

Ask HN: Who are the conference and event organizer thought leaders? - coreymaass

I run a meetup and am organizing a conference. I'm trying to learn all there is about putting on events, but can't find much beyond wedding planning. Are there blogs? Books? Guides out there teaching you how to throw amazing events?<p>Also, if you organize events, I'd love to speak with you about it. Please get in touch!
======
jamesbritt
I've organized, or helped organize, a number of events in the Phoenix area as
well as having been on some conference advisory boards.

You have to decide what the point of your event is before figuring out how to
organize it.

I'm big on serendipity and leaving room for the unplanned.

For example:
[http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=afc025...](http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=afc025f2-d3ea-41ee-a22a-e84996349960)

Note the difference.

Broadly speaking, there are some people who see conferences as big classrooms.
They go to learn about specific technologies. On the other hand are people who
see conferences as opportunities to be exposed to new people and ideas. They
aren't quite sure what they'll learn, but expect (or hope) it to be
interesting and valuable.

I'm in the latter group and organize events in that direction.

I push for having more, but shorter, presentations (20 minutes is plenty of
time to do a brain dump on people before they go off into twitterland or the
IRC back channel). Diversity of topics. Avoid talks on topics that are already
easily discoverable and done to death. Decent breaks during the day. Room for
people to hang out during talks without disrupting speakers. A hack space.
Good wifi. And no goddamn keynote speakers unless your conference lasts more
than five days.

Also, no re-runs. There are some speakers who seem to go on tour, giving
essentially the same talk at multiple conferences. Most of the time they are
recorded, so folks can watch the video afterwards. There is so much
interesting stuff going on that there is near-zero value to having people
repeat a talk; favor the new ideas and new presentations.

Some links that might be of interest:

[http://scripting.com/stories/2008/06/22/rethinkingTheConfere...](http://scripting.com/stories/2008/06/22/rethinkingTheConference.html)

<http://www.unconference.info/>

<http://www.unconference.net/tag/creating-space/>

For me a conference is a way to trick people into getting off their asses and
into the same general physical space to enable chance encounters, the
collision of ideas, and ad hoc collaboration.

~~~
coreymaass
Thanks, James. Some really good points. The unconference book looks like a
great resource. It's apparent that people are shaking up the idea of the
conference - are there specific people who you read, or subscribe to? Who's
blogging regularly about this?

~~~
jamesbritt
" are there specific people who you read, or subscribe to? Who's blogging
regularly about this?"

I've been too busy lately to be as actively involved in organizing events as I
used to, and I'm not up on what's current. I had some sites bookmarked and did
a bit of searching.

But I think if you google around for "barcamp" and "unconference" you'll get a
feel for who knows what, and then you can tweak the recipe to sit the kind of
event you want.

