As I prepare to go to the annual BNI International Conference in Long Beach, California – the following article on the website – Change.org caught my eye. See what you think?
First, what I don’t mean. Gatherings of people are going to do nothing but increase in importance. As more and more of our lives go online and particularly as our professional worlds cross more and more boundaries and connect us to people farther and farther away. In that world, the oasis of real human connection that gatherings provide will have an increasingly high emotional, psychological, and consequently professional value.
But the model of conferences – just like the model of everything else, it seems – is stuck in a 20th century. It’s hierarchical, it’s dominated by a class system that divides along lines of prestige, previous attendance, and a host of other factors, and more than anything else, it does stuff not because it’s what people want but just because it’s sort of how it’s always been done.
What people pay for at events is social capital – access to incredible networks, and at the same time events like Pop!Tech reinterpreting performance and using that performance as a platform for ongoing action.
In that situation, why do so many events cling to the older model? I’ve gotten nothing but positive response from my post a couple days ago about the extinction of plenaries, and in fact have never heard any one (with the exception of the occasional conference organizer themselves) really defend the structure. So what gives?
I think in part it’s economics. The assumption is that people participate in conferences largely because of the quality of the speakers they bring in. Being able to put together interesting and provocative panel discussion quadruples the number of speakers an event can have at any one time, and so shouldn’t that bring in more registrations? That’s a tough argument for me to accept though; the economics of conferences tend to stink anyway, so why not experiment with different formats? What’s more, the high price-tagof “all social capital” events like Opportunity Collaboration or “all keynote” performances like Pop!Tech and TED would seem to undermine it.
I think the inevitable thrust is that more and more, what we now call an “unconference” will increasingly just be what we think of as a conference. Sure there will be experiments with different formats that involve various levels of participation, but at the end of the day, I think that models that aren’t rooted in the obliteration of conference hierarchy and the recognition that people go to events to find other people are living on borrowed time.
