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10 Top Tips for Unplanning the Perfect Unconference

What's the secret of some of the unconferences in recent years that have had educators and learners excited, enthralled and changing their ways of working and thinking? Well, I'm not sure there is a secret per se, but having unplanned a good dozen or so unconferences and visited a score more there are some things that keep cropping up from which we can all learn.

As we head hurtling towards an online-offline unconference at the Scottish Learning Festival, that is, TeachMeet07 on the evening of September 19th (sign up now!), I've also been preparing some of the ground for another year of TeachMeet Roadshows in East Lothian, informal, funky training events which have already proven highly successful in getting some swift and sustained adoption of new technologies in our classrooms. Both use the following ten top tips.
 
 

1. Get started on your (cool) terms
   "Right, if I can have your attention please. Just a minute. Great. Now, I would like to introduce to you..."... Oh dear. We all know it. It's like being back in the rows at school, waiting to see someone very important attempt to hold our attention for an hour with more bullets than you could point at the Sundance Kid and that drawl we remember from the adults in Charlie Brown (it was actually a trombone, did you know?).
   
   If you want people's attention before you get started proper, don't let someone else bring you down before you even get started, and don't start by effectively telling off your participants. Learn from the way jazz musicians get started. Make the opening to the presentation enticing, using some video or the cadence to some quieter musak you've cued up to grab attention or mark the beginning of your spot.
    
    
2. Conference participants, not bystanders
   From the weeks before the conference even takes place get your attendees to suggest topics, spread the word and market the conference to their friends, by displaying a logo or taking part in Facebook groups, for example.
   
   The worst thing that can happen for a conference or training event is for people to go home actively disagreeing with what one (or all) the presenters had to say. You've got to provide an opportunity for people to make their views known and give the presenters a fighting chance of bringing them around.
   
   Q&A is one way to do this but people haven't really had time to digest and come up with a good question. By far the best thing to do is get people up presenting themselves. Back-to-back shorter presentations of soapboxes are often entertaining, always interesting given the divergent views and let people get it off their chest. It also opens up the conversations in the more informal parts of the conference, since people know who they want to go to talk to.
    
    
3. Make the conference the coffee break
   We all know the best parts of conferences are, of course, the coffee breaks and social events, where you get a chance to pore over someone's laptop for 15 minutes and learn one new really cool thing you can actually use, have late-night discussions over serious stuff, helped along by a few drops of amber. Why not just make this the conference itself? Provide coffee and tea all day long, lots of muffins and biscuits like they did at Reboot and, even better, open a bar like we do at BarCamp.
    
    
4. Flat pack your conference
   Let people make up their own conference. One of my favourite parts of BarCampScotland and Reboot9.0 were the large blank sheets of paper as you walked in - the participants plan what they want to hear and when, by putting up what they are going to talk about next to a time and a location in the venue. Make sure you offer a number of large, medium and small rooms for the large, medium and small egos ;-)
    
    
5. Don't hold yourself to one sponsor
   A good unconference does cost some money although if everyone pulls in it needn't cost a fortune: food, drink, space, projection facilities, audio visuals, publicity beyond the web... Getting a good sponsor might seem the answer to your dreams, but it might end up being a noose around your neck. Do not take all the funding from one place, and then be held to their publicity, their terms and their way of doing things. Some BarCamps put an upper limit of £150 ($300) per contribution to have a feast of many, not a gathering for one. Once you've had a successful event or two under your belt the sponsors will come to you.
    
    
6. Encourage speaking at the back of the class
   It's cool to have a place where people can extend the discussion beyond whatever the presentation is about. This is called a backchannel. You can use a blog set up to receive mobile phone messages, but it's easier to get everyone onto a Jaiku channel, or display messages left by people from the mobiles or computers on Twitter (Twittercamp is lovely to do this).
   
   At LTS, because the digital savvy of many attendees at the Learning Festival won't stretch to Twitter, we've set up our own text service, for launch on Sept 7 or thereabouts, which will display comments on keynotes under the blog posts that talk about them. Clever, huh?
   
   In some conferences it's displayed behind the speakers. Much better, in my opinion for what it's worth, is to equip the stage with a large monitor so that speakers can take a peak and have a chance to respond to criticisms or misunderstandings before they're picked up by too many other people. Presenters also need to be aware that there is a public backchannel in the first place.
    
    
7. May the wifi be with you
   You need wifi. Ideally you have electricity in abundance, too, for bloggers to blog, photographers to Flickr and for the backchannel to survive. Good wifi is a must, but make sure everyone knows about it so that they actually bring their laptops and cameras.
    
    
8. Tag, tag, tag - and tell people about it
   Make sure that everyone coming to the conference, everyone who wanted to and couldn't and all the major events sites (e.g. Upcoming.org) know what the conference tag is, otherwise all that online coverage is going to be lost. Tags need to be short, memorable and mean something to the people there.
    
    
9. Cover the event yourself - but get young people to do it
   At every nearly every conference I organise I make sure that I have some young people producing the podcasts, the videos or some blogging. This isn't because I want cheap labour, it's because of the angle they take on it and what they are able to contribute in this way to the arguments given in the conference. Their legacy is also far more long-lasting than that of the adult participants this way :-)
    
    
10. Don't give a giveaway
    People increasingly don't need a memory pen, a linen bag, a pen, a pad (they're blogging, remember)... What's more, people are beginning to become more conscious of the environmental impact of all those wasted products and paper. Far better to make your giveaway on the web or via Bluetooth to people's mobile phones.

Here are some more hints and tips for budding unconferencers:

• Different types of unconference
• Some photos from BarCampScotland that give some clues
• The Unconference Blog
• Open Space Events
• What is speed geeking?
• The BarCamp way
• The BloggerCon way
• ...and, of course, Wikipedia

and some ideas for those wanting to create education training events around the same ideals:

• TeachMeet07
• TeachMeet Roadshows

Loic's got comment trouble

Loic Le Meur's French blog is an unturned stone for many/most of the US-centric bloggers in the tech /new media industry. If they were to take a look they would see a disastrous case of "victim of its own success".

Since Loic's political outing last year (320 comments) and continued appearances on the French box about politics, his blog conversations have been taken over by extreme political views - even the centrists have gone all extreme in the comments of each post. For example, this anodyne tip-off about the French language version of The World Is Flat quickly becomes a political tirade from all sides (despite my considered offerings in the first comment ;-)

Loic's aware of the problem but doesn't quite know what to do: leave the comments on and have a conversation (shouting match?) of sorts, or moderate every comment and never get any of the day job done, or remove comments altogether?

It strikes me that Loic's problem is one faced by educators who blog every day of the week.

Take a look and give your opinion: what would you do? (You might as well leave the comment here since a) Loic's blog is in French, and b) your comment will get lost in the other hundred or so per post).

Blogs are a waste of time - no-one blogging by 2010?

There have been numerous news and blog reports on the research which lets us know that we are all wasting our time - blogging is dead, much like blog conferences and the guys who run the blog companies already appear to be ;-)

Balderdash and piffle.

The Gartner research is absolutely right that the number of blogs will level off and those being written on a regular basis will actually fall. To assume otherwise assumes that everyone has something worthwhile to say and, if you've ever been to a typical board meeting, you'll know that is not true ;-)

But that doesn't mean much. Just last week Hans Rosling was telling us that the world's population will be leveling off at around 9-10 billion by 2050, but something tells me that we won't all stop reproducing because, according to research, no-one else is.

Also, the influence of blogs and their importance to the public is only growing, with no signs of plateauing any time soon. Steve Rubel's post has some interesting stats and analysis on this, but more hard copy has been produced in the past month by IPSOS.

Fewer people might be writing blogs, but it seems more of us will be reading them and less aware of a distinction between blogs and websites the way we used to make them back in 2006 - can you imagine not being able to write on that organisation's homepage?!

Update: Really on a downturn or do European organisations just not understand the web?

Dave Weinberger@LeWeb3 and LTS's Connected Magazine

As I was waiting for my massage at work today I spotted that Dave Weinberger had written in Connected 16, available as a PDF (with 'active links', it says), pp28-29. It's a very live webby edition with a retort of the Toxic Childhood thesis from me and an insight into what we are doing with gaming for learning from Derek. Enjoy a read before the hols kick in.

Last week at LeWeb3 Dave not only spoke superbly on Blogging for Democracy but also provided welcoming and entertaining company for breakfast and cheese-laden lunch throughout the conference (he toddled over having overheard Jonas and I getting loud and enthusiastic about MMORPGs and learning and scandal and stuff).

His LeWeb3 Blogging for Democracy talk was an ideal compliment to the article I spotted this morning, the article being based on the "what is knowledge nowadays" theses in Everything is Miscellaneous (you can hear the mp3 of the talk) which I blogged about at the time.

He used the Howard Dean election story to get us started, as an example of how the hierarchy of communications had, by this point, been thrown onto its head. The politician and the PR/marketing gurus were no longer in charge of a message which they could massage, but partners in creating messages with the voters - their 'users', if you will. Dean got hat. By embracing this reversal of hierarchy (and really believing in it, not thinking they could play it) Dean was more in touch than any of his competitors. He went from bottom of the pile to a real Democratic contender for the presidency.

Cut to the way some 'democracy engines' operate. Newspapers and government websites for example. The net works on the principle of links, those little blue underlined fragments of generosity, where one person gives attention to another - "leave my site, go and see them; no really, I don't want you to stay here; this person has something far more worthwhile to say on the matter".

But that doesn't count for most Government and mainstream media sites. What they have to say, it would appear, is more important than what any blogger might produce. Weinberger's own example is from the New York Times. Other than ads, there are only four links on the homepage example we are shown, and they point to other pages in the NYTimes website. Taking a look at some random pages of our own Government sponsored websites we're much the same, except for the MFLE where we have made an effort and written in our policies to constantly link out of the site (we get far more traffic in return, too).

The next time someone says "bloggers are just an introverted bunch of egos who don't care what other people think": think again. Bloggers are the most generous around, if they are worth anything. Your average blog post links to several different individuals. Some of the richest posts - like this one, he said self-referetially - link to fifty or more.

The thing here is that the owners of information these days no longer have the right to be the owners of its distribution. Users can and do now sort information on the way out of the information silo rather than experts attempting to sort a growing mass on the way in - why should I choose which bloggers to include in a list of educational bloggers when you can do it yourself to your tastes?

At the end of the day today's advancement is not going to be through knowing loads of stuff - loads of stuff can be found on demand on the net using wikipedia and the many many other tools out there. What is important is finding information quickly, making these links between information, learning to synthesise, as Dan Pink advocates in A Whole New Mind, and then sharing that as a next step on from the raw product.

If we permit ourselves to do it - 'we' being bloggers, teachers, government organisations, learning organisations, businesses, individuals - we can create a meaningful infrastructure of links - an infrastructure of meaning. It can grow from us if organisations who think they know better stop and think before trying to impose taxonomies that force information onto one shelf at a time. The whole 'net neutrality' debate in US politics is a back hander as elites attempt to "make the internet better". It's quite telling, in fact, that today the Wikipedia entry for net neutrality is headed by the message: "the neutrality of this article is disputed". Who decides?

People are ready to get information on the shelf we want it to be on. Keeping those reins on us is only serving a false lesson - let us get out onto that road.

Thanks to Heiko for the top image

Windows Vista@LeWeb3

I felt very fortunate to get a sneak preview of Windows Vista and to be invited on to their trial programme for it, until the techie boys at LTS (namely one of the most helpful guys I know) informed me they've been playing with it for months. Bah humbug. I still felt a tingle of excitement when I saw it in Paris.

My advice for any Local Authority thinking of a refresh in the next year or so - hang on. It's worth it.

Kris Hoet from Microsoft Europe likes bloggers a lot, being one himself, and took me for a 40 minute spin of some of the features. Basically, Vista will turn PCs into Macs. Almost ;-) I loved the way you can flick through the windows open on the PC à la iTunes (see the picture) and the animated open and close of windows is similar to the way some of the dashboard functions on the Mac work. Oh, and it has it's own sort of pop out dashboard as well with all your useful bits ready for action.

Best of all, though, on a school organisational note, is the ability to tag files so that you can find them even more easily in the Spotlight-like 'live' search (as you type each letter of what you're looking for it updates the list of found files instantly - good, I presume, for those who do not touch type).

The kind of media centre, with integrated photos, music, video and so on will appeal to the family and granny market for all those holiday snaps and rips of the iLife package nicely, getting rid of some of its inefficiencies (changing music on a slideshow is a doddle).

At the rate I'm going through Macs (no. 1, no. 2 and no. 3 [no. 4 making funny hard disk noises already]) I might well consider getting a PC with Vista on board once they are released. Rick has some things to say on what could be better (the automatic updates are nice but seem a little late in the day) but overall, I've been impressed by Gates and co. this time.

@LeWeb3: SecondLife or NoLife?

Glenn Fisher, the Marketing Director at Linden Lab, talked about how SecondLife's 3D world helps create stronger communities than those of the traditional 2D variety, but his talk has turned me 180 degrees in my own hopes of using SecondLife as an educational tool.

He quoted some research that showed the distances avatars (people's online 3D images) stood apart in SecondLife was identical to the distances humans stood apart in real life. This made people more likely, he suggested, to create a genuine community, a genuine market and economy, where individuals could create goods for sale - this includes the kids we teach, in theory.

This month marks the 2 millionth SecondLifer with over 10 million objects created in the world, and around 900 events held there every day, including university classes and rock concerts. There are over 7000 companies plying their wares there, too, turning over around $87 million dollars this year. 43% of Second Life members are women but the median age is 32 - not exactly the younger end of the internet market, is it?

But don't let these figures tempt you into believing that SecondLife is the next place we as educators should concentrate our efforts. Of those 2 million only about a third, it would appear, will have interacted in the past week. For me, that's not highly sticky and certainly not as sticky as podcasting production, say, is for our kids. Or sharing photostories, films, animations, blog posts, opinions... the stuff some of us have been doing for years.

So far the offerings in SecondLife, which crashes in the simplest of scenarios, even when it's the Marketing Director having a play around, are nothing short of an inefficient mirror of what we have at reasonably good quality and download speed on the web.

As some educators seem to get excited about being able to view blogs, YouTube videos and PDFs in a jerky, boxy environment, I just want to get hold of that information quickly, assess its usefulness, bookmark it or throw it away. If SecondLife is going to be nothing but a really slow filing cabinet that often falls over, then please, no, take it away...

Better still, if I want to play a  game I'll go online and find that or, better still, use my xBox to play with folk from around the world without jerking around every time I want to move. At a push, the one big difference between SecondLife and World of Warcraft is that I'd probably be more likely to go for fun and play in WoW than SL. In WoW I am playing a game with real human interactions and the presence of a learning environment is happily missing ;-) Kids get stuck on WoW because they can, as Jonas says, allow them to be someone they are not - and how many kids wish they could be something else than the 'pain in the neck', the 'weak learner' or 'quiet child' of the classroom?

While I have been advocating that we need to appreciate changing viewpoints of the worlds we live in (virtual and offline) and consolidate these viewpoints in the way we teach and learn, I'm not sure SecondLife is yet in that vocabulary as a specific platform. I would love to hear more about what Wim Veen had to say about SecondLife in particular in his talk on the matter last week.

In the meantime, Jonas sums up why SecondLife as an educational tool is perhaps more out of place than we have first thought. I've paraphrased - read all of his post:

• Second Life is not a game in that it does not have environmental challenges and progress within its ecosystem.

• which follows - Second Life can not and won’t have the retention and draw games like Halo2, World of Warcraft, DaoC, and others have. Frankly, I believe for a glorified 3D chat system with build-your-own backend, SL isn’t all that bad.

• Second Life lacks internal rules and controls which will come back to bite Linden and its users in the hiney. Already we see issues of disappearing (expensive) virtual property and Linden Labs disclaiming any and all responsibility to preserve or restore such property, citing the “we just run the servers” excuse.

• which introduces a host of legal issues with regards to property, ownership, and liability.

More over on the blog of Jonas Luster - cool guy, policeman, blogger, gamer

Blyk - free mobile calls for all

Blyk is a fascinating company started by ex-Nokia man Marko Ahtisaari. He currently advises Fon, the service which allows you to offer some of your home or business wifi to others for free in return for getting some of theirs for free when you're on your travels. The same open source connectivity is what is in store for Blyk. In presenting what he envisaged for the first pan-European free mobile phone call company he centered around five key points:

1. Reach
   Web 2.0? Think more Mobile 2.0. The increased interest in mobile technology is not just a "me-too" from the likes of this blog and LTS but a way to share education with far more people than current web-based technology can reach. For 2.0, read 2 billion people who will be equipped with mobile phones more than laptops. The action will be taking place in the Brichs countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Let's add 'S' for Scotland at the end of that.
   
2. Sometimes off
   Most people these days have trouble switching off from constant interruptions or from checking their email or web stats the minute they wake up or go to bed (ask any teenager what they like to do when they get in from school - it's not watch the TV any more, it's check to see if anyone visited the Bebo page). Blyk intend to make more use of our dead time to allow us to switch off better when we should. It's worked for me this year since using offline RSS readers and wikis, and using online mobile email and IM.
   
3. Hackability
   We're used to hacking the look of our mobile devices by adding new plastic covers and accessories. However, there's still a market for giving people the ability to hack the software on their phones. Python can be learned in an afternoon by anyone so free access to these pieces of software is next on the priority list.




4. Social primitives:
   1. The Gift: we must encourage more people to share for really free using beaming or bluetooth, giving each other 'gifts' when they are out and about... or in the classroom. An opportunity that has been around for years yet ignored by most schools.
      
   2. Photostreaming: In the same way as Flickr allows us to have a stream of photos from our friends, and news readers give us the same from our favourite blogs, mobile devices now have to build in information flows form our friends or from those geographically close to us (imagine getting the blog information from the people sitting next to ou on the train or in class without you having to know what their blog address is or what their name is, even. BTW - a McIntosh idea that, but Blyk can have it saying it's built on their shoulders ;-)
      
   3. Signaling
      Things like Jaiku need to become the norm, where you can tell that you're friends (from your contacts list) are nearby. Great for nightclubs ;-)
      
   4. Real Identity, not just online identity
      Things liked LinkedIn work on the PC but you really need them when you're out and about on your mobile.
      
5. Freedom
   What stops people from using mobiles more? Money. We need to understand the pricing of our devices. Free is a pretty easy price to understand, even for schools ;-)

I wish Marko and his colleagues the best, especially since they intend to support this through "uninstrusive advertising" (I've never seen any ads that are unintrusive). If I were a Head Teacher or Local Authority manager, though, I'd be first in line for his services.

Responding to criticism - does it have to be done quickly?

I have some real sympathy for Loic as his blogs in French and English lie relatively dormant in the nasty backlash over his over-enthusiastic over-politicisation of LeWeb3. He's in hiding. But it got me thinking about whether some of the advice he has doled out in the past, with which has made his name and his book, is more than a little hollow.

Over the past few months I've been advising LTS and East Lothian on how blog posts can be sculpted and how one might respond to criticism when it comes (and it will always come). Part of my advice is that responding quickly to a criticism in public on a blog is far more effective than deleting a negative comment, ignoring negative comment on others' blogs or hoping that it will all go away (Techcrunch have tried doing all three this week and failed). I also advise against convening meetings to decide on a course of action because, by then, it will be too late.

Some of the advice comes from Loic's pen. p.80 in Blogs pour les Pros:

Les informations circulent très vite sur les blogs. Si un blogueur donne un avis négatif important sur un produit, mieux vaut répondre avant que d'autres ne propagent l'information.

Information circulates very quickly on blogs. If a blogger gives a large negative criticism of a product it's better to respond before others start to pick up on things.

I'm not blaming Loic for reading Technorati watchlists instead of responding in haste, but his prolonged silence is leaving only his fake blog and fake conference site an audience, along with the rest of us. It also makes me wonder whether Loic, like Sarkozy, is having trouble walking the walk.

Update: Robert Scoble adds his tuppence worth, and things may begin to calm down over at Ouriel's.

Hans Rosling@LeWeb3 - it's not globalisation, it's modernisation

Hans Rosling was an inspiration online at the TED talks, but to see him do his thang offline is worth the delayed aeroplanes, the Paris metro and even the microfood buffets.

His work and his company Gapminder has evolved around turning raw information from the United Nations and other statistical organisations into some kind of knowledge which he then interprets for us in his live show, providing us with some wisdom as to how and why the world works as it does. His main thrust: we must stop thinking about globalisation and start thinking about modernisation. Globalisation, in other words, is not about America exporting what it does as the 'global' way, a preconception most of us are all but too happy to believe. It is rather about the rest of the world finding its way through simple modernisation of ideas, technology, science, design and processes.

Example: Bedrooms have not globalised, but they may have modernised. Current thinking has us believe that rich country families comprise lots of money and few kids, with poor countries creating little wealth but lots of children. It is likely, though, that by 2050 the world's population will have stabilised at 9-10 billion people but this is not through some spreading of globalisation. It is down to the modernisation of the bedroom - a Bangladeshi who has discovered the condom is more modern than Hans' Swedish grandfather who, er, hadn't.

Likewise, mortality is not down to globalisation, but modernisation. Kitchens and bathrooms have modernised to stop people getting sick and dying early.

The world, therefore, is not made up of East/West, Poor/Rich, First World/Third World. It is made up of an unmodern bottom 20%, a highly modern 20% and a cast swathe of fairly static 60%. This middle ground of 60% don't give aid or receive it - they just make do.

For me, this struck home with the average classroom. We often talk about providing extra support for the bottom 20% (the poor kids) and enjoy the [rich] contributions of those in the top 20%. But we do tend to ignore the vast swathe in the middle (rest of the world). These kids neither give aid (answers, enthusiasm, interaction, collaboration) nor receive it (teacher help, excitement, enjoyment, collaborative opportunities, partnerships, decision-making).

The same is true in organisations of any kind. There's a wee chapter on the "Bell Curve" of organisations in The Big Moo: every country, organisation, group of people is filled with a large majority stuck in the middle of a bell curve of normalness. Some people choose to sit a little behind the curve, catching up most of the time, others tend to keep ahead of the curve a little and try to innovate. But most organisations average out in averageness. The trick, it would appear, is to change the mental shift of the whole organisation (bottom, middle, top and all the bits inbetween) to make "being exceptional" a normal thing.

The consequences of potentially missing out this collectively less exceptional, normal 80% who just "make do" are grave. Just take a look at your own family tree. Hans did (or click the picture to the left to enlarge in a new window). His Great-Grandmother was on a health and progress rate similar to current day Sierra Leone. By the time his grandmother was born the socio-economic situation of this average Swede was equivalent to current day Mozambique. His mother's situation was close to that of Egypt while he felt very much the Mexican of the family. His daughter's situation at birth would resemble current day Chile and his Grand-daughter will probably be around the same socio-economic situation of Singapore.

By ignoring the language, culture and opportunity that lies in the countries of our poorest neighbours now we are only setting ourselves up for a fall. In most of these countries, talk of the net and social media providing democracy and free speech for citizens comes a long second behind health, education, micro-credits and, oh, human rights. Micro-loans popped up a lot during LeWeb3, in fact, as a way of letting entrepreunerial spirit and autonomy make individuals, cities and countries grow faster and healthily.

The same is true, I believe, in our organisations and schools. Most of our schools, though, have the basics and the internet is, for me, the next basic commodity this 80% need to grasp. It's not as a means to 'receive aid', though, through Google searches. The 'micro-loan' we can give our teachers and students is to show them how to take control of the web by publishing on it, becoming autonomous in their learning and finding their way in the world without dependency on others. Becoming exceptional, in other words.

So what can we do about it? Well, for starters Rosling believes, universities should be encouraged to put their lectures on YouTube and compete for the attention of these countries, and further the education in these countries while also increasing demand for information through internet. By providing the need for internet market forces will bring internet prices down to prices more similar to Vietnam prices (a few cents an hour). With more internet more citizens can learn more for free etc etc etc

Pavements are free to use in most countries, so why not make "intellectual pavements" to bring skilled people to our industries?

Hans believes we must challenge closed learning environments, and let them instead be open and competitive. I like the idea but wonder where national and local interests lie in most countries, especially those who feel they are currently occupying the 20% of exceptional education systems (Scotland included?). Barely a year ago I was struggling with some local authorities to get material which already existed out into the open market. If the material is already there, or in digestible formats, why should it be locked away and not benefit the wider, global - modernising - community? The pay-off for the education system that harnesses the power of its professionals is significant: higher value given to teachers' and students' work measurable in quantitative (hits) and qualitative (comments) ways; more exporting of knowledge, expertise and workmanship; more importing of students to our universities and schools.

There are huge parallels between modernisation of our planet, the sharing of our education with the rest of our planet and the survival of our planet. Without all three I believe our very future here is under threat. What can Scotland do to start modernising and not globalising? What can your country do?

LeWeb3: Bon, Mauvais, Bon, Mauvais

I have a laptop on loan from the Lady Wife at the moment and aim to spend this morning cogitating and digesting the week's conference in Paris, LeWeb3. While I've not been able to live-blog things the upside is that I have had plenty of time to think without distraction, and this poster snapped on the way home at Charles de Gaulle airport kind of describes how I feel about the whole LeWeb3 debacle: bon, mauvais, bon, mauvais.

The Technorati LeWeb3 stream will give you a picture of most people's distaste for Loic's last minute programme changing and political interventions. While last year's conference got a couple of folk into a little live-on-stage-embarrassment, this year's conference has even got one Techcrunch writer sacked. After Loic's open letter to the three French presidential candidates on Monday and Shimon Peres' demand to speak on Tuesday morning most people felt resentment that the planned programme had been condensed and moved about. The startups hadn't even been informed and continue to try to pitch to no-one.

Here are a few of my own, hopefully constructive points. They will put you guys in the picture of my mood, for sure, but might help us have a bit of a conversation (or thought, at least) of the planning of events and the potential role of politicians in conferences.

My stars:

• Shimon Peres was really very interesting and quite inspiring as a speaker. Despite anything he has done in the past his message was a worthwhile one. It would have been more interesting, perhaps, to have had him instead of or along with the predictably ropey political panel of bloggers. It would have been nice just to know in advance that he was going to swallow up the lion's share of the morning. (see my pics here)
• I was pleased at being able to push the traditional media about and take some great political speaker photos with no heavies relegating me back to my plebian seat. Was this a sign of the influence of the blogosphere on traditional body guarding ;-)
• While we were unexpectedly made a prime target for terrorists on Tuesday (thanks, Loic ;-) the security that the French and Israelis provided seemed robust, but...

My wishes:

• The attendance at the conference started out at 1000, but finished by Loic's own admission at 1300. I bumped into loads of French businessmen and bloggers who had not paid entry to the event and were not contributing to it in anyway.
• I don't like paying 400 euros (some paid 600) for my programme to be rushed, speakers perturbed and moved about. While speakers and panels were cut off in their prime, further questions for the excellent Hans Rosling were cut short 'to stay on target' and Danah Boyd - the reason I came to LeWeb3, was cut from 30 minutes to 15, Peres, Bayrou and Sarkozy went well over the '15 minutes' mentioned in the open letter (more like two hours between them). I also didn't appreciate the hustle and bustle from the packs of media who materialised stage right during other people's panels and presentations - really distracting.
  
  
• This was a conference about the Long Tail as much as the big hits. Why did France's number two politician, Sarkozy, not even take questions? His script had been prepared by some civil servant that morning, he hadn't had time to read over it (he was leaning over his text and struggling with some of the syntax) and the content was entirely about France and French politics. At worst, LeWeb3 was supposed to be a European conference. At best, it was to be a flattened world experience. In the end, it was a French Party Political broadcast, and not a particularly good one since Sarko really doesn't get what the web is about, his speech full of contradictions. We in the room lent kudos to the candidates' PR and that of Loic, whose ambitions are clearly beyond SixApart, LeWeb3 and us. Loic doesn't need to do this with his consitituents, but in trying to do so has put our backs up.
• Bayrou, another centre-right presidential hopeful (there was no-one from the Left, Segolene Royale being busy with her constituents), was unscripted, took questions and very sharp on the ball. However, it was the translator, not our host Loic, who insisted that the audience ask questions, not the media mandarin in charge of Europe 1 radio station who had forced himself on stage into a seat and grabbed a microphone. It was Loic who, each time, gave first questions to the TV media. Thank goodness, again, that others on stage and the audience clapped over any second attempts to take our time away with further questions.

Over this morning I'll be posting my thoughts only on the things I found really useful and helpful, and which have some leaning on education or the way our organisations work. That means, ironically, that I'll be missing out any reference to the Education 2.0 panel (two guys who were so painfully boring and off the ball that I left before the end).

This weekend's positive posts will include:

• The superb Hans Rosling and why we need to stop thinking globalisation and start thinking modernisation
• The genial Danah Boyd on why kids [heart] MySpace
• The switched on and tagged up Dave Weinberger on French cheese, hotel breakfasts and how to run our internet for our democracy
• Blyk, the company that will start offering free mobile phone use to kids
• Gil Penchina from Wikio and Ross Mayfield from Socialtext on why open source and open code is the only way to go [and the only way software businesses will make money]
• More from Shimon Peres
• Hossain Derakhshan from Iran on what internet filtering really is (you thought Websense in your school was bad, you should see Websense in Iran - no, really, I'm not kidding)

You can pop back today and over the weekend to get all this or, even better, learn how to subscribe to these posts so that in three clicks you don't miss a thing. Enjoy!