Disrupting the Conference Business

September 23, 2011

One of the interesting things about the BIF conference is that all the speakers are charged with telling a personal story. The idea is that they don’t trot out their usual Powerpoint presentation, but instead give the audience a glimpse into their personal life and their world, and thus afford us with a more intimate impression of their work. When this works, it can be amazingly powerful. When it doesn’t, it’s kind of awkward.

One person who rarely sticks with a script is Richard Saul Wurman (above), prolific author and cranky founder of TED, who seems to spend much of his time complaining about the rigid 18-minute format made famous by TED Talks and now apparently the standard fare of conferences everywhere. He is right that the setup is feeling a little tired, but as many of the BIF attendees reminded me, they weren’t really there for the presentations anyway. They were there for the breaks, the networking, the personal connections and conversations. The presentations were almost an aside. Which is a bit depressing for conference organizers*, but promising for Wurman’s next initiative. As he described it, www.www will be a meeting like no other:

There are no presentations, no schedule, no Powerpoint, no Keynote, no films, photographs or slides. There’s no schedule because I’ll let people talk till I get bored and then I’ll pull them. (And I have a low attention span.) I won’t not sell any tickets. And nobody can come.

Essentially, it’ll be Wurman and 100 of his pals (and as he so eloquently put it, “I know fucking everybody”) talking about a particular topic for a certain amount of time. The “intellectual jazz” will be filmed in black and white, and then later released as an interactive app. ”I’m terrified,” said a coy Wurman, looking absolutely nothing of the sort. ”I don’t know if I can pull it off.” And while a gathering of 100 bigwigs in some ways sounds like the worst kind of elitist horror show, I actually found myself rooting for him. I mean, the world needs contrarians, and Wurman sure is one of them.

[Photograph: Stephanie Ewens/BIF]

*I was thinking about this some more, and in fact this shift in dynamic also signals a shift in priorities for conference organizers, who are now on the hook for providing high quality video of an event’s presentations that can live on online forever. So not only are conference attendees not really there for the presentations, but often the speakers aren’t either. I was at an event where a speaker suddenly stopped mid-sentence, said “let me do that again” and started that section of her presentation again. A pretty weird experience to watch live, but she was totally wrapped up in how she’d come across to a potential audience of millions and not at all thinking about those people in the room actually watching her in the moment. It’s an interesting shift, for sure.

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