful networking and the occasional magic of serendipity.

Follows a selection of the events that I find more interesting (or I’m curious to discover) before the end of 2011. Another extraordinary way  to discover conferences is through services like Plancast or Lanyrd.

Do you have a conference to recommend? Please do it in the comments below!

Note: I compile a Conference Calendar on Google Calendar here (you can subscribe to if from your own calendar) and also a list of interesting conferences here (the Google Calendar is more up to date though).

August

23/8-26/8 Adaptive Path’s UX week [San Francisco, USA]

Best for interaction designers and design professionals worldwide. Impressive lineup of speakers and many workshops to get your hands dirty with.

24/8-25/8 Media Evolution Conference [Malmö, Sweden] <- I’ll be attending, let’s meet!

Excellent place to meet key the media players from the nordic countries. It  explores the future of media and attracts people from film, games, web, publishing, learning, tech and music.

29/8-5/9 Burning Man [Nevada Desert, USA]

Some say it’s become too commercial now, but still it’s on my event bucket-list. “Once a year, tens of thousands of participants gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever.”

September

2/9 dConstruct [Brighton, UK]

Home for designers, makers and tinkers. The conference is sold-out but you can still register for the workshops (and it gives you access to the conference). “dConstruct 2011 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of interaction design, mobile design and ubiquitous computing to explore how we can bridge the gap between physical and digital product design.”

12/9-14/9 TechCrunch Disrupt SF [San Francisco, USA]

Run by TechCrunch, this is a place to go and meet new startups (or pitch your own), VCs and other players from the Web world.

14/9-16/9 PICNIC Festival [Amsterdam, The Netherlands] <- I’ll be attending, let’s meet!

PICNIC is a wonderful place to discover innovative ideas and business opportunities in the future of media, design, technology and the people that are making it happen (disclaimer: I used to work at PICNIC as Marketing Manager). This year’s edition is focusing on Urban Futures (infrastructure, sustainability, society, design, media).

15/9-18/9 The Do Lectures [Cilgerran (West Wales), UK]

This is another one in my event bucket-list. “The Do Lectures are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about.” 

30/9 TEDxTransmedia [Rome, Italy]

I attended the first TEDxTransmedia in Geneva last year and it was a first-class tour through the realm of Transmedia and Story-telling. Looking forward to the speaker lineup.

October

13/10-14/10 Wired (UK) Conference [London, UK] <- I’ll be attending, let’s meet!

This will be the first conference organized by the guys of Wired Magazine’s UK edition. I suspect it’s going to offer a good mix of business-oriented sessions and more forward-thinking geeky-futurist ones (and I’m personally looking forward to the latter). In the preliminary speaker list they include two that I particularly like: Bjarke Ingels and Heather Knight.

19/10-22/10 PopTech [Camden (Maine), USA]

This one too is in my event bucket list. A valid alternative to TED. “PopTech is a unique innovation network – a global community of cutting-edge leaders, thinkers, and doers from many different disciplines, who come together to explore the social impact of new technologies, the forces of change shaping our future, and new approaches to solving the world’s most significant challenges.”

November

9/11/-11/11 Monaco Media Forum [Monaco, Montecarlo]

What’s attractive of the MMF is the audience. Come here (invitation only) for high-level networking and an Oscar-like setup. Besides, it;s always nice to visit Monaco for a few days… you might even find a single prince/princess to marry!

25/11 TEDxAmsterdam [Amsterdam, The Netherlands] <- I might be attending, let’s meet!

Been there since the first edition back in 2009 and it felt like a big brother TED event condensed into one day (3 speakers from that edition made it to the TED stage one year after]. While the 2010 was a bit too much Dutch-focused for my wants, it still provided quite some inspiring ideas worth doing…

December

7/12/-9/12 Le Web [Paris, France] <- I might be attending, let’s meet!

Le Web has turned into a huge people-meeting-machine. Last year more than 3,000 attendees came to Paris and on a personal level it was a great networking opportunity. If you follow what’s going on in the web world, especially the Silicon Valley/Alley turf, then the program won’t seem that interesting but it’s a great platform for doing business.

The 99% Conference (web, twitter, tickets) is one of those that I’d wanted to attend for the last two years but never made it either because of schedule conflict or, this year, because it was Sold Out. Organize by the cool people of Behance, it focuses on the 99% of perspiration (and not the 1% of inspiration) required to make things happen (the original quote is from Thomas Edison). They usually gather top-notch speakers who tell original stories about how they transformed their projects from promising ideas into awesome successes.

The 4th edition will take place at the Times Center in New York City on May 3-4, 2012.

If you’re in NYC, planning a trip or work in the creative field, this is a great event to attend both for content and high-level networking. Hope to meet you there (no, I haven’t booked my seat yet… still tinkering with my agenda for next year).

The seventh edition of Frontiers of Interaction (web, twitter, Facebook) took place in Florence, Italy, on June 20-21.

I’ve been a regular to Frontiers since 2009 and during 2010 I was its the conference director (had to leave the job in December 2010 because I no longer had the time to run two full conferences in two countries and happening with just a week of time from each other).

This was the first time of the conference in Florence (after successful editions in Milan, Turin and Rome) and it was hosted at the Otel Variete which usually works as a nightclub. The setup benefited from a non traditional venue for this kind of event. The first day was dedicated to multi-track workshops and the second one was for the talks, both with an impressive lineup of speakers from all over the world (highlights: Luke Williams, Amber Case, Zdenek Kalal and Andrei Herasimchuk)

Follows a slideshow of photos I took during Frontiers.

Next April 16-17 the second edition of the Switch Conference (web, twitter, facebook) will take place in Oporto, Portugal. Founded by a group of young entrepreneurs, including the host Ricardo Sousa (linkedin, twitter), this 2-day event main theme is to “Embrace Change” and Switch aims to promote knowledge and idea sharing in a networking friendly environment, exposing the attendees with realities they don’t know and inspire them to do better everyday.

Switch 2011 has a very attractive roster of both international and local speakers (I’m particularly looking forward to Ji Lee’s keynote -> watch this video of Ji at the 99% Conference if you don’t know him).

I’ll be speaking about “The Future of Conferences”, a topic connected to my daily professional life and the core of this website.

Your input about The Future of Conferences

I’m currently working on my presentation and I would like to have your input about what is the key feature (big or small) that will shape the future of conferences. Please add it to the comments below or tweet using the hashtag #futureconf

Let’s meet

If you’re attending Switch, drop me a line or tweet so that we can meet.

Tickets for Switch Conference

I hear that some tickets are still available -> get yours now!

I‘m always [positively] surprised by the variety of interesting conferences taking all over the place, reinforcing my thesis that even though we’re hyper-connected digitally, there are more physical events taking place than ever (and we need them more than ever too).

My latest find through a tweet in my stream is the Buddhist Geeks Conference (web, twitter, facebook) that will take place next July 29-31 in Los Angeles, USA (not a very zen-ish city IMHO… but it might be just a foolish stereotype of mine).

The Conference brings together some of the most exciting teachers, leaders and thinkers from the US and beyond as Buddhist Geeks continues its ongoing mission to discover the emerging face of Buddhism. With a vibrant program of presentations, workshops, performance and participant-led elements and its inclusive non-denominational attitude, #bgeeks11 will be the most innovative, energetic and relevant event in the Buddhist world.

I wish I could attend, maybe next year.

The GEL conference (web, twitter, Facebook) is one of the big inspirational events of the US. The 9th annual spring conference will take place next April 28-29 in New York. I asked Mark Hurst (profile, twitter, Facebook), founder of GEL, to describe its main features and the biggest challenges he faces every year as an event organizer. The main focus is on speakers talking about good experience and Mark tries to never repeat a speaker.

“Every year it’s a different take on a similar theme: the perennial theme is good experience and what GEL tries to do is bring together  a diverse set of voices and perspectives”.

What makes a good experience at a conference?

“One of the goals of GEL is to teach good experience by creating one right there at the conference”

It’s both about big things and tiny details. According to Mark, typical examples of bad experiences in other events are:

• Badges that are hard to read
• You can never find the schedule of the event because it’s somewhere hidden in the attendee bag
• The attendee bag might be something unattractive (a polite way of saying cheap) and bound to the landfill after the conference
• Sponsor banners and logos “polluting” the physical space

View of the theater during a stage presentation

Badges

“When you build a conference with the attendee experience as your primary focus you get a different perspective on those details”. Name of the attendees in big font, schedule printed upside down on the badge (so that you just look down to read the schedule and while you’re doing so someone can read your name).

GEL 2007 Badge - Photo courtesy of nickbaum on flickr

Sponsors

“We have few to no sponsors every year. We don’t do things like selling the lanyard for 1,000 bucks or having a logo banner in every room of the conference”.

Catering

Catering is a very big element of a conference and Mark recommends not to “skimp on food quantity or quality. We use a local NY caterer who uses all organic, locally sourced and seasonal ingredients. Taste is better, nutritional value is higher, attendees feel better at the conference and there is a minimum carbon footprint”.

Also any food that is not consumed during the conference goes to a homeless shelter so there’s absolutely no waste. To further reduce the among of waste, GEL uses plates made of dry banana leaves that are fully biodegradable. “I have gone to conferences in the past where you go to the breakfast or lunch and you could tell that the organizer found the cheapest possible, chemical box lunch to save a few dollars and that shows that the organizer is not fully committed to the attendee experience”.

Members of the Gregory Brothers, Flying Karamazov Brothers, and Ebony Hillbillies together at GEL 2010

Conference bag

This is an aspect where several organizers fail. Mark has as a policy to give a bug but one that he would actually would like to use at home, carrying books, groceries or whatever. Furthermore the items that GEL are only those that attendees would actually want.

“There are no coupons because people don’t want coupons. There could be a voucher for a free item, that’s nice, but not a coupon for a 20% on some vendor service. that’s gross. That’s more for the benefit of the vendor than that of the attendee”.

Program

The “attendees come first” attitude affects not only collateral details but but also big issues as the programming.“The other day I got a proposal from a sponsor that also wanted to speak but that’s  absolutely the opposite of what attendees want. Attendees want to hear speakers that have something to say that is substantial, that they’re passionate about, that’s inspirational and motivates them to change something in their world”.

If you don’t rely from sponsors then it’s ticket sales that make the event possible. Money does play a part in bringing the event together, but Mark tries  to run this event with the lowest possible ticket price to make it feasible. “I have an advantage and that is that GEL is not the project that sustains me and my family financially (I have a consulting firm that does that), so I’m able to keep prices extremely low for the quality of the experience and I give a hefty discount when attendees buy for the next year the year before”.

The ticket price for GEL is about 1,000 dollars.

The ONE question for event organizers

“There is one central question that every [conference] organizer has to grapple with: why are you running this event?”

Answers tend to fall into two categories: you’re running the event to make money or because you love it and want to create a great experience. “For me GEL is something that I love and although I need to bring money to pay the expenses and put it on, that’s not the primary goal of running the conference and I’d like to think that it shows, because I’m able to bring the best caterer I can find, and rent the best venue I can find and so on”.

The biggest challenge in organizing GEL

Programming the event is a 12 month process that includes scouting for new speakers and new material to put into the event. “I have to be aware to who has spoken at other events because I try to have speakers that have not presented at other events. I prefer to run people that no one has ever heard of. Not always possible but it’s a goal. More often the new voices are people who no one’s ever heard of. On one side I like to think that I’m giving them at least a little exposure through the GEL platform and it’s gratifying to see them go off to make great things after they have spoken at GEL. I love to see them picked up by other conferences”.

This goal of tracking who has spoken where pushed Mark to launch a side-project with is a very useful tool for conference organizers: SittingO. It’s a website that collects speaker lists and event lineups, to track who has spoken where. For more info on SittingO read my review here.

Best networking “tool”

While GEL attendees are encouraged not to bring digital devices to the conference, Mark has created a program that enhances the possibility of interacting with new people. GEL is divided in two days The first one consists of a full day of in-person interactive group oriented experiences. “You will have at least two or three different experiences during that day where you’re alongside other attendees you haven’t met doing something, getting to know them and experience something side-by-side that gives you a shared context to talking with them later during the event”.

The second day is dedicated to the “theater talks” and by then people will have already built up an initial sense of community during the previous day. “During the second day we have five breaks: breakfast, mid-morning, lunch, mid-afternoon and cocktails. Five times for people to go into the shared area and say “what do you think? or “Oh, I remember you from yesterday” or “I didn’t see you yesterday, what events were you on yesterday?”.

Mark recalls that by the end of the conference every year the cleaning crew had to ask people to leave, because the talking went on after the program was over.

“I heard that occasionally there’s an after party but I’m usually too exhausted to attend”.

A GEL Day 1 creativity workshop held at Etsy offices

The Cognitive Cities Conference (web, twitter, facebook) took place on February 26-27, 2011 in Berlin and I was kindly invited to attend by co-organizer Johannes Kleske but had to suspend my trip last minute due to a health issue. Now that I’m getting feedback from my friends that did participate I really regret missing it. Hope they publish the keynote videos or something soon (the conference consisted in a first day of talks and a second one of workshops, many of which took place on the streets, or so I heard).

Here is a wrap-up by the organizers.

Warren Ellis at Cognitive Cities Conference 2011 - Photo by mjaysplanet on flickr

Last month, in London, 200 people turned out for Boring 2010, the first conference devoted to under-stimulation. The Wall Street Journal has a story about the conference—which included readings of paint color catalogs and lectures with titles like “The Intangible Beauty of Car Park Roofs”. The interesting thing, though, is that this conference really didn’t seem to be about boredom at all. Instead, the topics leaned more towards “Things that are stereotypically considered boring, but which some people are very interested in.”

Via Boing Boing [thanks to Laurent Haug for pointing it out]

This post, like the previous two, highlights the fact that there are plenty of opportunities to create meaningful conferences, that is meaningful to the right audience. It’s just a matter of understanding what is relevant to whom and make it happen with an honest desire of connecting people.

Some passages from the Wall Street Journal article that I found interesting:

Boring 2010 is the handiwork of James Ward, 29 years old, who works for a DVD distribution and production company. In his other life, as the envoy of ennui, Mr. Ward edits a blog called “I Like Boring Things.” He is also co-founder of the Stationery Club, whose 45 members meet occasionally to discuss pens, paper clips and Post-it Notes.

Boring 2010 sprang to life when Mr. Ward heard that an event called the Interesting Conference had been canceled, and he sent out a joke tweet about the need to have a Boring Conference instead. He was taken aback when dozens of people responded enthusiastically.

One eagerly awaited talk was about writer Peter Fletcher’s meticulous three-year—and still running—sneeze count. With the help of graphs and charts, Mr. Fletcher disclosed that he had sneezed 2,267 times in the past 1,249 days, thus gaining “a profound understanding of the passing of time.”

“I’ve even sneezed when recording a sneeze,” he said.

To get to the conference, Jo Lee took an hour’s train ride from the seaside town of Brighton. She said it was worth it because her own idea of fun is to take photographs of random marks left on walls and of chewing gum stuck under desks.

“We’re all overstimulated,” said Ms. Lee. “I think it’s important to stop all that for a while and see what several hours of being bored really feels like.”

I had an interesting chat with Matt Locke (Web, Twitter, Linkedin), Head of Crossplatform at Channel 4, during the New Media Days Conference in Copenhagen and he told me about a very interesting event he’s organizing called The Story Conference (Web, Twitter, Plancast, Lanyrd). The Story is all about “people who tell stories in interesting ways”, a one day conference about stories and story-telling.

Matt Locke speaking at New Media Days 2010 in Copenhagen

The first edition took place in 2010 and the next one is planned for Friday 18th February, 2011 in London. The speaker list includes extremely interesting people from different fields: sculptors, journalists, performers, interaction designers, storytelling media experts like Tim Kring (creator of Heroes) and photographers like Martin Parr.

According to Matt, buzz words like “transmedia” are constantly invading the media industry while it’s always been about one of the most basic forms of human interaction, telling stories, maybe in new and innovative ways, but still stories.

Tickets are selling out fast so I just bought mine. They are rather accessible, so hurry up to get yours!

The Story will be a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here.

The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Whether it is in a game, a movie, a book, or a pub, we’ve all heard or told or been part of stories that have made us gasp, cry or just laugh.

There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.

Today at the New Media Days Conference (Web, Twitter, Facebook) in Copenhagen, Kevin Kelly (Web, Wikipedia, Twitter)  delivered a very interesting keynote on the characteristics of the “new media” environment and its opportunities for Media companies, be it old or new ones.

Kelly, who has just published a book titled “What technology wants”, focused on 4 key concepts that are shaping our (media)world:

1. Trans media
2. Share by default
3. Generatives
4. Database of things

Kevin Kelly at New Media Days 2010

Trans media

Trans-media or intermedia is a term that Kelly uses to describe the single medium in which text, photos, music, TV, radio and others are converging. Imagine for example one single large text that contains all documents connected through hyperlinks. This intermedia is usable through different kinds of interaction like gestures and also allows a very intimate relationship (eg. like when you caress the iPad’s screen). “It’s a whole body somatic experience”.
The content will evolve into a two-way relationship where it adapts to our way of using it. For example,  adaptive text (part of the semantic web or web 3.0) will change the way that content is displayed on a web page depending on how much reading time you’re spending on a certain part of the page or the attention you’re giving to it. In this scenario, the screen becomes a two-way window: we look at it, it looks at us – and adapts.

Share by default

All the screens we use, be it a cellphone, a TV or a desktop computer, are windows into the same thing: the cloud. But as Kelly explains in his latest book, we –humans– are part of the cloud too, not separated from it. The central verb in the cloud is “share” with and within the cloud, and this new paradigm opens a lot of questions about sharing like: who owns the content in the cloud, who can modify it (or erase it), who’s responsible and whose laws apply to it.

One of the biggest challenges for media companies is that of ownership and access. If you share everything, you don’t need to own it. If you can have access to all the music in the world, then why would you want to own it. But them, who owns it?

Users become more important too, as they are generating loads of new content. How far can you go in tapping into users creating content? Several companies have virtually outsourced their customer service by providing forums where users answer to each others questions, many other are counting on the same users to do marketing for them by spreading viral marketing videos and yet other are counting on users to finance each other through micro loans and social financing (think of Kiva.org). According to Kelly though, not all content should be created by the users ans here is where professionals come into play, not by replacing the existing content but by complementing it through specific skills?

Generatives

The ease of copying digital content has created a sort of “promiscuous fluid”. Kelly urges media companies to forget about selling copies and assume as if they were free. So the focus switches to things that are valuable because they cannot be copied easily.

In this point is where Kevin Kelly gives some hints on the biggest opportunities lying out there for media companies. A clear example is that of immediacy. Kelly recounts how when downloading a (legal) copy of the National Geographic magazine from the ’20s he was given two options: download it for free with one click and it will take one hour or so to conclude the task – pay a few dollars and you can get the file in under 6 minutes. In other words, the copy was free, immediacy was the item being sold.

He calls these “generative valuables” and apart from immediacy, other opportunities lie in authenticity, personalization, patronage (having a relation or supporting the curator), interpretation, accessibility, embodiment and findability.

Sharing becomes a default, generatives cannot be copied easily and have to be made in place. This is the future of media – copies will flow free, people will pay for something else (of value to them).

Database of things

We are moving from files to streams, which are not a static page but a large flow. The new metaphor is streams of stuff, the cloud, now (real time), we (instead of I). Real time is the currency for this new media and everything in the world will be producing data (think of RFID tags, open datasets, etc) building up a huge database of things.

From "files" to "streams"

Kevin Kelly is an optimist and after 7,000 days of the web and seeing everything that changed from the original goals and predictions, the lesson he draws for himself is that we have to get better in believing the impossible. What will the next 7,000 days of the web be?

At this point he looked at the audience, whose silent attention evidenced how desperate they were for concrete answers, and said “you’re not too late!”. Most of the stuff regarding the next 7,000 days of the web (or whatever form it will take, from videos to apps, e-readers, etc) has not yet happened, media companies can become leaders too.

The Future of Conferences

After his presentation I cached up with Kelly on what he believes the future of conferences will look like. He described how those formats that can happen better offline are taking the lead. From one hour presentations to the 18 minutes of the TED talks and the 5 minutes of Pecha Kuchas, shorter presentations become more dynamic and interesting, and easier to deploy locally when they rely on participation like at unconferences.

That being said, I enjoyed much more this 1-hour lecture that an 18 minute TEDx talk that he delivered just one year ago in Amsterdam. Maybe that’s because he had more than one idea worth spreading.

Dear conference organizer, if you made it all the way to the bottom of this article, I encourage you to think about what kind of generatives you can create for your event. If you share the content of your conference for free through a live streaming, what other valuable things (worth paying for) can you deliver?
To kickstart new ideas think of the generatives mentioned before: immediacy, authenticity, personalization, patronage, interpretation, accessibility, embodiment and findability.

More photos from New Media Days 2010 here.