There was an amazing, emergent effect at the AlwaysOn conference this week. Although the conference was set up in the “traditional” conference format (talking heads on stage, audience in neat, supplicating rows), there was a balancing factor between the two groups. Perhaps, actually, it was more than a “balancing” factor…it turned the “balance of power” in favor of the participants.
Take a look over at Denise Howell’s photo over to the right. See the HUGE screen, stage left? That was a live text chat, consisting of people both inside the room and from around the world who were “participating” in the conference via the streamed webcast. Sometimes the commentary, floating above the heads of the folks on stage, was civil. To whit:
Chris Heuer: a bad strategy – mostly because we are bad at storytelling and getting the people behind our casue – but this is changing with the blogosphere
mike symmetry: NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE!!!!
Lisa: ok – so this is what I was talking about in tems of being disatisfied with having my options limited by the entertainment chain of power
Ed Daniel: everyone should read Lawence Lessig’s the future of ideas
disrupter: THIS IS SMART PAY ATTENTION(from here)
Then again, sometimes the chat was less-than-civil. This, from the opening panel on Wednesday night that went awry:
Chris Heuer: you know, we could always start talking about innovation between ourselves and not get into flamable conversations
PA: change the questions!
Tom: yet we wont attacck North Korea will we?
Doctoro: Please bring up subjects common to silicon valley and uncommon to cable news.
x: innovation summit?
whats going on:: okay..if on politics..
Allan: Wait, wasn’t Shock and Awe(TM) innovation?(from here)
By the second day of the conference, the chat became as much of a participant in the conference as the individuals on stage and seated in the room. And, wisely, Tony and the moderators chose not to control it, but instead embraced it.
As expected, some of the very public comments were spot-on, many were snarky, some were downright rude. But they were there, a part of the event. The Fourth Wall had been not broken, but obliterated.
One challenge with the chat, however, was that it was pseudonymous (was that really Ray Kurzweil asking Bill Joy a question via the chat window? If it was a good question, does it matter? What if it was asked by Ramona?). This seemed to allow more incendiary ranting than would have taken place in a face-to-face situation, or even in a situation where someone needed to stand by their words in perpetuity (say in the case of a blog by a named author). Although some of the comments were perhaps inappropriate, the words on the wall added an element of reality to the conference, a check-and-balance that wasn’t afraid to call B.S. when the folks on stage were perceived to be acting below-board. (The folks on stage knew this was happening when the chuckles would roll through the audience in response to a particularly sharp riposte on the screen.)
And, judging by the number of people commenting on this, I hope this meme continues to spread, and becomes integrated into conferences across the board. Web 2.0, indeed.
I shudder in horror at this emerging trend.
I don’t have the kind of brain that operates well when trying to listen and take notes and watch the actual speakers and read some small print on a screen.
And frankly I don’t think most people do, it’s that a lot of people go to such conferences simply to network and see friends and have little to no interest in the actual panels (and many panels are executed in a deadly dull manner.) Or they’re wishing they were up there during every panel.
So they’re just entertaining their over-active ADD minds 🙂 And killing time until they take the stage again.
And finding new ways to be the cool kids.
Not that I’m cynical or anything 😉
Conference of the Future
The Social Customer Manifesto has a great writeup of AlwaysOn conference. They’ve done something interesting at the conference, displaying a screen with live text chat from people in the room, as well as people remotely attending the conference via the
Elisa makes a good point – at times it was nearly impossible to be involved with the chat and listen to the speakers – personally I was listening for topics where the speakers were dancing near to the core point and then trying to add what I thought was the key Insyte. But then, I got caught in the chat and I do know that I missed some important things that were being said. Interestingly, this is another example of the value of attention, how fickle it is and how easy it is to lose someone’s attention from what you are doing/sayng.
I think the backchannel is a great place to be paying attention when someone in the audience feels the speakers on stage are missing the point, or off topic – and of course it is also an excellent place to receive and weed through questions to ask the panel. Unfortunately it seemed that Tony was only inclined to take questions from people he knows – though I do believe I saw a monitor on stage through which his team was filtering the questions, but am unsure of this.
BTW – Christopher – great blog – am adding The Social Customer Manifesto to my soon to be published blogroll…
Always-On 2005 at Stanford
Always On Conference at Stanford – save the $1,800, follow it online.
PeoplePower: backchannel forces panelist to change subject … Joe Kraus: forget Hollywod BS, focus on Innovation.
I built the system used for the AO summit this year, and Elisa’s point is very interesting to me because it actually is the flip side of what we are hoping to help solve with this system in the future. I’ve heard a lot about speakers becoming frustrated with the audience who isn’t paying attention because they are all chatting/checking email/surfing the web. In some cases this probably can be attributed to shortcomings on the speaker’s end, but I think part of it is that many people are simply becoming accustomed to doing all these things at once. Some conference planners have gone as far as attempting to shut off or not provide wifi access at the events, but I believe that only serves to irritate the audience. I’m hoping to provide something that can satisfy the audience’s desire to multitask while still keeping them present as part of the event, as well as turning the presentations into a discussion which actually involves the audience.
Unfortunately, we’re basically introducing a new problem for people like Elisa who would like to stay focused on the discussion itself. I’m not sure what the solution/middle ground will be, but we’re still pretty early in this whole project so I’ll keep working on it. I think an important component of it will be to get the presenters more involved with the system – as Chris mentioned we did have someone monitoring the chat, selecting interesting questions and queuing them up for the moderator on stage, who could then bring them up on the main screen if desired. However, most of the moderators didn’t choose to use it very extensively – my hope is that as we do more of these and get people used to using the system, they’ll be more inclined to bring the questions from the chat into the discussion. That may help to create more of a single discussion rather than a divided foreground/background between the speakers and the chat. We’ll see – I think the ability to integrate it in that manner may depend as much or more on the skills of the presenters than anything I can do with the application.
Thanks for the comments everyone – this event really was a shakedown of the basic concepts for the system, and I hope to improve the experience significantly in the future (both for AO’s events and others). I’ve been picking up a lot of good suggestions/feedback from everyone’s blogs.
REVIEWS OF THE AOSUMMIT 2005
A good amount of buzz about the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit. Steve Gillmor has a great post on it:
Audience Participation, Super-sized
The audience has the power. In this case, literally. The Social Customer Manifesto reports that the organizers of the AlwaysOn Conference projected a computer monitor onto the wall — and invited people to watch the conference and submit their comments