One of the first two people I introduced myself to at the Third Coast PRX party last evening is an intern with the festival, Ben.  He knew about me.  I had contacted the festival from the airport in Edmonton to tell them that I was delayed and still coming.  Apparently word got out about my travel ordeal and my determination to get to the conference.

Ben told me that I’m one of two Canadians that met with in-flight emergencies en route to Third Coast.  I didn’t get all of the details on the other attendee.  It sounded like there was another passenger on his flight that had a medical emergency requiring the pilot to land the plane for medical care.

The PRX party was a unique experience for me.  I went in cold.  I don’t know anyone here.  And, because most of the people at the conference are NPR-connected somehow, I don’t even know their names.  And, with the exception of the people who know about my travel story, noone knows me from a hole in the ground.  That’s quite a difference from all of the social media conferences I attend.  In fact, I heard very little social media talk last night.

Having said that, I was introduced to Sean Cole who appeared on CBC’s The Current earlier this year with a piece he did on wanting to move from the United States to Canada.  It was an amazing documentary and Sean and I corresponded after the piece aired.  During our conversation, Sean told me that there are other Canadians at the conference including Jowi Taylor who I did some work for (see Six String Nation) and others that I’m not familiar with.

Later in the evening I met Sarah Boothroyd.  She works for Carleton University, just a twenty-minute walk from my house.

I feel ripped off that I missed so many great sessions yesterday including How to Make Good Radio When You Don’t Have Any Time or Good Tape, Noah’s “The Classics” and Caging Chaos: How to Produce Radio Stories That Aren’t Exactly Stories.  And, my audio doctor session, of course.

I’m looking forward to maximizing my day today, learning as much as I can possibly take in and meeting as many people as I can — cementing the real-life friendships that you don’t get to experience by friending a disembodied person in your favourite social media tool.

Photo: http://thirdcoastfestival.org/annual_conference.asp

There’s a wave of social media events and conferences coming up that I’ll be attending and I encourage you to attend, as well.

Niagara on the Lake Podcasting and Social Media Meetup (tag: notl2008) is a hybrid meetup and conference taking place August 16 (yes, next week!) at the Prince of Whales Hotel in Niagara on the Lake. The event is being spearheaded by John Meadows and Keith Burtis, both of whom hope that this is the event that crosses the line from being a geeks-only event to one that includes the Social Media Widows and Orphans. While I’ve heard that one is in the works, a schedule of family-focused activites has not yet been published. The speaker schedule is available on the site as is a great promo by StevieZ.

The second PodCamp Philly (tag: podcampphilly) is happening September 6 and 7 at Temple University in Philadelphia. Lead organizer, Whitney Hoffman, has a history of organizing events that foster both an amazing sense of community and an environment that gets people thinking and talking about the medium and related opportunities. Last year’s conference had a great educational program and this year’s appears to be building on that success. SearchCamp is new for the 2008 edition of PodCamp Philly. SearchCamp is a series of sessions designed for people interested in seach engine marketing.

If PodCamp Montreal (tag: podcampmtl) isn’t the first ever officially bilingual PodCamp, it’s certainly one of the very few. That’s right, PodCamp makes its first appearance in La Belle Province September 20 and 21 at the University of Montreal’s Design Pavillion (Pavillion de Design de l’UQAM). The posts on the PodCamp Montreal website are all bilingual (French first, then English) and there will be separate tracks for French and English sessions at the event. Despite the segregation of the sessions by language, I hope that there’s a good amount of mingling between languages and cultures; both have a lot to learn from each other. If the organizing committee is any indication, this is going to be an incredible event.

I’m also considering going to Third Coast for the first time, this year. I’ve heard that it’s a religious experience for producer-geeks like me.

I enlisted the help of some friends to share experiences and ideas related to conference and unconference organizing. The hope is to kick off a conversation in which everyone — conference organizers, sponsors, participants, vendors, etc… — contributes and makes future events more smooth, successful and creative.

Contributors

• Dave Delaney
• Whitney Hoffman
• Jay Moonah
• Chris Penn
• Chris Brogan
• Linda Mills

Conferences mentioned

• Podcasters Across Borders
• PodCamps: UK, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Ottawa, NYC, Boston, Philly and Toronto
• BarCamp Nashville

Participate in the conversation. Leave a comment on this post or a record a voice comment at +1.206.350.6487.

 

 Thoughts on organizing a conference (part 1?) [35:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Joel Mark Witt asked me to elaborate on my thoughts originally published in my post The future strength of PodCamp is in three verticals.

Podcasting has been around for three-and-a-half years, PodCamp for one-and-a-half. Both have acheived a certain amount of recognition and the merits of both are consistently disected and debated. I believe that the age of generalism in the podcast community is drawing to a close. PodCamp, in particular (rightly or wrongly), has been about covering as much ground as possible to appeal to as many people as possible and draw as large a crowd as possible to each event. Organizers have measured success by the number of people that register then attend and how many “Rock Stars” participate.

I believe that ship has sailed.

I believe it’s time to expore verticals — three of them.

I’ve mulled this over in my head quite a bit over the last week to further develop my thoughts on tracking and what I’ve discovered is that the three verticals that I will describe here can be used individually, in any combination or not at all. This flexibility is what makes PodCamp such a great model. What I will describe here can also be left in the hands of the community if properly communicated by the initiators of the event. In that respect, the ethos of PodCamp can continue to be central to its success.

VERTICAL EVENTS

This is something that Whitney Hoffman has been talking about for a while. Vertical events are those that cater to a specific niche, theme, demography or geography. Some PodCamps have already organized themselves around a specific theme.

PodCamp Ottawa organized itself around a theme: Welcome to Podcasting and Beyond. In fact, the event in Ottawa was structured to cater to a specific geography and achieved that goal by taking place within three weeks of its announcement. While a few people came from a two-hour drive away and one couple did a six-hour drive to attend, a majority of the nearly thirty people at the event were from the Ottawa area.

I believe that PodCampEDU was the first specifically vertical PodCamp that has taken place so far. Organized by Vivian Vasquez and Andy Bilodeau, the event focussed on the use of new and social media technologies in an educational setting. By all accounts it was a huge success and explored new possibilities with input from both educators and the social media community. Talk about potential. And because the event was vertical, it attracted a captive audience.

There are as many ideas for vertical events as there are hobbies, products, services, ideas and locations. Consider events that cater specifically to people who want to learn about the use of podcasting about (or for) broadcast media, music, writing, NGOs, public sector communications, politics, design, marketing, health, emergency services, sports, municipal government, etc… You can also structure events around specific new media skills such as being an effective host, editing, audio production, engaging an audience, etc… Bring together and include people who have different backgrounds and, automatically, it will be hard to identify who is teaching and who is learning. If you give everyone an opportunity to speak about the challenges and skills of both the traditional and modern in a specific niche, you have a success in the making.

VERTICAL TRACKS

Consider using discussion tracks for your event as a way of making it easy for event participants to find what they’re looking for. A track organizes presentations by a specific topic area in a single thread, typically in one room, for the entire event. With any luck there will be a logical flow — an arc of the story, if you like — to the track.

I recommend that the tracking system not be used to pack too many diverse topics into a single event (e.g. don’t have an event with a track for music, one for education and another for gaming). Doing so could lead to several mini-conferences within one event. It makes far more sense to use the tracking system to focus the discussions within a topic area. For example, an event that focuses on health care could have a track on legal issues, another on the impacts of institutional structure on internal and public communications, and another on audio recording and production.

Of course, there are pros and cons to organizing tracks in this manner. The pros are that people with a specific interest will be able to easily find and follow the information they need. However, we know that in new media a lot of people perform many roles requiring them to learn many skills and understand many issues (I recently heard of a large company that has a Director of New Media with no department, staff or contractors. She exists and works on her own). Events like PodCampEDU and Podcasters Across Borders address this problem by having one room for the event. The community stays in that room and the content comes to the participants thus allowing everyone to experience and participate in everything offered by the conference. Of course, that approach requires either a significant degree of community cooperation and collaboration to sequence sessions, or lead organizers that are willing to invest the time to structure the event.

VERTICAL RELATIONSHIPS

PodCamp Boston (the first one) did it by accident. People of all disciplines, backgrounds and levels of new media and social media experience connected while trying to navigate the halls and funnel through doorways between sessions. It was natural and it laid the groundwork for long term friendships and mutual growth.

The buzz on mentoring within the PodCamp community has started to pick up. Besides the informal — and sometimes formal — mentoring relationships that have sprouted, events such as NewBCamp and PodCamp Toronto have experimented with specific programs and activities to encourage those connections: NewBCamp unveiled Speed Mentoring while PodCamp Toronto allowed people to meet in the calm of its Mentorship Lounge.

There are some very important reasons why we need vertical relationships. If you believe in the idea of celebrities in the community, then you also have to believe in the idea that those who have been called the “Rock Stars” can only be “at the top” so long. There’s a new wave of “Rock Stars” that are joining this space that have new ideas and a fresh perspective. If vertical relationships aren’t established, the new dogs won’t gain the benefit of the experience of the old dogs and the old dogs won’t learn new tricks. In fact, as someone who has been engaged in social media and new media for three years now, I can safely say that it’s easy for people in my position to forget about the challenges we faced when we were first figuring this thing out. That doesn’t account for the fact that times and technologies have changed somewhat. Zero to Podcasting (at PodCamp Toronto) was just as much a learning experience for those who facilitated the workshop as the newcomers who attended. Talk about a vertical gain!

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…

If you’re planning — or thinking of planning — a PodCamp, remember that adopting these approaches doesn’t mean that you need to take control of the event from the community. As a member of the organizing team your job is to provide a structure (physically and figuratively) for the event. An event can’t succeed without some level of focus and organization. By setting a theme for your event, defining tracks and establishing some ways for people — however many — to connect, you’re making it easier for the community to make the most of “your” event.

P.S. Since I alluded to “Rock Stars”… I’ve often heard interviews with members of music supergroups who claim that their best and most memorable gigs didn’t take place in sold-out soccer stadiums, but in small bars that facilitated a close connection between the band and the audience during the show and between sets when everyone was able to drink together.

Flickr Photo: those are tall by DimsumDarren

I get the strangest looks when I tell conference organizers that they should give their content away, for free, as podcasts on the Internet. Some of the looks are intrigue, most are horror.

I suppose that each community is different. My experience with conferences that I have organized and those for which I have been contracted to provide audio coverage is that making content available — for free — can create momentum for subsequent events. I have experienced this first hand and believe it to be true because of my philosophy about conferences. Let me explain.

I believe conferences sell three things:

• content
• time
• connections/interaction

Conferences have historically considered content to be their number one (and most valuable) asset and they’ve marketed themselves around the speeches and the innovative material that will be presented. Content is only one third (if that much) of what conferences sell. More significantly, most of the content that is available at any conference is similarly available as research papers, white papers, printed or electronic books, audio books, video programs, classes, etc… Knowing that to be true, why would anyone want to attend a conference, spending lots of money on registration, travel, accommodations and meals? Read on.

Many employers expect their employees to advance their knowledge and skills as part of their job, yet few offer the time and conditions in which to do this effectively. This is an even greater problem for contractors and consultants who must advance their skills to remain valuable to their clients. That means people must set aside time during their evenings and weekends — their “me time” — to self-learn. Life isn’t only about work. People have other responsibilities, such as family, which significantly reduces the available time, setting those people even further behind. Conferences offer dedicated and uninterrupted time to their communities, allowing them the opportunity to absorb and understand the material that is being presented. So, if you can’t read the book, the conference will provide you with a digest of the most significant information and perhaps the foundation to support self-learning. And because conferences are typically away from home and work, you don’t have to worry about your phone ringing, making dinner and mediating your fighting children.

The greatest asset of a conference is the gathering place it offers, a space that facilitates connections and interaction. Communities of interest are able to discuss and debate the presentations. This is an opportunity for speakers, subject matter experts, experienced professionals and newcomers to expand their networks. New conversations, relationships, projects, opportunities and even businesses are conceived and launched because of conferences. Minds, notebooks and address books fill up. And… since many conferences have communities made up of members of varied disciplines, the discussion is the opportunity to make the content that much more valuable.

To recap, I consider content to be the catalyst of a conference, time to be the value-add and the connections/interaction to be the main asset. Once you look at conferences through that lens you realize that giving away the content is your marketing strategy because what you really want is to give people a reason to attend that puts the value in an area they can’t create themselves.

Don’t market your event around your content,
market your event using your content.

Having said all of that, I don’t know that publishing the content verbatim is always the best idea. It’s certainly the easiest which is why many conferences (TED.com, meshconference.com, podcastersacrossborders.com, podcamp.org, etc…) take that approach. There are many ways to share content for free that isn’t just a verbatim recording and I have covered some conferences using those approaches both as a hobbyist and a journalist/audio producer. Those approaches include interviews with the presenters, audience and exhibitors, and journalistic reports of the conference sessions which include excerpts of the sessions. If interest is high, I’d be happy to talk/blog more about these approaches and offer some samples of work I’ve done to illustrate some options.

I believe that any conference would be crazy to NOT give away their content freely on the Internet. There’s a world audience and with it a world of potential conference-goers waiting for a reason to go to “your” event.

As I write this, Andrea and I are struggling to stay awake. We’re flying home after an amazing weekend in Chicago where we attended the first annual children’s literature bloggers conference (known at this time as the KidLit Conference). Click here to see photos of the conference.

The event was conceived by author Robin Brande as a pot luck dinner with a handful of children’s literature bloggers. That wasn’t enough for Robin. She gradually turned the event into a large scale gathering including speaking sessions and social events (cue flashback sequence: genesis of Podcasters Across Borders).

Robin did an amazing job. She put together a conference that attracted seventy people — bloggers, authors, illustrators, book sellers and a few podcasters — from across the United States (and a couple from Canada). Besides turning online acquaintances into real-life friendships, Robin was a doting host, taking care of every detail including establishing a buddy system for coffee runs at a dangerous intersection, prying herself out of bed early on Sunday to arrange taxis from the hotel to Planet Esme, and making sure that travelers got to the airport with time to spare.

The online children’s literature community is filled with people who are passionate about children’s literature and are collaborating to advance the creation and availability of quality books for children of all ages. Ideas were flying everywhere and included discussions about the use of online and traditional modes of collaboration and promotion.

I delivered a presentation on podcasting and spent some of the social time trying to convert people into eager podcasters. It seems that there are a few people in the community that are seriously considering starting their own podcasts. I’m looking forward to hearing their shows.

For me, the standouts of the weekend were meeting everyone (too many to name), Anne Boles Levy’s presentation on review styles and the Sunday brunch hosted by Esme Raji Codell at her brand new oasis of children’s literature and good energy — the Ginger Bread House of Planet Esme.

Next year’s conference is in Portland, Oregon. We’ll be there!

I thought PAB2007 would end and I would be able to return to a normal life. Not so. I have been constantly thinking about what I’ve learned from the conference, about conference planning, and how we even planned this thing in the first place. You can expect a number of posts as a result.

Here is some of what I’ve learned from co-organizing/co-running PAB2007.

Lesson 1: Be transparent then trust and believe in the community
It’s not easy being shouldered with tough decisions — especially when they result from your own mistakes. Take, for example, the Saturday afternoon draw for the Zoom H4. That was a closed draw that was to exclude speakers, sponsors and organizers. So, when we drew the name Chris Sherry, who is affiliated with one of the sponsors and didn’t catch it, we had the potential of a real problem. We decided to come clean with our mistake and include the community in the decision. The community unanimously forgave our mistake. Immediately after that was resolved, Chris Penn stepped up and donated a second Zoom H4 for the Sunday draw. This leads me to the next lesson learned.

Lesson 2: Include everyone
For our first Zoom H4 draw we announced that speakers, sponsors and organizers were specifically excluded from qualifying for the draw. Many speakers rightfully expressed their disappointment — after all, they weren’t paid and they are part of the community. For the second Zoom H4 draw we decided that all paid registrants, speakers and sponsors who were in the room at the time of the draw qualified to win.

Lesson 3: Share the love
As part of PAB2007, we held a children’s book drive for Kingston’s Central Public School. The drive was a huge hit. We collected 86 amazing kids books and the community felt great being a part of that. Later in the weekend we held a collection to raise money to replace Bruce Murray’s camera after it had disappeared from the conference room the night before. The community raised $291 before Bruce’s camera turned up. When we talked about having a 50/50 draw as a possible use of the collection, Chris Penn piped up with the suggestion that we donate the money to Central Public School. The community immediately approved of the idea.

Lesson 4: Remain calm; the problem can be solved
Actually… what I told a few people — and practiced — during the weekend was to “remain calm and the problem will solve itself”. Many people say that a lot can go wrong at a conference, failing to acknowledge that there is a lot that goes famously well. More importantly, if you think creatively — and keep your wits about you — there is likely to be many possible solutions for every problem (if nothing else, you won’t be stressed).

I am in Toronto for the International Reading Association’s (IRA) 52nd annual conference. Over the next few days I’ll be interviewing authors, illustrators, publishers, editors and educators as part of the coverage of this event for the Just One More Book podcast.

I will tag all conference related coverage (podcasts, photos, and blog posts) with IRA2007. I will start publishing podcasts later tonight.

If you’re at IRA2007 and want to hook up, consult the contact page at JustOneMoreBook.com.

I will be in Toronto to cover the International Reading Association’s (IRA) 52nd annual conference for the Just One More Book!! podcast.

I hope to interview as many authors, illustrators, publishers, editors, publicists, literacy experts and others as I can possibly handle and I will release audio podcasts throughout the conference. I’m also hoping to find a few interested parties to participate in round table discussions for our podcast.

If you are going to be at the IRA conference and would like to be part of the Just One More Book podcast community, be sure to contact us.

From my sleeping bag on the floor of Room 813 at the Holiday Inn Express, Cambridge, MA.

PodCamp is amazingly well organized.  The organizers have to be proud of themselves.  Sessions that were among the standouts based on an informal poll with Bob and Julien include C. C. Chapman and Mitch Joel’s presentation You and Your Brand; PodCast Consultation with Jason Van Orden (John C. Havens and one other guy whose name escapes me at the moment); the music panel discussion with C. C., Jay Moohan, and Eric Skiff; and, Pricing and PR presented by John C. Havens.  My own presentations, Extending the Conversation, and Interview Techniques which I presented with Larry Lawfer were also quite successful.

Bob, Julien, Mitch, C.C. and I went back to the hotel to have a beer and hang out before we joined the gang at The Grand Canal.  You realize how much there is to learn when you hang out with these guys.  The Grand Canal was fun and someone apparently picked up the bar tab starting at a certain point.  I believe that was a well excercised offer.

Julien and I had an interesting experience getting back to our hotel after the obnoxiously loud music at The Grand drove us away.  Just when I started to feel some degree of concern for my welfare during the cab ride, Julien leaned forward and asked the cabbie, Dude.  You do know where you’re going, right?.

At its peak, there was about eighteen people in room 813 last night.  That’s when Bob, J. Moo, Chris and I started playing music.  The highlights included De Do Do Do, and a version of No Woman No Cry that went something like No C. C. Home Fries.

We’re getting up right now, and getting ready for the day.  The morning schedule looks packed so we’ll split up the presentations and share the information on the drive home.