Material Conference 2016
It’s a tough time to start new events right now. Many people have held their final event last year, announcing the end of it or at least a longer break to think of a different setup or orientation. Just have a look at the “Future Of” - series or Clearleft’s dConstruct, just to mention a few. Who would have thought, that a traditional, long running event like dConstruct would close their doors? They always had a really diverse and well curated line-up, well chosen range of speakers and a great atmosphere overall, when you attended. Yet more an more events, without having a real idea why, suffer from less and less attendees. A lot of other events suffer from low attendance rates or the critique of possible attendees, that speaker line-ups at Web conference look all more or less similar.
How brave of Joschi and Brian to kick off a new event called Material during exactly this time. Even more, if you take in consideration that they don’t run it in London, Berlin, Amsterdam or any of the cities already having many events – you know, if you want to open an Italian restaurant, you open it where all the other Italian restaurants are, right? No, they decided to go for Reykjavik in Iceland for their location. I mean, yes, everybody who always wanted to go to Iceland has one more reason now, but that possibly means that you add a few more days in addition to the event. And planning and scheduling your event journeys needs time and many decisions have to be made, as you have seen in the results of this survey.
One more aspect, why they have a tough job is, that – if you know Joschi and Brian – they won’t come up with just another conference. Of course they have the aim of creating and delivering something meaningful, something relevant. They state, that this event is
Material 2016 – a conference exploring the concept of the Web as a material
Now you might ask yourself what this means and I don't want to simply repeat what they already have written, so please do me a favour and check what they have written about the meaning of this sentence and their event. Or check the video below this post, recorded by Brian and Joschi to explain, what they are planning to start and run.
The show is planned to take off at July 22nd this year. So it is not too far away anymore, which is another very brave move, as a lot of things have to be planned, organised and brought to live. Joschi and Brian decided to go for a Kickstarter campaign to sell their tickets. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of selling event tickets or Kickstarter in general, but many events in the past have shown that this a) is possible and b) a good option to see the interest of people. The only downside – I think – is, that it sometimes lets people wait and see how it takes of. If tickets are selling quick and backers come in quickly, then they act fast. If not, they take their time. And this is, what no organiser needs, running events the way they or I do it as we work with the money we get for an event directly towards the event.
Therefore I'd say: support this very nice idea and reason to run an event. Also because Brian and Joschi are wonderful people doing a lot of good for the community. Tickets are $150 and only about 150 seats are available. I'm pretty sure that you won't regret being part of this event. Content wise, from the location on it's own and also from the people you'll meet there.