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

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