Talk at ETech 06
March 9th, 2006
Today Jo and I did our talk at ETech about the experience of helping organize WSFII.London last year and the lessons we learned from it. Here is the slide show (in the s5 format and should work in any standards compliant browser).
We presented a half serious, half whimsical set of rules for hacking your own low (or zero) budget conference. The rules were:
Rule #1: Get a space
Rule #1.1: And don’t pay for it
Rule #2: Announce early, Announce often
Rule #3: Work in Public
Rule #4: Speakers are both central and incidental
Rule #5: Ensure there’s space in the Program and space in the Place (Remember: the intent is to enable as much random and relaxed f2f interaction as possible)
Rule #6: The most interesting talks will come from the most unexpected places
Rule #7: Enable ‘User’ participation
Rule #9: Obligatory ubiquitous WiFi
Rule #9.1: It will always overload
Rule #10: Your A/V will Always Screw Up at Crucial Times
Rule #11: You’ll always have one speaker who is walking proof of Einsteinian time dilation so …
Rule #11.1: Get a gong

March 12th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
[…] Linked from the new Open Knowledge Foundation blog, slides from the talk i gave at ETech with Rufus Pollock, Hack Your Own Conference: the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures. There’s also a sound recording of the talk that we gave on a slightly sporadic server with a link to a torrent file. […]