The Lobby, or Why We Attend Conferences

It used to be for the information.  Today it’s easier to follow the flow online, yet we’re still going, for the networking. Meet interesting new people, or those we’ve known for a while, just not face-to-face.  I guess this is the gist of David Hornik’s hilarious invitation video to The Lobby, his Conference without the conference:

“In a great conference, the conversation in the lobby is the content” – so he scraps the keynotes, panels, etc, and keeps the interesting part:-)

My favorite “conference” was the Techdirt Greenhouse – a perfect mix of some structure/agenda and the participatory unconference. (TechDirt team, isn’t it time for #3?)  It certainly did  not attract the corporate conference-tourist crowd: anybody that sacrificed their Saturday was clearly there to participate.  

The same was likely true for the Web 2.0 Open sessions at Web 2.0 Expo.  Most sessions were too technical  for me (dumb business-type, stuck on the border between Businessland and Geekdom…) but I did see enthusiastic participants involved in discussions around 9pm, when most of the “mainstream” attendees were out partying.

As much as I favor these unconferences, I  (we …) still attend some of the regular ones – like Software 2007 next week, and TieCon 2007 the week after, and who knows what else.  Let’s be honest: isn’t there a “to be seen” factor that drives of us to some (most?) of these events?

David Hornik’s Lobby will surely try to capture the participatory, conversational essence of conferences, without the mandatory crap around it … and it will surely be subject to the Foo Camp-like ritual: since it’s invitation only, everybody who wants to be considered somebody will try to get invited, and if they can’t, they will claim they were not interested anyway.

Yes, this is a private, invitation-only party conference (?) outed by Valleywag.  Private or not, I can’t blame Valleywag for writing about it, after all, that’s the job of the “Valley’s Gossip Rag”.  But pusblishing a userid and password from a private source is clearly a new low – even for ValleyRag.

Update:  Valleywag runs a poll on which *one* conference you’d attend:  TED leads by a mile, but the the Davos World Economic Forum barely comes in second, ahead of yet-to-be-seen TechCrunch 2.0.

Update #2: Valleywag published the list of attendees, “the New Media Elite”

Update #3:  I’ve told you:  Are you on the list? -asks VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall.