Jeff Jarvis on Revolutionizing the Conference Business

Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine, wants to revamp the conference business, because we pay too much to get too little.

[from Exploding the conference business by Jeff Jarvis]

Too many conferences suck. They’re too expensive. They are filled with boring panels. They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don’t capture the expertise of the crowd. They enrich the organizers at the cost of both the “talent” and the “audience” (a distinction that is usually random, meaningless, and essentially insulting). They are filled with commercial pitches. The large-scale conferences are too obvious; the high-end conferences are too often too safe. There are exceptions and conferences I do like attending because of the people they attract or because they are provocative. But often, the problem is that the interests of those who make conferences work — the people who fill it — are not aligned with the interests of the money behind conferences — the organizers and sponsors.



The conference business is ripe for revolution. If newspapers, TV, magazines, books, reference works, telecommunications, entertainment, retail, real estate, recruiting, and countless other industries are exploding thanks to the internet and the direct connections it enables, then so should conferences. Why shouldn’t we organize our own better conferences on our own terms?

He dissects the finances of a typical conference, and makes a case for speakers getting a piece of the game — which some high-flying keynoters may get, but the majority of speakers do not. But that is just one slice of his argument, and not the center of it. A redistribution of the income is not what Jeff is calling for: he wants something more radical.

Although Jeff doesn’t use disintermediation to describe what he intends, he does suggest that the unconference may be the answer, like the various “camps” that have sprung up organically as an abreaction to conference doldrums and excesses, such as last fall’s BarCamp and TagCamp, and the upcoming MashupCamp.

[…]

The emerging Camp model has several parts, but basically can be thought of as an ‘open source’ conference model:

• low-cost or no-cost, subsidized by various sponsors, explicitly based on a non-profit mindset.
  
  
• the principle that all attendees can be presenters if they want to be: a self-selection process, rather than a centrally controlled program.
  
  
• self-organization by an ad hoc group of organizers who are not in the business of running conferences.
  
  
• tightly focused agenda, on a well-defined topic of interest to those involved.

[…]

Just as tech conferences are rebounding, based on a dynamic period of investment and innovation, we will see the emergence of very new, very different approaches to what a conference is supposed to be, what it is supposed to deliver, and how we will measure the value and success of conferences as a whole, and individually.