Conferences and the Long Tail
The ETech’05 Keynote was pretty interesting. I enjoyed the patterns that Tim and Rael present, and I repeat a few of the them here, drawing a lesson at the end:
- “Design for Participation” - success lies in small pieces loosely joined
- “User-centered development” - great benefit to sharing efforts and processes with users
- “Syndicate e-commerce” - glue together small pieces of others
- “Users add value to shared data”
- “Network effects by default” - make participation the default
- “The long tail” - many of the limiting factors from the physical world are absent on the internet
- “Software above the level of a single device” - design to integrate services across disparate devices
- “Packets and shipping containers” - understand the packet size of the application domain, the most effective way to ship
Though I didn’t attend the conference, it appears to have been a great success and well presented - with a novel combination of information sources: Good speakers, great weblog coverage, articles, wikis, tags galore, flickr feeds, the Attention Stream and more. To me, all of these ways of presenting the conference follow on from the patterns. The conference itself seems to have been designed for participation, it’s obviously user-centered and devices like the Attention Stream syndicate other applications. The attendees added value to the conference, and almost all information sources were public and immediately available. Remixing was happening at almost all levels too: direct quotes from the speakers were blogged, thoughts, articles and interviews too. Awesome.I live many thousands of miles away, but could participate at some level. That’s phenomenal. I’d like to be even more involved next time, which makes me think back to some of the other patterns:
- Above the level of a single device - at a conference, the device is the speaker’s voice and the attendee’s ears. So, how about making everything available to non-attendee’s ears too.
- Packets and shipping containers - sounds suspiciously like “MP3 and podcasts” to me
- The long tail - well that’s all the other folk that couldn’t physically attend the conference
Although there are now a few podcasts available, having them available after each speaker would benefit not only those present, but those abroad too. I hope that more conferences move towards the standards set by ETech’05, and beyond. Afterall, permitting the long tail to participate has been shown to deliver unprecedented rewards.
