danah boyd: "I had to figure out how to cut my 30 minute talk to 15 on the fly on stage and i feel like i wasn't as clear as i wanted to be... It was a sea of middle-aged white men dressed in business casual. After 4 days in Paris (a surprisingly diverse city), this was a complete shock. And i thought that American conferences were homogeneous! The ever-present press also meant that it was really hard to just hang out and catch up with people that i knew." 
Le Web 3: Interview with a LesBian 
Madge Weinstein over at Yeast Radio has an interview with me about Le Web 3. I hope you enjoy the sounds of Madge taking a dump and washing her vagina during the interview. 
It was a tough interview - I usually have to work hard to stifle my guffaws while listening to Yeast on the train - I had to work much harder when it was on Skype. Still, it's all pretty tame compared to Cheryl.
Tags: leweb3, yeast, madge weinstein, yeast radio, podcast
Ground rules for running a conference
If I were organising a conference, I'd lay out these as my guiding principles:
1. Attendees are entrusting us with the only resource that is still not a commodity: time and attention. Don't waste an ounce of those.
2. A conference without a conversation is an MP3 file without timeshifting.
3. Networking opportunities in the foyer do not excuse bad content in the auditorium.
4. Advertise clearly who the conference is aimed at, otherwise you'll end up with a lot of people who don't want to be there (and those people may have blogs).
5. Make explicitly clear on the website before a conference happens who is speaking or on panels - and why. And "because they've paid us" is not a good reason why.
6. No press desks, no press badges, no special treatment for the media at all. Professional journalists attend on the same terms as anybody else.
7. Listen to the audience. No, strike that. Listen to the participants. If they've paid for a ticket, you really, really need to listen to them. Do so before, during and after the event - online and offline. And don't just listen. Respond.
8. If they are unhappy, apologise and refund their tickets.
9. Cut the goddamn music - this is a conference, not a nightclub. We don't need pounding dance music if the person is interesting.
10. No adverts on stage - no sponsor logos, no ads on the video. None of that is relevant. If you have sponsors, keep them out of the auditorium.
11. Advertise the language up front and stick to it. Paying for a ticket only to find people speaking a language that you don't is not acceptable.
12. Consider scrapping the whole conference thing and just run an unconference instead, like BarCamp or PodCamp or BloggerCon.
Tags: conferences, conference planning, leweb3, participation, unconference, barcamp, bloggercon, podcamp
Le Web 3: Bruce Sterling weighs in
Bruce Sterling has weighed in calling our reaction to the politicians "burning contempt".
It was not. I would have loved to have had a conversation with Sarkozy. But conversation is precisely what we did not get.
We got a big stage managed show with politicians displacing more interesting speakers.
The politicians is just one of the numerous things that sucked about Le Web. See my previous entry, "Ground rules for running a conference" for a full list of the ways that the conference could have been improved.
The presence of the politicians on their own was not the problem - the hypocrisy of shipping these politicians in to impress the media, while still insisting that it was the bloggers who were running the game - that's what was annoying.
As was the condescending "close your laptops, someone important is here". Saying "you can't blog" is a way of saying "take all the rough edges out of online culture to impress this guy in a suit". Sorry, but that doesn't fly with me, especially after paying a fair whack of money to attend this conference.
I said it on Yeast Radio yesterday, and I'll say it again today - imagine if Nancy Pelosi and Rick Santorum turned up at The Future of Web Apps in San Francisco, and the schedule was ripped to pieces and the few interesting people on the schedule were bumped or had to cut their talks in half to make way for a political stump speech. Would that piss you off? Add to the fact that half of the people weren't French citizens and you see why there is a reaction.
Again, the politicians was the straw that broke the camels back. We had to react in the way we did, otherwise this would have been ignored. If our reaction helps to make conferences more interesting in the future, then the aim will have been achieved.
Tags: leweb3, bruce sterling, brucesterling
