What Makes a Conference Great
A few days ago, right after I posted my write-up of Head in the Cloud, my friend Sacha Judd, who spoke at beyond tellerrand three times already, published a piece called “What makes a conference great”. Reading it felt a little like hearing my own talk played back to me instantly. Coincidence from the other side of the planet. ;)
She comes at it differently than I did. Where I told stories from fifteen years of running events, she writes almost like an inventory of care: the website and communication that respects you before you’ve bought a ticket, the code of conduct you actually mean, name tags you can read without squinting, coffee that’s there when you need it. But underneath the details, we’re circling the same thing and content and statements overlap.
A few places where our two posts agree:
The real programme is the hallway – I keep saying the actual event happens in the breaks. At the tables, in the conversation that starts over coffee and continues at dinner. Sacha calls it the hallway track and lands on the point I always try to make: you can’t schedule the magic, you can only design the conditions for it. Generous breaks are an event’s way of saying it wants people to talk to each other.
People don’t come (just) for the information – she puts it more sharply than I did on stage: “Information is free and infinite and at home with better snacks” People come to be in a room with their community. That’s the bit you can’t download.
Curation is the product – I talked about independence being a question of attitude rather than legal form. Nobody at mittwald told me what to say or asked to see my slides. Sacha makes the same case from the programming side: a single track is an act of editorial conviction, a person with taste deciding what the whole room needs to hear. The opposite is the (badly planned) sponsor slot that’s secretly a sales pitch — the thing we both quietly can’t stand (which does not mean sponsors can’t do great talks!)
The talks that change you are the ones you’d never have picked – Sacha remembers the talk about grief when she’d come for design, the one about typography when she’d come for business … the talks nobody chooses for themselves. And that is exactly why the events I care about put grief and burnout and failure on the same stage as the technical stuff.
And then, without planning it, we land on the same last note: buy the ticket to the small conference and buy it early! While the organiser is still awake at night worrying about the numbers. I said more or less the same thing on stage: stop wondering and grab your ticket, because the community that shows up is the community that keeps these events alive.
That line of hers isn’t new, as it turns out. She first wrote it last November, in a newsletter called “hope rises” — written from beyond tellerrand in Berlin, where she’d just spoken and where, she mentions, she’d watched me open the whole thing the day before. And there she takes the idea a step further than I did on stage. Keeping these small events alive, Sacha argues, isn’t only about the events. It’s about holding on to a sense of hope about the internet itself at a moment when the platforms we live on are tuned for conflict and fear and the people doing independent, trustworthy work are often the ones getting throttled. Gathering in a room, learning from each other, just hanging out: that is part of how we remember that a better internet is still possible. Her image for it: “If platforms are going to dim the room, then we’ll bring lamps.”
Go read Sacha’s post and the newsletter it grew out of. They’re better than any checklist and even have a lovely FAQ for events.
Well and then, you know, buy the ticket. ;)
