Concept: Your Very Own Personal TED
Been boothing recently for Creative Commons at Linuxworld, which has been pretty fun just based on the people that we’ve been meeting (had a guy this morning ask us — no kidding — “this stuff is all for free? How do you guys fit into the rest of this event?”). But got me thinking more generally if there’s some way of fitting all the types of geek conferences you see over the course of a year into some kind of overarching cosmology of event design.
Some drafts later, I came up with the color monstrosity above. Roughly, you can lay out all conference events along the dimensions of how spontaneous the activity at the conference is meant to be, and the degree to which the subject matter of the conference is specific to the unique series of interests/personal questions of the people involved. That is, are all the events at the conference tied together by a broad theme (science fiction, Linux, dogs), or by the arbitary preferences/concerns of the attendees (Lifecamp)
The top part of the chart, predictably, is the “unconference” universe, people come and innovate sessions on the spot. Barcamp tackles this for broad topics, while Lifecamp replicates the same for personal issues, goals, and specific bundle of interests of the community attending.
The lower half of the conference universe is a more mixed bag. You’ve got trade shows, which are the most rigid and depersonalized, where the events are closely scheduled, and the subject is generically a series of products/companies. Traditional conferences (scifi, etc) allow for a little more flex and “user-generated” events (i.e. funny costumes), with a range of specificity.
There’s a middle stratum of conferences (the yellow boxes) that essentially base themselves around being a curated collection of famous people. They vary in spontaneity, but bridge the specificity gap — people are talking about their own work and thoughts, but they’re in turn so prominent that they end up generically talking about broader topics/issues. This is vaguely the world that TED exists in, and how FOOCamp operates.
However, once you rule out all these types of conferences, there’s still a big space left unexplored. What happens when you combine a highly rigid, planned event structure with a highly idiosyncratic topic matter that touches on the specific personal worlds of the attendees and their random collection of “things they’ve found thought-provoking lately”?
I’m thinking it’d be great: I’ve been calling it “Personal TED” — an event to put together a highly-structured, pre-scheduled conference centered around the small peer group attending. Thematically, the events could be linked only by the fact that the people attending found them interesting. It could feature prepared slide presentations re-analyzing in detailed terms early childhood experiences or comparing the development of personal goals over time. You could even invite guests.
Diana Kimball and I have been working on an extension of the Tim and Diana show affectionally called “HwangballCon 2008,” due to be webcast this Fall. With any hope, it’ll be the first of many personal TEDs to come. Will keep things posted here on USBFB.
